Spotlight: Weapon Realism in Fantasy Games

Recently, I started playing The Witcher III. It's a gorgeous game, but one thing that really stuck out was the weapon design. Most fantasy games, even those that try for some degree of realism, such as Skyrim, make their sword a distant caricature of a feasable weapon. But no, lo and behold, someone on the witcher dev team knew what they were talking about. This doesn't prevent them from making exciting looking items though. They draw on the rich assortment of swords made throughout Europe to give them each a special feel. When even more wow is needed, they leave the physical design of the sword alone and add glowing glyphs to the blade. If more fantasy game designers abided by these principles, I think it would be a great boon to the genre as a whole.