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Videogame Graphic Advances - Not That Important? 114

Posted by simoniker from the you-scare-me dept.
Thanks to the IGDA for its 'Culture Clash' column discussing the recent advances in graphics quality for games, and why increased detail isn't always a good thing. The author, referencing a previously Slashdot-covered article about "unsettlingly funereal" hi-poly face models in games, points out: "Dependence on increasingly real visuals alone to generate emotion will inevitably hit a wall: at some point game graphics will look as good as real life. Developers have an arsenal of emotioneering tools at hand; to limit themselves to just one, however prominent, would be ill-advised", before further warning: "Overfocus on hyper-realistic graphics and modeling, while not a bad idea in a general sort of way, can also impede quality of gameplay."
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Videogame Graphic Advances - Not That Important? More

Videogame Graphic Advances - Not That Important?

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  • Gameplay (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BigDork1001 ( 683341 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @07:19AM (#9706005) Homepage
    No, super realistic graphics is not the most important thing in video games. There needs to be gameplay to make a game good. One of my favorite games is Combat Mission [battlefront.com] which is an incredible WWII strategy game. The graphics are a weak by todays standards but the gameplay is amazing and very realistic which is what makes the game.

    Graphics might be good to look at but if there's no gameplay what's the point of putting down $50? If it's no fun, no matter how life like it looks I'm not going to spend my hard earned money on it.

    • Re:Gameplay (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Yorrike ( 322502 )
      Because 15 year olds, and some lesser intelligent people of greater age will dismiss games such as Zelda:WW because it doesn't have super realistic graphics. Despite the fact that, without exaggeration, it's one of the best games of all time.

      It's more a matter of changing the gaming culture by sensible gamers dissociating themselves from those among us who would pass such games by because they want to look cool, or have other personality failings.

      • Re:Gameplay (Score:2, Funny)

        by cyber0ne ( 640846 )
        It has to be referenced...

        http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-12 -14&res=l [penny-arcade.com]

      • Re:Gameplay (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Lightwarrior ( 73124 )
        Wind Waker is a game for a certain type of person.

        Not all of us who don't like the game blame it on cel-shading. I rather enjoyed XIII, and find Tales of Symphonia to be quite interesting.

        But Wind Waker just wasn't my thing. I played it past the first island, and that was about it. I didn't enjoy the presentation; I don't mean graphics, I don't mean cel-shading, I mean that the presentation of the game didn't appeal to me.

        As an example, I didn't think the little boy on the first island with the snot d
        • You didn't think the "booger kid" was cute!?
          You, sir, clearly have no soul.
        • While I disagree with the "certain type of person" assessment of Wind Waker, I also felt like there was a certain stylistic change in Wind Waker, unrelated to the cel shading, that was a little sour. And the battleship mini-game, which was presented out-of-engine, struck a sour note with me, it felt tacked-on.

          On the other hand, I loved the non-linear world exploration aspects of the game. This is the first Zelda since the very first to have that to great degree, and, in my book, that puts it on the short
        • A well thought out criticism like that is great. You see, you gave it a go and didn't like it. I'm talking about people who dismiss games and don't give them a chance based soley on the way they look.

          And by giving a criticism, it's clear you've played on the GameCube, which the people I'm trying to describe would dismiss as a "kiddy system", despite the vast range of genres and ESRB ratings across GC games.

          • > ...the people I'm trying to describe would dismiss [the GCN] as a "kiddy system", despite the vast range of genres and ESRB ratings across GC games.

            These people just aren't thinking. They are unable to seperate the GCN from Nintendo's desire to make games enjoyable across all age groups.

            All they see are the ratings of "flagship" titles:
            GCN: Super Mario Sunshine, LoZ:WW (Everyone)
            PS2: Grand Theft Auto 3/VC, MGS2 (Mature)
            XBX: Halo, KotOR (Mature, Teen)

            Never mind that GCN has REmake, Eternal Darkness,
      • See, personally, I dismissed Zelda: WW because I hate Zelda. And most RPGs, for that matter. The only thing I've got against cel-shading is that it started becoming way too overused for a while. I mean, a cel-shaded FPS? A cel-shaded skating game? A cel-shaded racer? Bleh. I actually like cel-shading when it's not used so much. I loved Cel Damage, and I like the visuals of Jet Set Radio, although I'm not much for the gameplay. Personally, I think Master of Orion II is the best game ever made, bar none. Wor
      • As one who's played all of the "Official" Zelda games (in the original formats, not ROMs or Re-releases. Yes, I'm an old fart), and one or two of the bletcherous CD-I knockoff games, I disagree with you.

        NONE of the Zelda games had "super-realistic" graphics, yet plenty of folks (like myself) who hated Wind Waker LOVED Ocarina Of Time. The entire presentation of WW was awful, like sibling post said. Besides being eye-bleedingly cutesy, it was also un-freaking-beleivably repetitive. The first half of the

    • Re:Gameplay (Score:2, Interesting)

      by cyber0ne ( 640846 )
      Amen. One of my favorites in the recent super-realistic-graphics days is the very unrealistic Zelda: Windwaker. The gameplay was fantastic. And, as for the emotion factor, I wanted to strangle Ganon with my bare hands by the end of that game.

