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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Videogame Graphic Advances - Not What They Used To Be? 134

Posted by simoniker from the can-still-count-the-pixels dept.
Thanks to GamesRadar for its PC Gamer-reprinted article discussing why graphics alone aren't enough to sell a game anymore. The author explains: "During the final days of Steam, I found myself playing the original Half-Life. And, frankly, it looked perfectly acceptable. While it clearly lacks the fine polish of modern first-person shooters, the world it presented me with was entirely comparable with anything around. And, being a great game in the first place, it was more enjoyable than - say - Unreal II." He continues: "However, if you went back to 1998 when Valve's masterpiece was released, and attempted to play a game five years older than that, it would be a very different experience. To go back and play System Shock, Doom or Wolfenstein requires a whole re-arrangement of your thought processes to accept the difference in graphics quality." Do you agree that "...the days when graphics ruled videogames are rapidly drawing to a close"?
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Videogame Graphic Advances - Not What They Used To Be? More

Videogame Graphic Advances - Not What They Used To Be?

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  • Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheDarkRogue ( 245521 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @03:15AM (#8142769)
    Yes

    • Re:Yes (Score:3, Funny)

      by Aliencow ( 653119 )
      Don't answer the whole thing in a first post dammit, you just broke the comment flow !

    • Re:Yes (Score:3)

      by tsa ( 15680 )
      I agree. It's just like with HiFi sound: at a certain moment technology is so advanced that you can make better equipment but you don't see the differnce any more, or the differences are so small that people just don't care. So now it's back to the drawing board for new game genres or better stories! That's good; I just played the point-'n' click adventure game Pleurghburg, dark ages [gaspop.com], and despite its Commodore 64-like graphics it was lots of fun to play!

      • Re:Yes (Score:3, Funny)

        by radicalskeptic ( 644346 )
        just played the point-'n' click adventure game Pleurghburg, dark ages, and despite its Commodore 64-like graphics it was lots of fun to play!

        *sigh* Yet another game that isn't ported to the Mac : (

    • Good Riddance (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tid242 ( 540756 ) * on Saturday January 31, 2004 @03:36AM (#8142811) Homepage
      Good riddance, i'm sick of the plethora of shitty games that survive solely because they have 'good graphics.'

      Maybe now people will actually develop good games instead of their own graphical egos.

      -tid242
    • Me Too
    • in which case, maybe people will start making AI that doesnt suck.

      btw: the Ai in the farcry demo is pretty good, not great, but interesting.

  • but then they'd have to rely on content/gameplay (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    which is very very hard for most game companies.

  • Quite Right (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spiffae ( 707428 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @03:34AM (#8142808)
    I agree completely. There have been some games that are wildly divergent in terms of their graphics, (Eye Toy, DDR) but by and large the game industry seems to have found something it's happy with in polygons. The next step will probably not be revolutionary, like the jump from 2D to 3D or sprites to polygons, but evolutionary.

    As pixel shaders and frame buffer effects become more common, we'll probably see an increase in "cinematic" effects, like depth of field, distortion, and better lighting accuracy.

    The best proof that graphics are pretty much stabilizing is the fact that the supposed "next-gen" games, are improving the fidelity of their game world, rather than reinventing it. Half-Life 2 is looking for a physically accurate and emotionaly involving world. Doom 3 is aiming at a well-lit world. Duke Nukem Forever is redefining how many times a game can be delayed, and many engines a single game can use.

    I'm fine with the polygons too... they never hurt me.

  • All about the hook (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GTarrant ( 726871 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @03:37AM (#8142813)
    I remember getting my first 3D card and going from playing, say, Quake, to playing GLQuake, and practically falling off my chair with how GL looked compared to software.

    But did Call of Duty do that to me, compared to some FPS of two-three years ago? Not because of graphics.

    But this happens all the time. You need a hook, to sell. Graphics aren't the big thing now. But back when the PlayStation came out, or when 3D cards were becoming more common in PCs, did you get something that advertised in big letters "3D!" on it. A developer would take anything, stick it in the box, and if it was 3D, it was 'cool' and people actually bought it, even if it was absolute crap. Games that were good, and 2D, didn't sell, and games that were lousy, but 3D, sold. Go back and read some game reviews from the period, and you see all sorts of reviews like "This was a great game, but with the '3D revolution' we're in now, it just doesn't cut it." Then a crappy 3D game gets a 8/10 because it's 3D. It's a hook. They're always looking for a hook.

    Graphics aren't a hook anymore. How often now do you look at screenshots on a box and go "Wow"? Not nearly as often. So they find a different one. If I had to pick one, I'd say right now it's "Online play!" Games with online play mention it about 14 times all over the box. Great games get some crappy netcode slapped onto them just so they can be "online!" Otherwise good games get hurt in reviews, even if they're single-player titles, because they don't have online play.

    What will the next hook be, when almost everything's online and "it's online!" is no longer something that reviewers will give bonus points for? That's the real question.

    • Re:All about the hook (Score:5, Insightful)

      by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @05:42AM (#8143106)
      The future "hook" is likely total immersion. When I think of something that will blow me away today, on the same level as, say, the GLQuake example blew us away when we first began utilizing 3D cards, it's total immersion.
      Graphics today have a long way to go before they peak, there are still many things we can do that we just haven't had the time or power to do yet. However I don't forsee any of these things being revolutionary on that level until we are *in* the game.

