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Videogame Graphic Advances - Not What They Used To Be?
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"?
Yes
(Score:0, Interesting)
No
which is very very hard for most game companies.
people want as much eyecandy as possible before the game ships.
but they want gameplay when they bought the game.
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.
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
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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.
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 can come up with.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
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.
Still seems perfectly ok to me.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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...
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
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.
My
Limekiller
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.
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.
:) (ps to BZFlaggers - GMs & Lasers are for pussies! PUUUUSSSSEEEEEES. (Yes, I mean *YOU*!))
Also third-person games blow away FPSs, IMO. Except for BZFlag - that game rawks!
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.
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...
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 a game (genre, gameplay/multiplay, reviews)
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.
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'white, you fanboys). read few hundred practical ai papers and you'll see what i mean. how about trying to win the trophy in game ai, instead of graphics?
"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.
A.
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 more complex to play then doom. It was however a single player game so really they can't be compared.
As for outdated graphics. If you read the text files on the cd you will read that it has support for 3d headsets. So whenever these things actually appear in shops, System Shock will be THE game again :)
Disclaimer it is of course entirely possible that the poster had intended it as a joke. On slashdot you just never know for certain and System Shock is to nice a game to go unmentioned.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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, but who would want to play slower...
The other thing that keeps us with UT2k3 is our modding efforts. When I can rip open the code for a weapon and change it, I'm much more likely to keep playing that game. The ability to mod a game is my primary motivation for playing it. Our weapons are pretty well balanced now, which they weren't in the orig game, we have the matrix moves, (coded inhouse) carry the flag, (you have to pick up your flag and bring it back home when it's dropped) as well as a host of other fun mods. Without all those additions, we wouldn't be playing the game still.
Graphics are nice, but when I can make a game *my* game, I'll play it a lot longer than any other.
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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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In my mind no company in the history of gaming pushed graphics advances more than Origin. Starting with the original Wing Commander, which was simply dazzling, they consistently put out games that made me salivate thinking how pretty they would be.
I'm still going back and playing my old games on occasion. Space Quest, King's Quest, Ultrabots, Quest for Glory...
Hell, AGD Interactive (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. (:
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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...
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.
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I think you picked a bad example with Super Mario Brothers 3 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.
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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.
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't talk about much newer FPS games since I don't consider the what they add to be worth the hardware it would cost me to play them.
Similarly I would hate increased realism graphics being applied to some of my favorite gaming pass times. Continuum is a great 2d multiplayer ship combat game and increased realism in the graphics department (e.g. 3D) would just hurt it. Now better graphics as part of new weapons, ships, translucent radar that only shows when you look at it, and stuff like that would be most welcome. There isn't a peak for these things either, since they are gameplay and game system intertwined like all important graphics decisions are. I hate all these graphics MMO RPGs out there (tend to be filled with repetitive tasks and non role players...) compared to MUDs, but when my favorite mud added an overland map I rather liked it since it improved gameplay.
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.
.5 sec to figure out if a golf game is real). Pixels and refresh rates for example have passed the human ability to precieve so if you have a high res digital photograph on a screen problems aren't readily apparent. Now we just need to do that with the 10 million other aspects which seperate Reality from realitytm.
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 actors). In other words Immersion is in the eye of the audience.
2.Experience leads to more immersion. When I started playing GLQuake it didn't make an ounce of diffrence, I couldn't really tell which I was playing and I still can't to this day. Of course I had logged more hours in Q1 DM than my parent's thought physically possible. My point is that you grow accustomed to a certain graphical level and it colours your opinion, gamers probably aren't the best people to ask about the state of graphics in games, non gamers are!