      Graphics are great, don't get me wrong. But I've seen too many games that boast fantastically realistic video sequences interlaced with terrible gameplay. Sure, the characters and objects and backgrounds looked great independantly of one another, but their actio
      • I'd agree that motion is a major weakness of "realistic" graphics right now. In most of the 3D games I've played that boasted high polygon counts and realistic rendering, I've noticed that the characters basically move like very well-lit marionettes, or audio-animatronic figures. As a result, I quite often have a harder time suspending disbelief in these sorts of games than I would in a smoothly-animated 2D game. I guess it just depends on what aspects of the graphics you pay the most attention to....
        • Come on people. Network is the biggest problem, not gameplay or graphics. Online games have so much more potential than single player offline games, but lag is still too common.

    • Re:Gameplay (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bigman2003 ( 671309 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @09:00AM (#9706821) Homepage
      The Graphics vs. Gameplay issue comes up on Slashdot a lot. The more vocal group (majority? dunno) seems to think that the gameplay is suffering, because the graphics are getting more attention.

      My response to that is....bullshit. Games now have bigger budgets- meaning more people. They take longer to create, meaning more time. Even if graphics are 90% of that time x money formula, just 10% of the total effort that goes into most modern games is far more than what was put into the entire game 15 years ago. First comparison- the Atari 2600 had the game 'Skiing' where you move a square down a white screen with occasional green blobs that you were supposed to avoid. Consoles have games like Amped and SSX. If you can't see the improved gameplay, you are blind. And of course the graphics are like 45^99th times better too.

      To me, games are a little like hairstyles. I'm sure you've seen women going around with a ridiculous 20 year old hairstyle. Well, 20 years ago was probably the best time of her life, and she is going to hang on to every part of that era that she can. A lot of gamers are the same way. 'Platformers from the 80s are the best'. Okay...chances are you are over the age of 25, and most modern games intimidate you. So, it's much easier to stick with those games essentially for the rest of your life. Oh, you'll look at them, but soon dismiss them because you understand Kaboom! so much more.

      Some people think that Quake was the pinnacle of first person shooters...my guess is that they were in a college dorm (or similar situation) when Quake came out. Now, if a new game comes out, they don't have 20 guys sitting around who want to play (It's called Xbox Live..check it out) and it isn't as much fun. So therefore, the new games just aren't as good. (Even if they do have things like a real vertical plane, smarter enemies, larger/more complex maps, etc etc)

      Also, as games mature, they get more complex. The computing power is available to do more, and the graphics cards can handle better/more complex graphics.

      Age of Empires was a good game. Age of Empires II was a great game, and Rise of Nations was even better. I still know people who are stuck on the first AOE, and aren't willing to move on. In fact, they look at Rise of Nations, and think that all of the other stuff is un-necessary... Yet, ask someone to go backwards (somebody who played Rise of Nations first) and they will feel that the previous games were absolute crap. Well, some people have a limited capacity for learning new things (games included) and they stick with what they know.

      Okay...enough rambling. Thank you for listening. (and for the record, I'm 36 years old, and I hate older games because I LIKE new games with nice graphics and more complex gameplay.)

      • Re:Gameplay (Score:4, Insightful)

        by brkello ( 642429 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @11:24AM (#9708299)
        Wow, I was going to reply with something similar to what you wrote. But you said it better than I would have anyway.

        I wish people could remove the nostalgia glasses and really compare the games. I'm sorry, but just because people play nethack doesn't prove that crappy graphics mean better gameplay. I don't see why the author is complaining. Let's get graphics as real as possible until it hits the "wall" of being absolutely realistic (and I really doubt it will be as quick as they think). Now that we hit that wall, will graphics never change again? Will game play suddenly improve? Of course not. People will take graphics in new UNrealistic directions. Good games will have good gameplay, bad games won't. Why argue against improving graphics? I guess his argument is overfocusing on graphics will cause gameplay to be worse. Well, duh! If they overfocus on marketing, that will hurt gameplay. If they overfocus on their family life, that will hurt gameplay. What a dumb statement. Articles like these make me wonder how these people get hired. There is really no analysis, just a rehash of what other uninformed people like to complain about.

        • Re:Gameplay (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AltaMannen ( 568693 )
          I think I can see the point of where realistic graphics harms the gameplay.

          For one thing, many icons, target reticles, markers etc. used to assist aiming or lead snowboarders through a better path clash with the real graphics. I have an easier time accepting these helpers if the surrounding graphics is stylized to an extent.

          Another thing is the game designer's control over the environment. If the environment is more realistic you have a harder time setting up something as bizarre as a mario carousel platf
      • My response to that is....bullshit. Games now have bigger budgets- meaning more people. They take longer to create, meaning more time. Even if graphics are 90% of that time x money formula, just 10% of the total effort that goes into most modern games is far more than what was put into the entire game 15 years ago.

        But games still tend to be poorly designed these days. Game design is not something you can necessarily learn, and one great designer is worth more than ten bad ones.

        Further, the industry does
    • True, but relative to other excellent wargames out there Combat Mission has damn good graphics. Another good example in Medieval: Total War. Compared to Max Payne 2, Medieval's graphics suck. Compare it all the other wargames out there with bland graphics, it sucks.