      Now I feel like I'm in the mid-90's saying "Virtual Reality is the Next-Big-Thing" all over again, but I think that was the right attitude all along, just far, far too early to be realized.

      • Total immersion is something the Massively Multiplayer online games promise (and strive for) but most never really deliver. In theory a big old world filled with people should take you away from the day to day, and put you in a "golden land of opportunity and adventure". In practice that never seems to happen.

        One of the reason is the graphics. For a game to look good graphically, the sprites have to be very detailed and have a comprehensive set of animations. The problem is, this makes the game run slow a

        • ooooh you mean total immersion emotionally. i thought he meant visually.. wrap around views, surround sound 'n' stuff. yeah well total immersion emotionally.. like a world as complex as "our" world.. now that's slightly scary no? requires some advance in AI no? :o
          • some advance in AI no?

            nope. just lots of meatbag competitors! =)
          • Usually I'd say games look great now, you can look at the sky or out to sea. I'd say immersiveness needs more than that though: you have to feel you can interact with the world. Graphics help, but there is definitely more to it.

            Its not so much AI as game design (though beyond a certain point its hard to tell those apart)

          • like a world as complex as "our" world.. now that's slightly scary no? requires some advance in AI no?

            Not AI. Just an emphasis on user-created content, and the ability to freely build and script everything... See sig for an example of just such a place =)

      • Re:All about the hook (Score:2, Insightful)

        by aanand ( 705284 )
        The new hook? It's physics, man. Physics is the new cel-shading.

        Back on topic, though: I think one pivotal reason in the levelling-off of graphical advances is the sheer unfeasibility of building such densely modelled environments. How long does it take to model a skyscraper right down to the screw threads?

    • Re:All about the hook (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kisrael ( 134664 ) *
      Real physics for every damn thing. People that don't walk a scripted motion captured "walk" animation, but because of the the way their muscles and mass are working together. Rag doll physics is just the begining.

    • other tech (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Sunday February 01, 2004 @03:11AM (#8149435) Journal
      Graphics is about pushing polygons to the screen, fast. More recently (in some games), it's pushing curves and spheres to the screen, and taking all of them and adding effects -- realistic lighting (and translucency, and diffraction), and more "cinematic" effects, as above.

      AI has been about finding that balance between too easy and too hard, because if a bot is too stupid, you just give it a bigger gun (so to speak) -- or some other arbitrary advantage over the player. More recently, Half-Life 2 (among other things) is making it about moving away from scripts and making the AI do lots of possible things to match the scenario, rather than just one or two (shoot or dodge).

      Good gameplay has been about having good AI (as above) and a good interface. More recently, it's been about involving the player with the content, particularly the plot, in order to make them "feel" involved on an emotional rather than visual level. Music also helps a lot with this and below.

      Good plot has been about having something well-written and fast-moving but long, which plays well with the gameplay. Now, various games are (tentatively) taking steps in the direction of freedom and non-linearity. Some of the most popular games are either multiplayer or somewhat nonlinear (gta3).

      Good multiplayer has been about having multiplayer in the first place, and having it online. More recently, it's about involving everyone in a unique way, such as a MMO game where everyone has a unique part by necessity, and games like Natural Selection, where in both cases the game plays better with more people, yet can be quite fun with only two people. (Surprisingly, a two-player NS game was the most fun I ever had with it, though I wouldn't want to repeat the experience.)

      The criterion is the same -- good graphics, good gameplay, good multiplayer (and internet), good AI and plot, etc... It's pieces of that which keep changing. I agree that the focus on graphics will decrease, but it won't go away, and even after playing ut2003, I can still look at that half-life 2 and doom 3 trailer and say "Wow". But what amazed me more was that both allies and enemies in hl2 seemed a lot less retarted, and many of them seemed human.

      If you need proof that graphics alone don't sell (though graphics + gameplay can sell quite well), look at Counter-Strike. Still _the_ most popular Internet game, last I checked.

      I will add one more category: good programming. A game that doesn't crash, and which allows one to play well on older hardware but looks great on newer hardware... Not to mention, I have two games for the PS2 which give me a loading screen only _very_ occasionally (<10 times per game), and even those could be skipped -- otherwise, you just literally walk from area to area, throughout the entire game, even though some areas have entirely different rules than others (a race minigame, for instance).

      Good technology is not shiny features, but good, hardworking features. For example: It should have a good Linux port, or genuine multi-platform support, rather than having one definitely better platform -- FFVIII for PC (only one I've seen on a PC) required a processor/video card several times what the playstation needs. It could eliminate loading times and arbitrary limitations to levelers and modders. The cube engine offers in-game, multiplayer level editing -- even while a deathmatch is going on. Little things like that add so much to the experience, although I've got a plan for several bigger ones that needs to be written up (ends up looking like Neal Stephenson's Metaverse).

      Ultimately, there will be some hype anyway, but at least in today's world, that's somewhat dampened by the increasing functionality of downloadable demos. Download the quake3 or ut2003 demos to see -- although the actual game may have "much more", the demos definitely give you an idea of a typical game.

      I agree that it's harder to go from halflife to doom than it is to go from, say, ut (or even doom 3) to halflife. I i

  • Gah, I hope so... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gleng ( 537516 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @03:42AM (#8142825)

    I would trade in 100 games with good graphics for one game with great playability.

    Some of my favourite games over the last five years or so have been things like Baldur's Gate 2, Civ 3 and Sim City 4. None of those can claim to have great flashy graphics (although the artwork in BG2 is fantastic), but they offer an unparalleled level of depth and gameplay.