3. "God of Gaming" mis-quote:"What we'd really like to do is calculate each ion's trajectory and reflection, eventually calculating how it would enter the gamer's iris. I mean anything else is just a hack, some hacks are better than others. When I look at something I can still ask how they did that. We're getting better though." (feel free to quote the actual carmack interview). But what we have is the truth about graphics, we are no where near the point where the people who design 3D environments can't figure out what someone else did, we might look at water and say how realistic it looks, Carmack might see some of the equations they used. His quote puts into perspective how far from reality we are, and that's just lighting! HL2 promises to have large full objects moving with a realistic set of physical perameters but really we are nowhere near true realism where all physics external and internal are based upon the same rules. In reality a door opens because force is applied and the metal in the hinges limits the range of motion, in a game the door is a "door entity" with a fixed range of motion. As long as the seperation is there we are nowhere near a realistic physics system.
4. A message of hope: fortunatly we don't need to be anywhere near true realism, all we need to do is fool people. We are getting near the point where people can find themselves believing when they don't want to (ex:LOTR,
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 not as impressive as the difference between NES and SNES, or when the PSX came out and made 3D graphics popular).
Unless the PS3, X-Box Next and N5 (or whatever they end up being called) can do something really impressive beyond graphical ability, then I really don't see much point.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
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 thing, our precious relics like Resident Evil, Half Life, Even SPACE INVADERS for crying out loud. In fact, I still have loads of fun loading up Super Mario for the NES. That is still one of the top 5 most fun games i've ever played, it's just mindless fun without any stupid crap thrown in. You're Mario and you gotta jump stomp and bash your way through each level till you rescue the Princess. Simple, fun, and can keep you at it for hours on end.
Now we're getting games like SWG, Unreal II, Max Payne 2, Contract Jack, Deus Ex: IW.
Some of these have decent gameplay, and some do not. They are all however, extremely short except for the MMORPG I listed (SWG) which is kind of pretty but leaves you with pretty much nothing to do but chat and kill things without motivation. No real content, no reason to play, nothing that makes you want to go "Hey, I really want to go out and do this, and that, and this, because of this and that!!!".
I didn't even mention the bugs either, most games that come out today require 4 or 5 patches before you can even think about playing them as they were meant to be played. Once they're all patched though you find that the game is only 8 hours long anyway, and you wonder where your $50 went.
5 years ago $50 spent on many of the games that were available provided you with YEARS of replay value, and I mean REAL replay value. Now.. you blow $50 on a game and you ask yourself "what the hell happened?" after you beat it, because you just want to take the game back like it was a rental or something.
Perhaps things will get better. If not, I know I can always bury myself the old glory games of years past.
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Is it me, or do you think the wide spread uptake of using game engines has slowed the overall pace of graphics development - if only from a technical stand point?
"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"?"
No. I am not a PC games person. I grew up on console games and pretty much relegate my playing of games to consoles. (only playing civilization and alpha centauri on a mac).
But looking back over the evolution of games in general the refinements have been amazing. I was floored by the colors and playability when I played Rygar on my NES after having had a 2600 before. It was a quantum leap.
The Sega Genesis which I had next wasn't as much of a leap as a refinement of the kind of games the NES had - more colors, better scrolling, etc. But the games and how they were played remained basically the same - side scrollers or sky looking down shooters.
Skip to the N64 - which I got only for the new Zelda - and that again was a quantum leap in how games were played. First person ala Doom and Wolfenstein. 3D game play is totally different from what was available on the NES and Genesis. 8 and 16 bit pale compare to 64 bit.
The gamecube - again only bought for Zelda and Metroid - is again a refinement. The games are VERY refined but it is only an evolution over what was available prior.
I can only imagine what the next generation of game console will bring but I think we are in for a quantum leap type movement some time soon. What that will be, I don't know.
But what I am saying is that graphics are very important to a game - yes a game with great graphics AND story AND playability is the best. But the story of a game includes some many things and the graphics now are an important part of that.
It seems that the cinematics between the playable parts of games always represented the best of what a system could offer until new systems sort of made those cinematics the games of the newer systems and the newer systems had even better cinematics. And that will continue.
But the thought processes of playing Zelda Windwaker as compared to the NES zeldas are completely different. But, even still, the original is STILL fun.