      I believe the problem is not super-realistic graphics detracting from the gameplay but rather the resources which are diverted toward the graphics seriously diminish the gameplay and replayability of the game.

      Additionally, when going only f

  • Not entirely true (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To say that focussing on graphics at the expense of gameplay is a bad thing is obviously true. However, the reverse is equally true. These days, when I hand over the money for a game, I expect to get a product which not only plays well, but also looks decent.

    This doesn't necessarily mean it has to have the latest 3d modelling techniques and uber-realistic lighting; you can achieve decent visuals as much through stylised 2D work as you can through the latest 3d engine. What it does mean is that I don't want
    • The 90s are where most of my favortie games came from. The 90s was the pinnacle of platform games (Super Mario World, Super Star Wars, MegaMan X), 2D fighting games (SF2, MK), and my favorite puzzle games (The Lost Vikings, Saturn Bomberman). Also my favorite driving game came out in the 90s but the graphics look like they came out of the 80's (Stunts).

      Would I buy a game new that had these graphics? Absolutely, but only if the gameplay was as good as these titles. I'd love to see a Super Episode I and

      • Re:Not entirely true (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Japong ( 793982 )
        Stunts looked pretty damned good, considering it actually had polygonal graphics going on in 1990. I don't thing there were many others doing even that at the time. 1980 gave us... Battlezone? Unfortunately I was only 6 when they ended. Either way Stunt Race FX came out for the Super Nintendo in 1994, sporting far worse graphics with the SuperFX chip. Still, good taste. Ah, those custom track memories vs Skid Vicious...
    • Speaking of PS2 and graphics put to good use, remember when Dynasty Warriors first came out, and you were running around a field fighting against like 25 - 50 on-screen enemies? Or Bangaio or Dodonpachi, shooters which have hundreds (maybe thousands) of sprites on screen? Or Theif 3, where the relatively advanced shading provided shadowed areas where you could hide and perform stealthy actions? Or Splinter Cell, where various vertex and pixel shaders were employed to give you night-vision and infrared?
    • I never heard anyone say the PS2 can't manage "decent" graphics. Great leading edge graphics no, decent yes. Both FF and GT rely heavily on pre-rendered backgrounds, and while both have the gameplay, as long as you enjoy looking at postcards, then hey more power to you. Additionally, in the context of those two games, most games released for the PS2 do not look like FF and GT and therefore the majority of PS2 games released are very inferior visually to PC, Xbox and Gamecube. Hence why the community th

  • emotion (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BinLadenMyHero ( 688544 ) <binladen@9hell s . org> on Thursday July 15, 2004 @07:37AM (#9706137) Journal
    Dependence on increasingly real visuals alone to generate emotion

    Just look at South Park, for example.
    The characters are full of emotion expression, even if the graphics are ridiculously simple.

    • Re:emotion (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zephiros ( 214088 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @08:23AM (#9706487)
      Scott McCloud discusses this at length in Understanding Comics. As a rendering of a person becomes more stylized and abstract, the viewer begins to fill in details on their own. Not only can our minds fill in more details than an artist can draw, but the content we fill the drawing with is our own, which makes the character more accessible.

      A similar effect occurs with The Sims. Their reductionist design and behavior allows users to ascribe all sorts of baroque narratives [geocities.com] to their simple actions.

      • Re:emotion (Score:3, Informative)

        by VendingMenace ( 613279 )
        OH man, i am SO glad you mentioned this...

        And not only does more abstract character become more accesable, but we even tend to IDENTIFY more with a character that is drawn more abstract. Which is really cool.

        It is fun to read comics and see this sort of thing in practice. In a some comics (BONE is a good example) there are a few characters that are drawn very abstract as compared to the rest of the cast. This makes it so that you identify soley with a few of the caracters, and the author can really dic

  • Graphics means squat after 1 year (Score:3, Interesting)

    by carcosa30 ( 235579 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @07:41AM (#9706163)
    Parent article is definitely true.

    Compare the "legs," or longevity, of games like Angband and Nethack to those of Quake and the Diablo games. No contest.

    This is because there are different production values: the roguelike games have a lasting cerebral appeal, while games that are built on eye candy concentrate elsewhere. This may have to do with the business models of modern game companies.

    Take id software for instance. For gameplay internals, it doesn't get much simpler than id games. Doom was actually a playable game from the map screen if you turned on display of objects, and doing this shows how moronically simple Doom and Quake are. The appeal of the games, however, came from the presentation of the data, and the atmosphere produced by the amazing, moody artwork.
    Mid-end graphics are comparatively simple to do, and using OpenGL actually makes it simpler, once you get over a certain learning curve. The models are the sticking point: you're not going to be doing amazing mo-capped human character models, but there's quite a database of MDL format models already out there, and there are other types of games, such as modern military RTS, that don't really require extremely detailed models-- a good example is the amazing TA, a game that has excellent longevity despite rather dated graphics.

    TA is a game where the graphics are just good enough. At the time, there had to be a lot of trickery to render that many units at once, and the trickery in the TA engine involved giving the graphics a stylization that is still quite capable of bringing its gritty, desolate image home. TA is a sterling example of turning flaws into advantages.

    Linux games should focus on extensibility, replay value, using randomness (cf. Roguelikes), and multiplayer, which gives games far more gameplay depth than the engine would seem to warrant (cf. Quake, Diablo II).