    I'm certainly looking forward to whatever the "new Black Isle Studios", Obsidian Entertainment [obsidianent.com] can come up with.

  • None of today's games have "good" graphics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Saturday January 31, 2004 @03:52AM (#8142844) Homepage Journal
    The games of yesteryear that were considered to have outstanding graphics really pushed the hardware, I mean that they required real talent in programming and required every CPU cycle you could devote to them. None of today's games really push the envelope, just your wallet. Wake me when someone writes a game in assembler and it still requires a 2GHz machine and the latest DX9 video card.
    • Wake me when someone writes a game in assembler and it still requires a 2GHz machine

      You mean from cryonic freeze? That's how long it would take to do.
    • I think it's because the graphic card developers hit a previously untapped sweet spot with "value" hardware that's not necessarly $20 bargin bin kind of stuff, but not the greatest $600 card. So now that they've hit that they don't wanna risk losing it by pushing the higher end hardware. Game developers are affected by that sweet spot as well, as they don't want to push their games out of reach of that vast "sweet spot" market.

      Back when all of this stuff wasn't nearly as mainstream as it is today, the geek
      • There's also the fact that there was a point where if you had a 3D card, the developers pretty much KNEW which one you had. When GLquake came out, everyone pretty much had a 3dfx-brand card, if they had one at all. Then it's easy.

        Now, everyone has something different, and all the cards have different capabilities. Worse yet, some manufacturers are shipping their newest computers with some of the oldest 3D cards (Sony, for example, ships some otherwise top-of-the-line systems with TNT2 cards). Some man

    • Are you kidding me? I guess you consider '$' as a good representation of a monster? Or have you remembered the fact that back then box covers were ussually more appealing than the graphics in the game?
    • I won't name names in the negative sense here, lest this be tagged flamebait, troll, or otherwise... But I have to agree 100% - conditionally.

      I've seen many producers/publishers release, time and time again, absolute crap. I've also seen, time and time again, a few great major TV/movie franchises have their likeness placed in absolute crap.

      I will name names on the positive side.

      Rockstar: At the time, GTA's graphics, sound, gameplay, and everything else was not only great, pushing the system's limits
      • I'm thrilled, but why do you care if I "enjoy a good game for once"?
      • If by grossly underpowered, you mean a 485Mhz IBM processor and a 162Mhz VPU? Nintendo's system is more powerful then they're given credit for.
        • Yes, that's what I mean. If you look closely, I did say "grossly underpowered versus XBox". I don't know the exact specs on the XBox but I assume it's NVidia graphics chip runs at a minimum of 133MHz (I dislike NVidia, and wish they had gone ATI). I know it's Celery is 700MHz or so. And it's got more RAM, and a hard drive for caching data (though I must admit the GameCube's drive seems to read much faster). Also, I was giving them credit for managing to crank out *more* FPS (albeit at lower resolution,
      • I don't care what YOU say, the F-Zero GX was just a remake of the F-Zero 64 with better graphics, new tracks, and a somewhat easier to use side-attack move. In particular, both games have the brilliant boost-drains-shields model, that forces a trade off between safety and speed, and that constant temptation in multiplayer games to drive a bit more dangerously and unsafe.
        • I totally agree - but I'm fine with a remake! I've had tons of fun with F-Zero GX multiplayer.

          I discredit most N64 games... I really didn't like the system after an overhyped and long wait. The controller was abysmal. And I was really unimpressed with the graphics and sound quality versus PS (though I only -bought- FF7 for PS, I avoid Sony as if it were AOL).

          I was also really upset and pissed off that I couldn't give F-Zero 64, the sequel to one of my all time favorites, more than a week of play before
          • Oh, sorry, I thought you dissing F-Zero 64. Yeah, the N64/ PS1 era was definitely the "ugly" era of video games--3D graphics while 3D looked like crap. That's actually one of the reasons I liked F-zero 64--it was willing to sacrifice all graphics quality to make such a great game--the tracks look crappy, the cars look crappy, but framerate never drops even with 30 cars on the screen at one time.
  • Still seems perfectly ok to me.

    • Silly kid (Score:3, Informative)

      by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 )
      He is talking about the original System Shock. In case you hadn't noticed by either the titel or the story it was a sequel.

      The original System Shock was a ground breaking titel at the time of doom but using a fastly superior engine for the enviroment and a fastly infirior one for the characters. It was I think one of the first true 3d shooters as opposed to dooms and duke nukems 2.5d. It also had a great story and if you had the cd version excellent voice acting.

      Sadly it also was about a gazillion times m

  • "Surface" technical feasability is here (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ReyTFox ( 676839 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @04:12AM (#8142892)
    But there's plenty of things one could add to a game that can't be done quite yet; some of them are programming questions like AI or systems modelling; others simply require more hardware, like modelling worlds with totally deformable terrain(Red Faction, if you even remember it now, felt like a hack because only certain parts could be destroyed) or bringing the detail of our CG characters and environments in line with pre-rendered work.

    The real issue is how we, so to speak, "start over" now that games can do everything we can imagine, when a big enough budget and schedule is allowed. Lots of people want to do virtual realities, in an online or single player form, and over time the distinction between that(when it was still theoretical) and a game that constantly tests our abilities or acts as social glue in the way that sports or board or card games might has gotten muddied; games today are often made heavy and slow-paced by feeling the compulsion to satisfy both the requirements of skill/excitement and of VR. Games rarely ever have a continuous stream of challenge thrown at you anymore; instead, it's broken up into little chunks wherin you explore a little, and then you fight or solve puzzles or whatever, and then you go back to exploring...

