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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"?
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.
I think it's because the graphic card developers hit a previously untapped sweet spot with "value" hardware that's not necessarly $20 bargin bin kind of stuff, but not the greatest $600 card. So now that they've hit that they don't wanna risk losing it by pushing the higher end hardware. Game developers are affected by that sweet spot as well, as they don't want to push their games out of reach of that vast "sweet spot" market.
Back when all of this stuff wasn't nearly as mainstream as it is today, the geeky masses would be willing to spend the money necessary to allow the envelope to be pushed. When the vast majority of your market is geeks that have the lastest and greatest hardware, then the game developers feel comfortable creating games that require the latest and greatest hardware. On the otherhand, when the vast majority of your market has is Joe Sixpack, who isn't likely to know what a graphics card is, let alone purchase a better one if required -- game developers aren't going to feel comfortable requiring that high end hardware.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
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.
Good riddance, i'm sick of the plethora of shitty games that survive solely because they have 'good graphics.'
Such as...?
There are probably far more crap games with crap graphics than there are crap games with great graphics.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
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.
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?
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.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
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)
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.
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.
All your base are belong to Google.
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
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