    We could have a hundred original, interesting games on Linux. Instead we have 45,000 versions of Freecell and Tetris. In fact, Linux is the indisputed king of these types of games, because of the minimal thought required in their creation.

    One idea for curing this might be to leverage the existing codebases of games like Angband and grafting semi-modern rendering engines onto them. Even turnbased play is wonderful with these games, and I think realtime play a la Diablo might not be very difficult to achieve.

    One thing we DON'T need is more Tetris and Tuxracer clones.

    • Compare the "legs," or longevity, of games like Angband and Nethack to those of Quake and the Diablo games. No contest.

      I've never even heard of Angband. Maybe it's tremendously popular in whatever genre it's in, but by any meaningful metric, it can't possibly compare to Quake. I've heard of Nethack, but never played it, and outside of Slashdot I've never heard of anyone playing it either. In fact, I'm only assuming that your point is that those two games are more long-lived than Quake and Diablo, t

      • I know tons of people in daily life who play Angband variants, but basically no one who plays Diablo 2 or Quake 3. Should I conclude from this that nobody outside of the theoretical beings who post to slashdot actually play Diablo 2 or Quake 3?

        Anecdotal evidence is just not be relied upon. It reflects what your friends do, not what most people do.

    • Doom was actually a playable game from the map screen if you turned on display of objects, and doing this shows how moronically simple Doom and Quake are.

      I see you weren't on the high school debate team.

      The appeal of the games, however, came from the presentation of the data, and the atmosphere produced by the amazing, moody artwork.

      I guess the well-tuned low level gameplay had nothing to do with it?

      Linux games should focus on extensibility, replay value, using randomness (cf. Roguelikes), and mul

  • Not a new concern... (Score:4, Informative)

    by GrosTuba ( 227941 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @07:42AM (#9706173)
    At GDC 2003, Jason Rubin, head and founder of Naugthy Dog, a highly successful development studio for PS1 and PS2, delivered a speech (slides available here [gdconf.com], audio and slides available on Gamasutra [gamasutra.com] (free painless reg. req.)) on a closely related subject : improvements in graphics quality will not be sustained over the next few years, and relying on them to impress potential customers is a bad idea.

    Moral : as long as gameplay, character development and story do not suck, nice graphics are of course an asset, but they're useless in case of an already shitty game...
  • What's the most popular game ever made? GTA? Doom 2? Halo?

    Tetris. Look at the GFX budget and how it's aged.

    If you want to make money and impress people, concentrate on graphics. If you want to create a game with redeeming value, they're not really that important. Many people who read /. still play MUDs.
    • Look, Tetris with great GFX is still good right? Halo wouldn't work with bad GFX. Vice City would be a different experience with different GFX (although I've been playing GTA & GTA2 of late and find GTA a little better, even with the not so hot GFX).

      GFX without gameplay is like a movie (or something you don't actually play with).
      Gameplay without GFX isn't as great.
      It's about balance. I suggest we get a delegation from each camp and sort out some sort of peace treaty. This war has raged for too long.
  • A friend of mine does not like to play most shooter style games, she will watch them but not play, this is ever since Quake 1 or so. The reason is that she does not like to die, even in a video game she knows isn't real. I could see it possible that as graphics get better and better, more and more people feeling like this and games starting to lose money.
  • I came to the conclusion that the article author is insane, and, as a consequence of that, full of shit.

  • I agree (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Amen to that. The astonishing graphics on today's games are quit fantastic, but I find myself increasingly disturbed at how shallow the plot lines and characters are of many modern games. Final Fantasy X is a good example. I loved the final fantasy games because of the complexity and the personal connection with the story line and characters. When I played X I was bored to death because I was just being strung along from one battle to the next and/or graphic cinematic. They had spent so much time creat
    • how shallow the plot lines and characters are of many modern games

      I suspect this will become a larger problem in the future. The problem of lifeless characters can be solved, somewhat, by improved character animation techniques. But without fundamentally changing the way characters interact with their world, you're just going to end up with hyper-realistic quest-dispensing vending machines.

      Bulking up backstory and character dialogue is a short-term patch, but ultimately characters will need to become a
      • The best Final Fantasy IMO was Final Fantasy VII. My ultimate dream is for them to redo the game for the PS3, taking advantage of full 3D environments and better rendering. In terms of gameplay mechanics and storyline, it can't be beat (FF8 came close, but failed).
  • I think that the recent increase in nostalgia gaming and the decline of the PC gaming market are proof of this. Look at all the games Nintendo is selling hundreds of thousands of copies of. Not one of them has ultra-realistic graphics. What they do have is nostalgia and gameplay.

    To contrast lets look at the PC gaming market. HL2 and Doom3 are the only games of note for the entire PC platform. Virtually every other game has been ignored other than MMOs, which are a seperate story. But that doesn't mean th
    • Well, they DO make 2D games still- take a look at Metal Slug 3 [gamespot.com].

      I was VERY interested in this before it came out- I thought it sounded like a good idea, to put a 2D shooter on more modern hardware, and see what happens.

      Well, I got the demo, I found out what happens...In my opinion, it sucks.