    That said, I have great hopes that the market will reinvigorate itself with a whole new set of ideas; there's plenty of untapped potential floating around that is likely to unleash great stuff over the next few years, games that try to do things "new and different" like any art should.
    • I'd like to see hardware that handles LOD calculations, so you can throw hundreds or even thousands of times the polygons at it than normal hardware can handle, but it's smart enough to know how to balance out the LOD so everything keeps it's detail when looked at up close, but the frame rate is still good when looking at the whole scene.
  • When the Halo 2 screenshot was posted, I looked at it and its crappy moon-rocks or whatever the fuck and said to myself, "wow, it's Half-Life except with people who look better, mostly because they have masks on." Am I the only one who thinks Halo is the most overrated game ever, bar none? It's just another standard 3D shooter game based on a foreign planet with you being a soldier. We've seen it before, I think, a few times... um... Doom, Doom II, Half-Life, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D...

    • Re:Funny that this should be posted tonight (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bugbread ( 599172 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @04:58AM (#8143007)
      No, you aren't the only one on the planet. However, a lot of people like it too.

      It's like chocolate cake. Chocolate cake has been done to death. Everyone's eaten it before; every variation has been done. That doesn't keep good chocolate cake from tasting good (use some other food example if you hate chocolate cake). Sure, chefs are experimenting with new non-chocolate cakes, and making almond crumble chiffon turnovers and other brand-new pastries, but that doesn't mean that chocolate cake isn't still good. Halo isn't popular because it is original, or innovative, or all of the other catchwords that get bandied around. It has a lot of fans because...it's fun! It may not be your cup of tea, but like it or not, it's popular because people enjoy playing it.

      People need to move away, not only from the idea that "Good Graphics = Good Game", but that "Innovation = Good Game", or "Realism = Good Game", or "Good Storyline = Good Game", and remember that the key is "Fun = Good Game". If good graphics, story, ideas, originality, etc. help make a game fun, then that's an added bonus, but even a game with trite, rehashed ideas, bad graphics, and a laughable story is awesome if it's fun.

      And if you haven't played Halo multiplayer, or you've only played on PC, you missed all the fun bits, so I wouldn't be surprised if you find it un-fun as well. The XBox multiplayer part is where it really shined.
      • I agree. Fun is important. And it may, or may not, be solely what makes a game good, but it's obviously not what makes games sold and used solely. Unlike, a chocolate cake, a game can be "enjoyed" over and over again. They're not selling very many copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 anymore, despite the fact that it was, and still is, fun. Actually, they sell so few, that Nintendo doesn't even sell it anymore. They sell new games as "replacements" for the old games. These new games may be fun, but, are they a
        • Agreed. My post was merely in response to the previous poster, who found no value in Halo merely because it was unoriginal. I just wanted to point out that people may enjoy a product not for its originality, but for its fun factor. Now, making a succesful product? That involves more than just fun, as you point out.

        • Re:Funny that this should be posted tonight (Score:4, Interesting)

          by trashcanmoses ( 732094 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @08:30AM (#8143417)
          They're not selling very many copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 anymore, despite the fact that it was, and still is, fun.

          Nintendo is still selling SMB3, just repackaged and targeted to the GBA. And lots of people are buying it. And lots of people are buying the Game Boy Player so they can play it on their television instead of hunching over a GBA. I bought it for the nostalgia, but a lot of kids are seeing it for the first time this way.
          My buddy just carried out an interesting (albeit unintentional) experiment with his 3rd grade son. He gave his son the new Zelda "Collectors Edition" disc with the original Zelda, Zelda 2, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. My buddy and I were talking about all the time we spent on Zelda when we were his son's age, and how it was neat that his son would now be playing the same game, blah blah blah...so the kid pops in the disc and goes straight to Majora's Mask. Doesn't even glance at the originals. The conclusion that my friend and I have reached is that we are obsolete.

        • I think you picked a bad example with Super Mario Brothers 3 [ign.com] since Nintendo has ported it to GameBoy Advance and re-released it as Super Mario Brothers 3: Super Mario Advance 4, and it's been a huge hit.

      • Thanks for your reply. I don't take offense at people saying it's an extraordinarily fun game, or fun multiplayer game, or that it's among the best shooter games ever released, but I've played it a decent amount with some friends. It's fun. But if you were to ask me what the best game ever is, I'd have to weigh innovation and originality in there, somewhere, and that's where I find Halo coming short.
        • And thank you for your response. I think Halo is fun, too, but when people say "the best game ever", I also kind of have to scratch my head.

          My initial response was predicated on the idea that you found no value in Halo because it was not innovative. Your response has cleared up that misconception, so I realize that we basically agree.
      • People need to move away, not only from the idea that "Good Graphics = Good Game", but that "Innovation = Good Game", or "Realism = Good Game", or "Good Storyline = Good Game", and remember that the key is "Fun = Good Game".