In the end, being fun is what a game is about no matter how you have to "think" about playing it. And graphical capabilities of new systems will only make the new fun games fun in a new and different way.
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
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Or maybe online content is the next "big thing" and we won't see the maturing of the current medium. Who knows.
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.
Does anyone remember the FIRST Zork games. They were text my friends, uh-huh. And if I was to be realistic I would have to say that I spent months playing it. Same with Eye of the beholder (on my 486 with 4 MB ram) or the original CIV. Gameplay was EVERYTHING. I bought Unreal the awakening a while ago and found that after my initial goggling at the graphics I had finished it in a week. Shame really. Scares me to think that my video card has more ram and is faster than 80% of the computers I have ever owned.
Furthermore, this circulating claim that games are about fun *period* is something I'd like to dispel. Games have more potential as an art-form than either novels or movies. The PSX game Koudelka, for instance, blew me away from a literary-analysis perspective (and I did a Minor in English in undergrad so I'm not illiterate). It, however, isn't a terribly "fun" game per se. Similarly Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, and G is for Gumshoe are more fun to read than Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, and Villette. Why do we read the latter? Depth. In the case of Villette, which I am currently reading, I can say that I'm just finding it fascinating on an intellectual level. ...To use a less obscure example, can you look me straight in the eye and say you found The Fellowship of the Rings more fun to read than Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone? I'd be shocked if you could. So is Harry Potter better than Lord of the Rings? (Actually...I'd be willing to argue that, but I'm one of those people who think LotR characters to have less depth than HP characters so I'm not arguing entirely from the "fun" perspective).
Er...yeah summing up: innovation matters (otherwise Microsoft could release 16 versions of Halo with different levels and we'd buy all 16) and "fun" isn't the sole goal of art forms (otherwise Paradise Lost would have been burned as firewood centuries ago).
I would say we're not even close to the "tiny return for huge effort" point. Game designers do a fantastic job of hiding our current limitations, though-- we just never see the stuff our systems can't handle. When was the last time you saw a forest scene that looked like a real forest? No, not a meadow with a handful of trees that's mostly just flat grass-- a *forest*, with hundreds of thousands of plants in view anywhere you turn.
We need approximately a gajillion more polygons before we've got good representations of natural stuff. Buildings and open fields (deserts, etc...) look good now, but they're not the whole world. Heck, most systems couldn't handle a representation of the handful of (old, large) trees in my yard that didn't cop out on the branches and leaves.
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 that this game is worth continueing because of its plot if the graphics are just the same as competing game? Then you have the console producers to placate. They want the fanciest graphic games to show off their console.
I've wandered...sorry.
On another note the same problem that will happen to graphics happens to everything else. Take civil rights. The closer you get to total equality the less people you'll have fighting to achieve it. The closer you get to perfect graphics (realistic,) the less people you'll have working on it.
There comes a point where only a few people care about that last %1....less money to work on the issue, but more money actually needed to fix the issue....
On a positive note, online (and hard drives for consoles) provide the best growth for the future.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
The shift will be less on the technology, and more on the quality of the models. Today's technology already offers gamemakers the opportunity to create life-like faces and expressions, that convey a great deal of info - for plot, storyline and character build-up.
Trivial games like Tetris and Snood have lost their graphics emphasis a long time ago.
In the world of serious games, the demand for modelers capable of delivering quality content will be insatiable, and so only the gamemakers aware of this need will release games people will find appealling.
There are a couple of waves of "graphics technology matters" still to come though - faces, skin and clothes that can be mistaken for real, and someday, fully 3D representations.
Between those waves, and after, competition between 3D engine license-holders will reduce the cost to create solid, concept-heavy, story-heavy games - resulting in many, many games in the field, most of which are trash, but a few of which hold "I'm in the movie" stories unmatched by any game in history - approaching the quality of the cream of the crop one can find in books today. Half-Life is an example of the beginning of this phenomenon. This story emphasis and general rise in quality of available storylines will attract more females to mainstream gaming.