      As confused as I was the first time I played Mario 64- I realize that it was a huge step in gaming. I loved Donkey Kong Country, and I liked Donkey Kong 64 (except for chasing those damn bananas...what a pain in the a
      • Nostalgia is big in America right now. A lot of people are convinced that things were so much better in the past (just watch 'I love the 80s' or 'I love the 90s', or notice how fondly people use the term 'old school'). Hopefully this will run out of steam soon, and we can get back to the business of creating a future...not looking back on our childhood with rose colored glasses.

        Having a bafoon in power, evil men directing policy, lack of good paying jobs, slow economic growth, the world hating you ect...
  • This is a trend I've been seeing in Movies (Shrek comes to mind) as well as in computer games: Recently, the enhanced realism in computer graphics only shows how hard it is to do, and how much we aren't quite there yet (and maybe never will be). I find stylized CG (XIII or say, The Incredibles) much more interesting.

    • Re:Realism? Nah. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nine-times ( 778537 )
      What I find it shows, most clearly, is how hard it is to do WELL. Shrek 2 doesn't fail to look ultra-realistic, it's just going for a particular blend of realism and cartoonishness (and I think it does a good job). The Lord of the Rings may, perhaps, be a better movie to look at. Gollum was a terrific example of realistic CG being used effectively. What many people fail to recognize, though, is this doesn't JUST require technology, it requires artistry.

      Saying 'CG isn't good, look at how many people fai

    • The makers of Shrek said in an interview that tey actually had to scale back on the realism of e.g. the princess since they didn't want the characters to look realistic.

  • 3d (Score:2)

    by sporty ( 27564 )
    Software rendered or done on a souped up video card, being able to move in 3d, is biggest graphical technology, imho, to come to pass.

    Games like double dragon, TMNT (original), street fighter, they all were cool games, but it didn't make sense that you could dodge backwards and vertically (by jumping or ducking) but not in a 3rd dimension. Yes, you you had limited movement in the 3rd dimension, but you couldn't turn diagonally like you could in true 3d games like Mario 64, or Quake or DOOM. Wolfenstei

    • Games like double dragon, TMNT (original), street fighter, they all were cool games, but it didn't make sense that you could dodge backwards and vertically (by jumping or ducking) but not in a 3rd dimension. Yes, you you had limited movement in the 3rd dimension, but you couldn't turn diagonally like you could in true 3d games like Mario 64, or Quake or DOOM. Wolfenstein 3d doesn't count btw, no vertical movement ;)

      Making sense isn't the point. having fun is.
      • Making sense isn't the point. having fun is.

        Agreed. for some reason, the human brain has no problem accepting the rules of a 2d game universe. it's bizarre, on the surface doesn't make sense, yet is so natural, it wasn't really questioned by players until 3d came along. further, i would argue that precise control (of the kind Super Mario Bros. or many shooters encouraged) is still only possible in '2d' games.. remember 3d is only a 2d window on virtual 3d space, you have no binocular vision, and controls

  • "at some point game graphics will look as good as real life."

    Yeah, because I see dozens of corpses every day in REAL LIFE, and *gee* it gets boring after a while.
  • Good gaming is about good gameplay; if you don't believe that, go play with MAME for a bit. The problem is, game marketing has changed.

    Once upon a time, you either watched someone else play in an arcade, risked a quarter to play it yourself, or went over to the house of the kid whose father bought every new console game that Nintendo advertised. Marketers had it easy.

    These days, there are so many games available, and prices are so high, that you're at the mercy of relying on review articles or limiting yo
  • I would pay more money for a new chapter of Fallout, with the same graphics as before, than I would for Doom 3.

    I think the stuff going into Half-Life 2 is awesome, but I -still- would have wanted the game if it looked the same as before (ok, some higher resolution textures would be good but the engine worked well). Most of my gripes with 3D games have been on the mechanics side of things, not the whizbang graphics side.

    I wouldn't mind seeing a 3D treatment of my all-time favorite Squarez! but it would be

  • Eventually graphics will bite us.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by inkless1 ( 1269 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @09:06AM (#9706882) Homepage
    Sooner or later all these high end engines are going to raise the cost of games. Every time these guys go from 10,000 to 100,000 poly models, that's just that much more time spent in a studio trying to get killer models done, and then there's the additional texture work, sound, etc.

    The engine might come out of the box to run at these level, but the asset work still requires that much more work to complete.

    I'm seeing this all over the place in the (unreal) mod community. People don't want small mods anymore, they want commercial quality games. The problem is - making that quality gets more time consuming, requires more organization, etc. Few mod teams have the steam and those that do can rarely get out innovative work (which IMO, is the job of mods) ... or they're small pro shops looking to make a name for themselves.

    I'm actually looking to make use of the 2D aspects of Unreal to lower asset costs.

    But back on topic - the high end nature of the graphics keep increasing the production costs, which eventually are going to have to increase product cost.
    • Sooner or later all these high end engines are going to raise the cost of games.

      They already have raised the cost, sort of... Games cost what they did 10 years ago but go to a much larger audience. If the games weren't so large, volume discounting (which can be wery powerful for software!) would have pushed the price down to $30 or $20... below that and I think you'd have perception problems. (People instinctively distrust something that is "too cheap", because they are usually right.)