        Pretty much true, but I think it's a bad idea to downplay the importance of innovation. Innovation doesn't really make a game better, I realize that. I even realize that it makes it worse, at times. I think it gives a game more potential to be great (as well as more potential to be t
        • True, and I may have overstated my point in response to the popular "Innovation = Good" view. Reflecting on things, I would say that lack of innovation is not in itself bad, but as people get more and more used to games, and play more, fun levels may go down unless innovation occurs, in which case innovation will become necessary for fun. Case in point: I loved Pitfall when I was a kid. I've played it since, and it is incredibly boring. One could say that innovation since then is what makes the game les
      • Chocolate Cake I can only eat once before needing to buy more. Good shooters, on the other hand, (say Goldeneye) I can continue to reuse essentially endlessly. I've easily spent more than 400 hours on the games I've liked that are unique, whereas games which are overly similar to past ones I've played, and not significant improvements, tend to get the once-through 10-20 hour treatments. Think about it--how many times have you played Poker, Chess, Bridge, or Monopoly? Now have you even tried "Missile Che
    • Um Half-Life and Duke Nukem 3D never casted you as a soldier on a foreign planet (except for the last part of Half-Life). Both games took place on or around Earth. Doom II also took place on Earth (for about the first 10 or so levels) before going down to Hell. So out of your 6 examples, 3 of which (partially) take place on Earth.

      Some better examples would've been the entire Quake series, the entire Unreal and Unreal Tournament series, and Hidden and Dangerous. If you ask me, its more recent games that are

    • Am I the only one who thinks Halo is the most overrated game ever

      I hadn't played video games in years. A friend convinced to try playing halo with him. Suddenly it was eight hours later, and I was hooked. Now, four of us get together every week and spend the day shooting at each other and having a great time. The physics, the balance, the overall cleverness of it keeps us playing. For someone like me, who is admittedly unfamiliar with other recent games, Halo is amazing.

    • It is interesting that you criticize Halo for the graphics, for it was my belief that Halo was an innovative (and fun) game due to the good physics, weapon balance, and AI. Sure, if you evaluate it like Quake it's gonna suck, because the appeals of Quake are mostly graphics based (hmm, a bunch of monsters charge at you and you shoot them. Repeat.) While in Halo, the enemy use team tactics, hide behind cover, and shoot funny things when you shoot at them! Halo should stand as a prime example of why graphics
      • The mainstream probably doesn't even notice that the enemies have fancy AI, and use real tactics. A, dare I use the term, hardcore gamer will enjoy that aspect of the game, but the appeal to most of those who bought it probably has more to do with its advanced lighting techniques, bump mapping, and all the other graphical effects in the game. The vehicles are cool, too...

  • Photo-realism (Score:4, Insightful)

    by limekiller4 ( 451497 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @05:22AM (#8143067) Homepage
    Game graphics are asymptotically approaching photo-realism.

    Is it slowing? Yeah, because as you get closer to this holy grail, you spend more and more time/years getting less and less return for the effort. But are all the nails in this coffin? No, not even close. What we have now looks good but isn't going to convince anyone they're looking at footage.
    • It all depends on what you're looking at.

      When i saw ads for GranTurismo 3 I thought i was seeing video footage... i had to see the ads a few times before i was able to tell that it was gameplay, and was still fooled by some of the clips.

      A person is tough to get right, but those cars looked perfect to me. Reflections, shadows, realistic movement as the cars went over bumps... they even seemed a little dirty in spots. It has been a long time since i saw it, but i was fooled.

  • One More Graphics Advance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb@gm a i l . com> on Saturday January 31, 2004 @05:24AM (#8143074) Homepage
    There's one more graphics advance that will stun people and that's when material/environmental science is applied to every set of polygons in a game. For example, not only will you see a newspaper blowing along the post-apocalyptic street you're walking down in the latest FPS, but the newspaper will realistically alter in shape according to how the wind blows and how it hits the ground or other objects. Instead of blowing up a brick wall, breaking it into predetermined bits; the brick wall will break apart differently - dictated by realistic physics - depending on what was used to blow it up, the size of the bricks used in construction and the mortar holding it together.

    I consider this an advance in graphics, in addition to an advance in gameplay and game physics, because it enhances the visual realism of the gaming experience. Shooting a chandelier and making it fall onto enemies is cool. Shooting down that same chandelier and watching it hit the enemy and ground, breaking into realistic pieces flying in realistic patterns would be awesome.

    • Isn't that called the havoc engine? They have made some strides in that direction have they not?

      The thing game designers and level designers need to focus on is not only these new graphics, but how to INCORPORATE them into the gameplay. For example, in the original deus ex game I remember grabbin a rolling cart and placing a small TNT box on it and rolling on down the hall only to shoot it when it neared my enemies. If only the designs would use all these features then the games could be awesome again.

  • I saw this about a month ago being played in a computer store, and was blown away. The graphics on this game are noticeably beyond anything else I've seen currently available. There's definitely still much room for improvement, if that's the only game out there with that kind of detail.

    Also third-person games blow away FPSs, IMO. Except for BZFlag - that game rawks! :) (ps to BZFlaggers - GMs & Lasers are for pussies! PUUUUSSSSEEEEEES. (Yes, I mean *YOU*!))
    • Doesn't really have that great graphics. What it gives you, is something different.

      Massive graphics.

      Not so much detail, but a lot going on the screen. It's a tradeoff, but one that's worth it.

  • Maturity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rmarll ( 161697 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @05:32AM (#8143086) Journal
    The graphics pipline has matured as much as it will for a long while. There's very little in the way of eye candy that you cannot do on modern day hardware. Speed will improve, but graphics has become a money problem instead of a technical one. In essence, the revolution is over. The real progress is going to be in the redistribution of technical effort into levening of entertainment value.

