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