      Proof: A new quali
    • Its worse than what you think. The higher production costs makes it much harder for small groups to write games. This means many of the small companies which would truely innovate will never come to market. In the long term this will really hurt the games industry. Hell, looking at the games put out in the past 2 years, innovation is already dead.
  • Sometimes graphical advancements can actually augment gameplay in certain situations. Take Splinter Cell for example. You may or may not like the title all that much, but the gameplay is greatly improved upon by the fact that the graphical engine includes shadows that you can hide in. Without the accurate visual representation, you'd have to rely on a stealth meter which is archaic in comparison.

    Splinter Cell is one of the titles out there where better graphics pushed better gameplay. I'm hoping that Doo
    • Not necessarily. You could just paint in the shadows into the background and when a character stands in the shadow you just use a darker palette to render the sprite, signalling to the player that you are now hidden. The advance in graphics technology just makes the effect better-looking.
      • You just offered proof of my point. There was a time when console games offered no more than 16 colors. How would you propose to create shadows with one miniscule pallette? How could quake have been possible without enough computing horsepower to create a 3D environment? Graphics(or I should say hardware) have improved and because graphics have improved, gameplay has also been able to improve.

        I guess you could keep arguing against me, but that's only because you refuse to even consider my point. Honestly
  • > "Overfocus on hyper-realistic graphics and modeling, while not a bad idea in a general sort of way, can also impede quality of gameplay."

    Gamers know this already; a game is not graphics alone. Without good gameplay to back it up, a good-looking game will still do rather poorly. And a game with relatively dated graphics can still do quite well with exceptional gameplay.

    -lw
    • And unfortunately, the Xbox is usually the system that proves this example time and time again. take Brute Force, for example. Beautiful game, but it's just not fun. The same could be said for Blinx, Munch's Oddesy, Blood Wake, MechAssault, etc.

      On the other end of the spectrim, look at Rock 'n Roll Racing for the SNES. That game, to this day, still earns my appreciation. I have yet to find a person that didn't like it, in fact.

      • I wouldn't say it proves time and time again. This had been the case when the Xbox was trying to establish itself as a major player, which was when many of those projects were initiated. Microsofts model has moved towards quality and Microsoft understands that both great grpahics and great gameplay will sell systems. Great graphics in Xbox games are necessary as the Xbox demographic demands it.

  • in the old days, sonny... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We used to play game for their abstractedness! Games would take us to weird and wonderful places that couldn't ever exist in reality! You young 'uns today have no imagination! Everything has to be real. Well dag nabbit, real is boring!!

    Now fetch me my cane.
    • If I had mod points, I would mod this up.

      I also played games as a child because they transported me to amazing and otherwise impossible worlds. I used to love exploring the worlds of Sierra's 2D Adventure games, or blowing up incredibly blocky and ugly looking tie-fighters in X-Wing.

      The primitive graphics of those games are not the virture; having bad graphics does not make a game "cool" or "old school". The issue was, the developers concentrated on tapping into my imagination, not blitzkrieging my

  • Complex environment make us loose the "action" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fluor2 ( 242824 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @10:20AM (#9707619)
    I play Half-Life Counter-Strike. Every map in the game consist of crates/boxes which are square-shaped. These are the few places where people can hide.

    Now, the new game-engines out there seem to sport many new elements like trees, vehicles, grass, bush, etc. Which by the way makes us have to look really carefully for an enemy when we play. This really removes the "action aspect" of the game.

    Mind you that when people make small arenas in real-life games, they often remove these complex things that slow down the gameplay.

  • Game selling graphics (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Games based on high quality graphics isn't going anywhere soon. Action movies still pull in viewers no matter how crappy the plot/acting is. I'll admit that I highly doubt that any game based on eye candy alone will ever be the number one selling game, much like that of the video industry I doubt an action movie will ever be the number 1 grossing movie.

    They are niche markets so to speak and will always draw people. If you look at the video industry the number 1 grossing movie of all time is Titantic, an

  • The real problem is.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by arieswind ( 789699 ) * on Thursday July 15, 2004 @10:29AM (#9707724) Homepage
    Well.. the real problem I see is that companies are adding realistic graphics without the mandatory elements that go along with them i.e. if you are going to render each finger individually, you better make them move like real fingers. If you are going to make the characters mouths move when they talk, you better make damn sure that the speech lines up with their motuhs, or else it will stick out like a big fking X painted across your face..

    I've seen plenty of games that only used 2d sprites, cel shaded or low poly(relative) 3d graphics that had more expressive and deep characters than some if not many of todays games with lifelike chars

  • Real-time Lighting is a breakthrough (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ILL Clinton ( 734169 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @10:39AM (#9707826) Homepage Journal
    I agree with the idea that higher resolution and realism may not contribute to good game-play without good game design.

    That said, as someone who uses game technology for uses other than playing games (ie machinima,) I can say that the real-time lighting effects in Doom 3 are a huge change, and a sort of breakthrough in terms of what's possible.

    When making Machinima, we are able to come very close to the techniques of real film-making. But the lighting has always been a limitation. Film-making is all about light. So the fact that we can now position lights in-game in real-time and create shadows, means we are that much closer to real film-making techniques.