    Uh oh. Off topic stuff below....

    Some have said lately that the ease of developing a modern engine is a terrible thing. I disagree. It's been about 20 years since a single individual could develop something that was both decent visually and fun.
    Consider the Independan Games Festival's entrants page for 2003 http://www.igf.com/2003entrants.shtml
    games produced by hobbists that still still need teams, run up tens of thousands in costs, and take years of time to get to their (not always) finished state.

    Richard Garriot had a very limited number of pixels to work with when developing the early Ultima's which eased his burden enormously. Since then it's all been about the number of people in your art department, and the engine you liscense.
    The power and flexability of modern hardware is making development, code and art, less costly. For the casual developer, what has been just too much work to bother is becoming more trivial. I think we will be seeing activity in the hobiest gaming arena that has been absent for a very long time.

  • So many times I've been wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BTWR ( 540147 ) <americangibor3@@@yahoo...com> on Saturday January 31, 2004 @05:42AM (#8143105) Homepage Journal
    OK, I always knew Atari, even in its day, had awful graphics. I remember playing the NES game "Total Recall" and thinking (as an 8 year-old) "wow, what a crappy attempt to recreate Arnold."

    Ninja Gaiden, the cut scenes at least, had "awesome" graphics at the time but I knew they were just really good cartoons. But when I played Wheel of Fortune on the SNES one time, and it had a near-photo quality still-picture of Vanna White on the title screen, I thought that "well, this is the best it can be... because you can't do better than photos!"

    Flash forward to 1997 when I first saw Mario 64. I walked into my friend's house and I seriously did not even take off my jacket. I was standing there for like 10 minutes just marveling it. Amazing, I thought. They did it. They peaked. Can't get any better.

    Once again, I was wrong. Super Mario Sunshine is much prettier.

    Stupid me, here I go again. Just 5 minutes ago I finished watching a preview for EA mvp baseball 2004 for gamecube and I thought again "Wow, this is a looooong way from Bases Loaded on NES. look how awesome this looks! Seriously, how get much better than this!?!?"

    Something tells me that I'll laugh at that statement once again in 2008...
    • Well, I was amazed to find out games have passed a weak firm of my own personal Turing test...over at a party, some football game was on TV, the onscreen overlay talked about waiting for a call from the refs.

      It took me 10-15 minutes 'til I realized it was still waiting for the refs, no commercials. Then I looked more closely and saw it was a video game. And I'm a pretty avid gamer, but out of the corner of my eye, the camera angles used (switching to various players standing around) were 'real' enough and
  • I remember when I'd browse EB when I was a kid with my friends, and what could seriously sell us on a game was to look at the back of the box and see the 4 pictures on the back of the NES/PC game. We could totally be like "whoah! look at the 'multimedia' version of Kings Quest 6 (i.e. it was on a cd-rom) versus the floppy version (on like 11 disks)!"

    I don't remember a single game I've bought in the last few years because of graphics. Sure, they're nice, but nowhere near say, the top 3 selling points of
  • Give it time. Ten years ago we were waiting for some sort of "virtual reality" - we still are (though I must admit an XBox on a plasma HDTV is damn close). Let's also not forget the prospect of 3D and/or holographic displays. And once we get that down, it's only a matter of time before we shift focus to something more like a holodeck. Some LaserTag arenas were a pretty suitable virtual reality experience years ago. We won't be running out anytime soon.

  • yeah sure (Score:2, Interesting)

    by metalmario ( 717434 )
    tell that to the average joe. only older gamers can see through the graphical polish to the core of the game. don't forget that it's expensive to create those complex (and good looking) 3D-models. the prettier it is the more time it takes to make. unless the average coders populating the game industry somehow manage to build a cool 3D-model generator. it would be better to move those extra 100000 hours from opengl programming to ai programming as the ai in games is so simple and sad (yes, even in black'n'

  • spatial immersion is more key (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ghostlibrary ( 450718 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @07:49AM (#8143321) Homepage Journal
    "a whole re-arrangement of your thought processes to accept the difference in graphics quality."

    I disagree. Doom is still quite playable. People don't 'rearrange their thought processes' to play cartoonish games like Jet Grind Radio, lower graphics quality doesn't require a shift. What does require a shift is 'how do they model the space'.

    I think 'Doom' really nailed the spatial immersion aspect (and is still playable now). Quake et al added full 3D movement. It wasn't just the graphics, but the fact that Game Movement was like Real Life Movement.

    So it's sort of a tactile thing. Once you were walking seamlessly (not in chunky steps), and could look around, things had 'arrived'. After that, things just got prettier.

    And, they got the audio right-- you got spatial information from where the sound came from. (5.1 stuff has really helped boost that, but I can't pick 1 'pivotal' game that advanced it.)

    So I think the next big leap isn't going to be graphical, but spatial. Perhaps handling peripherial vision, so you don't get the 'someone is hitting me but where?' effect, and there's more of a sense of placement.

    Or some clever way to handle mapping and direction so you don't feel lost-- one can get lost in an FPS mall due to lack of spatial awareness, whereas it's harder to do in real life.

    Or perhaps kinetic sense will be the next thing, actually feeling motion. We'll see.

    • Some games already deal with that "someone is hitting me but where?" problem. The latest game I played that did it was the demo of Far Cry. Whichever side people are hitting you from, a flash of red on the screen (which is something a lot of games use to show you're getting hit in general) is concentrated at one edge of the screen, the edge in the direction of the bad guy.

