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"?

Comments

Re:but then they'd have to rely on content/gamepla

[El_Muerte_TDS]

people want as much eyecandy as possible before the game ships.
but they want gameplay when they bought the game.

Good Riddance

[tid242]

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

All about the hook

[GTarrant]

I remember getting my first 3D card and going from playing, say, Quake, to playing GLQuake, and practically falling off my chair with how GL looked compared to software.

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

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

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

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

Re:All about the hook

[neostorm]

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

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

Gah, I hope so...

[Gleng]

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.

Re:Funny that this should be posted tonight

[bugbread]

No, you aren't the only one on the planet. However, a lot of people like it too.

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

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

And if you haven't played Halo multiplayer, or you've only played on PC, you missed all the fun bits, so I wouldn't be surprised if you find it un-fun as well. The XBox multiplayer part is where it really shined.

Photo-realism

[limekiller4]

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.

One More Graphics Advance

[Babbster]

There's one more graphics advance that will stun people and that's when material/environmental science is applied to every set of polygons in a game. For example, not only will you see a newspaper blowing along the post-apocalyptic street you're walking down in the latest FPS, but the newspaper will realistically alter in shape according to how the wind blows and how it hits the ground or other objects. Instead of blowing up a brick wall, breaking it into predetermined bits; the brick wall will break apart differently - dictated by realistic physics - depending on what was used to blow it up, the size of the bricks used in construction and the mortar holding it together.

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

So many times I've been wrong...

[BTWR]

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...

spatial immersion is more key

[ghostlibrary]

"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.

Uncanny Chasm

[Thedalek]

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.

The answer is a resounding NO.

[__aailob1448]

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.