why the love for voxels? it seems like you get a much smoother model for the same representational cost with triangles on the surface.
(I used to do scientific visualization and have written voxel renderers...it just never occurred to me that someone would want to do that for general purpose graphics)
I have no idea why from the perspective of a developer, but as a devoted fan of minecraft I can say it does look like the evolution of the genre.
Minecraft has "voxels" (they are rendered as polygons) that are 1 meter square in size. More granularity would add a lot to the games. There are even mods that try to add a more granular kind of voxel to the game, like "chisels & bits". That one specifically is very popular and used in most modpacks, so that might be a hint for a successful voxel game in the future.
As the article implies I suspect it's the ease with which they can be decomposed. Before Red Faction I don't recall many games with destroy anything capabilities. Yet there were some experiments to do just that with voxel engines. Ken Silverman being the one I'm most familiar with, though besides some weapon models I don't think much of that made it into commercial games.
Most destruction in Battlefield games is pre-baked. For smaller stuff, the artists only specify how as segment of wall is supposed to break up. For larger stuff, like toppling skyscrapers, it's entirely a canned animation.
My own interest comes from nostalgia mostly. Many old games looked better using a voxel engine than contemporary polygon based ones. Though, of course I later realized in fact there weren't any real voxel engines in the sense of what I wanted them to be. I think Voxlap really was the first time we saw one.
Why the appeal now? Voxels are a simpler model for describing the world and adding granular detail, at least at first sight. Ultimately you still have to model bending, physics, animation, free rotation, etc. which is AFAIK more complicated than for polygon based 3D data. Essentially a voxel object still needs to have a secondary parametric representation to describe things like elasticity or connectivity, etc. (not sure how it's done), though I assume the techniques are not too far off from skeletal animation etc. in traditional engines (which also use such a simpler representation overlayed on / inside the mesh.
But I think that leads to the second appeal: Trying to squeeze out a few more polygons per second or a specific little effect on the fundamental technique level in traditional 3D engines is pretty hard but only gives you so much in return. I can understand how something you can approach with a fresh set of eyes, with fewer established working solutions, is appealing in itself. There's (seemingly) more to discover, more to invent.
Without knowing the technical terms or details, I think of voxels as the things in Minecraft. A voxel game world, to me, is one where I could destroy or place any random voxel I want anywhere in the game world and have the game world smoothly and faithfully incorporate my decision.
If voxels just mean the smallest rendering primitive is a cube instead of a triangle then I agree it seems just like an artistic preference.
While voxels are often represented in cubes like minecraft, they don't have to be. A voxel is just a data point in 3d space.
It can be rendered or visualized many different ways including smooth curves or many other things. While blocky cubes are common that is not all they are or can do.
I think Minecraft changed the definition a little. Before Minecraft, a voxel was just a 3d pixel. Imagine drawing a single pixel using on paint, a voxel engine does that in a 3d space.
A Minecraft voxel is much more complicated than a pixel in 3d. It has textures, the shape/graphics changes depending on what angle you see it from and can even have animations.
I guess the term has evolved now but I find naming Minecraft as a voxel game mostly as a marketing gimmick. No one calls 8x8 block of a NES background tile a pixel
1) aesthetic is more novel than polygons, which are currently much more widespread (note: novel does not necessarily equate to "better" looking).
2) The finite limitations "leave more to the imagination" - in the same way that low resolution pixel art might, vs a high resolution vector image.
3) A very minor factor, but worth noting: not only are voxels visually novel, but they are technologically novel - in order to make a competitive voxel engine, you typically are not using an off-the-shelf engine like Unreal or Unity (though you can, and there are many voxel pluggins for these engines). Thus programmers are drawn to them (IMO) - they are an easy way to visually show off your technical know-how, just as you might many other effects in the demo scene.
4) A false sense of nostalgia - voxel engines never were very widespread, and the closest thing in the early days tended to be height-map driven rather than volumetric (the earliest notable exception being Voxlap). But the "nostalgia" exists, just as it does with synthwave (most of which does not fully mirror any music of the 80s/90s).
5) Voxels are point-based volumetric representation and thus are much easier to use for procedural generation (vs describing a surface, which is much harder). Though voxels are often wrapped on the surface with polygons, this is trivial (vs, say, describing the polygonization of a metaball without using voxels).
Novalogic games used it for terrain rendering back in the day and got nicer visuals than their contemporaries (compare Comanche with LHX Attack Chopper, for example) as a result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space
(I used to do scientific visualization and have written voxel renderers...it just never occurred to me that someone would want to do that for general purpose graphics)