      I'm pretty sure there are older games that have things like that, but none are coming immediately to mind.

  • Network Traffic (Score:2, Interesting)

    by apoc.famine ( 621563 )
    Werid that I made a similar post on another board minutes before reading /., but anyway...

    Most games are still only in the 20 updates/sec range still, when played online. UT/UT2k3 is a good example of this. The game looks great, and plays like a dream on a lan, but even on cable the update rate means rockets can disappear and people can skip over large portions of ground as the game struggles to get enough updates to accurately place things. Of course, it doesn't help that our server is on 110% speed, bu

  • Complete and utter drivel. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @08:46AM (#8143461) Journal
    Two recent games. UFO aftermath and Silent Storm. As I played aftermath I thought looks nice. Great game. A silly person like the article poster would have said that the graphics were great and nothing could have improved on it. Cue Silent storm released shortly after. Where UFO had mostly static scenery in Silent Storm it could be destroyed by your fire. UFO had only outside citylevels and indoor bases. Silent Storm had outside levels with houses you could go in. The graphics were just so much better it is hard to describe. Both are fun and intresting games to play but when compared Silent Storm is just the better game despite its weaker story. (Why am I a WW2 soldier fighting some alien invasion? Isn't WW2 on its own intresting enough anymore?)

    And Silent Storm wins because of its graphics. It really makes a difference when you are fighting a heated battle and the enviroment does get damaged. I had a small squad pinned down by a sniper on the third floor who constantly ducked out of the way after taking very accurate shots. My own sniper was busy being patched up. So I had a soldier run up to the side of the house and start throwing grenades at the house. He couldn't reach the floor of the sniper let alone lob one in through the window. He did however manage to hit the outside of the second floor. This blew away the wall allowing the second grenade to sail in easily. Blowing away both floors killing the sniper as he fell two floors.

    So yes I think graphics will be continue to be an important improvement. No maybe not in "dumb" shooters like quake where quite honestly the increased power has only been used to create nice decoration. In games like Vietnam, Silent Storm, Operation Flashpoint, the increase in graphics power is however used to create more then just pretty pictures. It is used to create a more realistic enviroment in wich to play. People complain about snipers? Play OFP and see how easy it is to snipe at a player 1 mile away.

    Really why do people keep posting these stupid stories? They happen every year and every year they are proven wrong.

    Oh and I don't think games like Half-life aged terribly but I do enjoy in more recent games that peoples lips move and there heads in general are more then cubes. No it doesn't matter to much in a frag fest. But when like me you enjoy single player games it does matter.

    • Re:Complete and utter drivel. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @10:42AM (#8143768) Homepage Journal
      the ability to destroy the houses & environment in silent storm is not a gfx perk, rather a gameplay one. it's a bit ironic though that it's better than ufo: aftermath because of that since ufo1&2(or xcoms whatever you prefer for naming) had those destroyable houses and it really did matter in the battles as well(my favourite was using the explosive shooting weapons to spray the areas I thought there were aliens in).

      • But the graphics need to be able to do it. I don't know if you played and were capable of doing it at max level but the lighting was dynamic as well. Meaning that if you blew a hole in a wall the light from the next room would shine through and cast shadows.

        This is more then you say had in quake were if you opened a door to a lighted room then the light would NOT spill into the room you were in.

        Graphics is not just extra polys to make round pillars. It is also bullet holes in the pillar. Smoke from burnin

  • Older games (Score:2, Interesting)

    by etherlad ( 410990 )
    I'm still going back and playing my old games on occasion. Space Quest, King's Quest, Ultrabots, Quest for Glory...

    Hell, AGD Interactive [agdinteractive.com] (formerly Tierra) is redoing some of Sierra's older EGA games into scintillating 256-colour graphical wonders.

    Cell-shaded 3d graphics? Pretty to look at, but I don't need 'em. (:
    • are you insane? how many times can you play kings quest before the frustration of falling off of footbridges and staircases to your death outweighs the sheer thrill of typing "give egg to troll"?

      yes, graphics have come a long way since then, but honestly gameplay itself has come just as far. you like adventure games? play some Grim Fandango. Monkey Island.
      • I have. Zak McCracken, Sam & Max... I like 'em too. Doesn't mean I can't like Sierra games. And I'm not the only one.

        I don't tell you what you should or shouldn't like. Long as you've found something you enjoy and you're having fun with it, cool. I don't like horror movies, I don't like romantic comedies, but that doesn't invalidate them, and I don't tell people who do enjoy them that they're insane. So let me enjoy my games, and you can enjoy yours.

        Anyhow, I prefer not to type anything... Sierr

  • indeed.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tasinet ( 747465 )
    Graphics have become very realistic nowadays, and after the initial shock of "o_O WoW! this is so real!" every time you play a newer and better game.. You need the 'something more' which will stick you to the screen and glue your hand to the mouse. See counterstrike for example-a '98 game [?-not sure-sorry!] with graphics of '98 but YET it is STILL a favorite of a LOT of people.. including me ;o)
  • I still think Quake 1 had more interesting architecture than many games released today. It's just so sad to see bunches of axis-aligned stacks of crates...

  • Uncanny Chasm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thedalek ( 473015 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @10:28AM (#8143713)
    Sometime in the last six months, Popular Science did an article on a robotics hobbyist whose quest was to create an android head which mimicked the movement and form of a human head completely.