    Of course, if the past is any indication, we won't actually start to use Doom 3 for Machinima until Doom 4 is released. ; )

    The ILL Clan - Machinima Pioneers [illclan.com]

    • is this why DX:IW focused so much on lighting, despite the fact that it added little to game play and in fact made most machines running it chug like 386's? if so, i wish they'd focus on the game and less on neat-o lighting special effects. Sure, they're nice, but fucking useless if i can't accomplish the main point of the program at a reasonable framerate. [And no, my machine isn't crap; Athlon 2700+, 1gb pc2700 ddr sdram, nvidia gforce4 ti4200 64mb, asus a7n8 motherboard.. should be able to run anything l

  • Faces (Score:3, Informative)

    by wickedj ( 652189 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @10:39AM (#9707827) Homepage
    I've been thinking about this for quite some time and I realize that I'm more comfortable around cartoon and animated graphics than I am with pseudo realistic graphics. I've seen some movies and games where they try to make the face of a character as realistic as possible. However, it just feels eery to me. The closer they get to reality the more eery it feels. There is always something that just doesn't fit. Lips don't move properly, the skin is too shiny, the face too perfect, or the features too symmetrical.

    In fact, I just looked on Google to see if anyone else noticed this and found this article [msn.com].
  • Having worked for a gaming company and in the game industry for over ten years, gameplay and graphics go hand in hand. Yes, good graphics will improve sales but it will not make the game. I think most of us are smart enough to know that while eye candy is dandy, being real is the deal. But there is a lot more to developing a decent product.

    There are four important factors in a games success:
    1: open sourced/editable for improvements and new version (i.e. battlefield1942 morphing into desertcombat or starwars's galactic conquest, nethack)
    2: gameplay that can extend beyond the original campaign(dynamic campaigns, add-ons)
    3: good customer interaction and support for the game community (ie.combat mission, halflife, quake)
    4: product that does something new or is not scared of rattling the conservative right (Grand Theft Auto)    .

    The fourth will garner attention as free marketing. Rockstar used it for GTA:Vice and it worked brilliant.
    Put those into a game, you've got a home run every time.
    • There are many games that fall outside of the four factors.
      Myst, Far Cry, Baldur's Gate, Splinter Cell. They don't have customization, open source, or anything breakthrough like you list; They just executed an existing genre really well.
      Myst was just an adventure puzzle game, with [at the time] mindblowing graphics, and really well executed puzzles.
      Far Cry is just an FPS with mindblowing graphics and really good physics. The story, the multiplayer, even the gameplay is pretty good, nothing terribly speci
  • Anyone else amused by comments posted by people whom quite obviously aren't gamers? "Things were so much better back in the halcyon days, yadda yadda". They all bring up games that are 7-8 years old and have zero bearing on what gamers are currently playing. It's absolute nonsense. I'm in my 30's, have been a gamer all my life, and remember quite well the games of the late 70's and onward. Guess what? Most of them don't hold up anymore compared to modern games. The usual Nethack zealots really get me

    • They all bring up games that are 7-8 years old and have zero bearing on what gamers are currently playing. It's absolute nonsense. I'm in my 30's, have been a gamer all my life, and remember quite well the games of the late 70's and onward. Guess what? Most of them don't hold up anymore compared to modern games

      While it is true that most classic games don't hold a candle to modern games, it is usually based on the fact that 90% of all games are unaldurated crap. As long as a game is of high enough quality

      • From my understanding, there are a couple of major roguelikes under development, either at their base version or their source ports. Even so, I still see activity on the newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.development where a version update for a roguelike game appears (among discussion for creating a roguelike.), at a rate that indicates that roguelike development is in progress. While there has been a shift in some games from Ascii to bitmaps, these Roguelikes are still being developed. And I'm sure those home

        • And I'm sure those homebrew monstrosities will shake the gaming world...

          Out of all of the games released, there have only been a select few that shook the gaming world - regardless of which genre that are released in. And as you know, those types of games are hyped up through advertisments and claims of revolutionary gameplay.

          A small band of nerds updating Telengard in their free time does not a resurgence of a gaming genre make.

          In case you haven't noticed, there is a signficant chunk of gamers that

  • Think back over the games that really immersed you... was it the graphics or the aural environment?

    For me, sound makes a huge, *huge* difference to immersion. The tension of hearing an unknown bump in the night, the thrum of big machinery, the startling screech of something nearby, a ricochet shot that just missed my head... these add a lot more to my game experience than a more-accurately rendered face viewed from 100 feet away...
    • I couldn't agree more, but then I'm biased coz I'm a sound-guy. One of the things about Return To Castle Wolfenstein (apart from the nice rocky rock-textures and great doomy Ramms+ein-like feel) was the great score and SFX. The downside of all this sonic realism is that when playing said game at 3AM on headphones in the dark, on the crypt level, surrounded by the undead, a bag of books falls off the bed behind me, causing me to nearly blast a hole clean through the seat of my chair.

      In the classic Dungeon M
  • I personally prefer the texture oriented detail found in DOA2 VS the higher polygonal detail found in DOA3. Sure, they both look great, but those characters are not meant to look, and more Anime'ish. Making full 3D representations kind of break the feel.
  • As graphics become more advanced, you run into a problem a Japanese researcher discovered called the Uncanny Valley [arclight.net] which I believe has been mentioned here before. Basically, there is a zone right before true biomechanical and visual accuracy where the viewer's affinity plummets. Thus the success with anthropomorphic game characters--Jak, Sonic, Conker, et al--and the intentionally lowered parallelism in GTA3, Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil...et al. Thus contriubting to the underwhelming sales of De
  • One day I woke up and realized that I didn't need the latest technology. I realized that there really is life behind the leading edge. A good game from 5 years ago is as good as a good game from today, except the game from 5 years ago costs $4.99 or less instead of $49.99 and plays on a used PC that costs $200 instead of $2000. And if the game made today really is that good...then in 5 years I'll be buying it for $4.99 to play on my $200 system. And I'll have no trouble waiting those 5 years because I'm now
  • story driven games with immersive plotlines and characters fare better with me than fancy graphics. I think players miss the meat and potatoes and are getting sick on the icing.

  • From the article (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @02:55PM (#9710570)
    "Even the famously tech-fetishist id Software has brought on a professional writer for the development of DOOM 3. As awesome as technologies like shading and Havok may be, they in and of themselves are not games."

    I guess we have to do with someone very unimaginative, who is discarding lighting/gravity as a non-gameplay item.

    Bontago (www.bontago.com) proves for once that gravity can be used for the gameplay, and not gimmicky-like as in , for example, Mac Payne 2.

    For the lighting : I see plenty of options, since it's the cornerstone of most 3dengines (the shadows give something 'real ' depth) , ifnot our real lifes.

    I can see how someone can make a stand that only graphics, or only a cool gravity engine, can't make a good game on itself : But there are plenty of examples that are/will be.

  • It's similar to the problem I have with cel-shaded games, especially the ridiculously cutesy Wind Waker. I can handle stuff like that with hand-drawn 2D, because even the best artist can't make a 2D drawing compare very well to real life; inaccuracies are expected. But convert a cel to 3D and the deficiencies of the style become blindingly apparent.

    What's my point? I guess it's the fact that ultra-realism isn't the only way that high-tech graphics can become jarring to the eye.

    Rob
    • Look at Ghost int eh shell innocence. It can work. The uncanny valley describes soemthing else. Once somethign become too realistic but just short like 10-15% off it look unnatural and disturbing. But 2d graphics are much mroe then 10-15% off.
      • Once somethign become too realistic but just short like 10-15% off it look unnatural and disturbing. But 2d graphics are much mroe then 10-15% off.

        That's my point. 2D graphics are way off, so they don't look as weird as cel-shaded 3D.

        Rob
        • Thats my point about the uncanny valley. Since their way off, it has nothign to do with the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is only when it's so close but just a bit off. 2d on 3d works just fine. See Vietiful jo, or Xenogears, or FF tactics.

  • Mutilple Uncanny Valleys (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mfterman ( 2719 ) on Thursday July 15, 2004 @08:39PM (#9713069)
    In my opinion, there are multiple uncanny valleys that gasmes can fall into. Graphics is only one of them and the most obvious of them. The other two things that have uncanny valleys are AI and physics.

    One of the problems that people are having now is the ability to make characters in the game behave in a realistic fashion. In older games, you had things that behaved in such an artificial manner that it didn't jar our expectations. Now that we're trying to make games more realistic, creating characters that act like humans, we're going to find the ways they fall short of actual humans rather jarring, for the same reason that we find the zombies of modern games disturbing. We're wired to react to people socially. We can deal with artificial things easily enough, but someone that acts like a weird human will push mental buttons that clearly artificial things won't.

    Likewise with physics. I think one of the reason a lot of very old games do very well in replayability is that they had totally unrealistic physics. Of course they had totally unrealistic worlds so we weren't jarred by the fact that things did not obey the normal laws of physics. Why did the things in Centipede or an early platformer act the way they did? That's just the way the world worked, and that was that.

    Now we're trying to create games with realistic looking worlds. And people wonder why they can't pick up a rock and break open a window. Or move aside crates blocking a hallway. Games are getting more real, and that means we're sliding into the Uncanny Valley again as our expectations rise up to demand realism and what we are wired to expect.

    Eventually things will get better, as we get good at creating synthetic digital actors who can express a range of emotions, and artificial personality programs that process player-NPC interaction and generate appropriate NPC reactions, and we have libraries that automatically model the physics and behavior of realistic objects.

    Incidentally, even as the polygon count goes up, I don't expect the artistic cost to go up proportionally. I do expect the artistic tools to get better over time. An artist who wants a forest scene will just tell the computer to create a forest and he'll be able to tweak parameters and make a few manual adjustments over time. Just because an object has a zillion polygons doesn't mean an artist has to specify each one by hand. I do expect the demands on artists to level off.
  • The Movies in particular comes to mind, without the ability to render realistic-looking actors, the idea won't work. Of course it remains to be seen if it will work since the game isn't out yet.
  • ... suck in the gameplay department. I also don't know anyone that buys games for their graphics alone. Both play their part in staying with the status quo. The graphics should be as good as the hardware is capable and everyone accepts that. I don't think anyone is suggesting a return to 8-bit nintendo graphics, but 2D 16-bit style games could still hold up on modern hardware at higher resolutions if the art was updated with 'quasi' 3d / 2D artwork.

    The Gameboy advance while not being amazing in the grap

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