    Over the course of the article, they discussed something called the "Uncanny Chasm." This chasm was what happened at a point just shy of total realism, at which things look jarring, unnatural, and disturbing.

    This is part of what's happening with games right now. We've reached the cusp of the Uncanny Chasm. Some have marched headlong off into the pit: I can't count the number of sports games I've looked at and thought "Wow, that looks totally incredib... Woah, that looked completely wrong."

    SquareEnix and Konami have pushed further towards the far edge of the Chasm, but only in cutscenes. The primary reason is, once the character is under the player's control, it is virtually impossible to keep up the convincing level of motion and still have the player be able to control more than just a modern-day Dragon's Lair.

  • Polygons vs. Design (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CashCarSTAR ( 548853 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @11:23AM (#8143933)
    Not all graphical splendor is due to technology or polygon pushing. A large part of it is due to design decisions that will make to tend something pleasing, or not pleasing.

    The graphics have improved to the point where creators have a pretty damn big canvas to work on. Just improving the technology isn't good enough anymore. It's all about making your game feel good. That's really what it's all about.

  • Graphics in terms of "looking realistic" might be approaching it's peak, but that's the most useless application of graphics to gaming there is in my mind. I actually prefer Doom to Quake since Quake looks like mud (literally, all the colors are dark and muted and blend into each other) and Doom is nice and simple to navigate and fight in - that last is the point of the game remember. I still have directories full of maps to try for Doom while my copy of Quake is getting dusty on a shelf somewhere. I can
    • If you are still playing the old-school FPS's you should check the PC port of Marathon (http://source.bungie.org/), though I shudder to mention port and marathon in the same sentence. Marathon was released on the Mac around the same time as Doom on the PC, and I had similar reservations about the mud content of Doom. Plus, Marathon has kickass physics, something just starting to come back into style, and probably the best story of any game to date.

  • The answer is a resounding NO. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by __aailob1448 ( 541069 ) on Saturday January 31, 2004 @01:15PM (#8144671) Journal
    While It is true that graphics have remained a bit stagnant for the last 5 years or so, I believe this is just a phase. Graphics still have a very long way to go before they become truly photorealistic. Toy Story came out in 1994 and 10 years later, a standalone PC still has a long way to go before being able to render it in real time. And toy story can hardly be called photorealistic. Similarly, today's best techniques and the biggest rendering farms can give us something like The fight scene between Neo and the 100 agent smiths in Matrix Reloaded. Barring some revolutionary breakthrough, A standalone PC won't be able to render something like that for another 20 or 25 years at least. And that scene was not quite photorealistic either. Add to that the fact that we need to progress towards a resolution of 4196*2360 and 100FPS as a minimum and my estimate would be 50-100 years before we can look at something that can fool our eyes completely.
  • First off I don't think we are anywhere near graphical realism.

    Now let me explain, in point form: 1.)Immersion is the ability of a player to be lost in the game world, there are many factors to this outside of graphics but they are important. For many anime watchers swotching to CG is a step away from realism. I think this is because they are tied directly to the creators vision and the emotional content of the voice actors. Adding CG is just another level between you and the creator (Same with physical
  • I still don't understand why people keep hyping up the next generation of console gaming. We've already got such amazing graphical ability in all the current systems, that I don't see the point in getting anything new. Do you really think you'll notice an extra million polygons on screen? Or an extra few frames per second? If so, will that be worth $300 to you?

    Pretty much every jump in console graphics so far has been pretty major, but I really don't think this next jump will be that impressive (certainly
  • When half-life originally came out I tried playing it but my system was too slow which would induce headaches. This past fall I decided to give it a go. I found the graphics looked significantly dated and it still gave me a headache cause now my system was too fast >:(
  • We're pushing further and further into an "age" so to speak, where it's all about selling as much of a fake product as possible. The gaming industry is coming dangerously close to making a complete full swing to the dollar.

    Games are coming out with great graphics, but are only 10 hours long, stereotypical with no real thought given into the story. Heck, right now I hardly even play games anymore.. I just browse internet forums 90% of the time i'm on the computer.

    Content/Gameplay is becoming an 80s/90s t

  • Games aren't entirely focused on one thing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Sunday February 01, 2004 @04:37PM (#8153340) Homepage Journal
    The main story here assumes that pure gameplay is everything in a game. Sure, gameplay is important, but our standards for other things go up over time too.

    I agree with what the guy says about Half-Life, and that it's still more playable than many games today.. but that's because today's games don't have as good gameplay as Half-Life. If a modern game with excellent graphics had the same game-play than Half-Life, then it'd be better. PC games have just tended to suck over the past year.

    But, no, we haven't gone far enough yet. When you can render something and it looks just like you're 'really there' (i.e. photo quality), with no lines between texture changes, and the like, then we'll be there. Of course, we'll also want excellent AI, and excellent scaling. I mean.. who wants something that looks like real life (Max Payne and Half Life 2 come surprisingly close here!) but which forces you to take a very defined route to the end?

    It's all got to scale. Not just the gameplay, not just the graphics, not just the sound.. but everything.
  • We started off with no graphics (text based games) = 0%physical realistic graphics.

    We moved on to space invaders,pong, defender, etc. games with barely an improvement in graphics =15% graphics

    Then the console wars begin and graphics were the only yard stick. We are at a point where the graphics are basically 75%+ physical realistic graphics.

    Now the kicker: to continue to specialize in graphics means a very little return to investment ratio, but it still the only yard stick.

    How do you show the execs tha

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