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Gaming Beauty Is Only Pixel Deep
Thanks to NTSC-uk for its feature discussing what the new pixel and vertex shaders mean to this generation of videogames. The piece laments: "Looking back at the past few years, games have looked incredibly similar. And this is the main reason why: they all used the same tools", before going on to explain: "The hardware previously contained logic circuits to simply perform the operations needed by Gouraud and Flat shading, but now the fully Programmable Pipeline has introduced a whole new world of graphical effects for us all, limited only by the programmers' time and creativity", referencing "the water effects used in Super Mario Sunshine, cel shading effects used in Zelda, or the rippling water effects on Dead or Alive 3."
That's like saying "because power tools are now popular, all buildings look the same". The reason why games are looking similar is that developers are sharing some of the more common code (as they should do). It's similar to when games first became color and all of them looked like blotchy squares. Over time the graphics start to vary. Give them time.
Better graphics and better physics don't make a game great. Better design does.
While developers continue to fail understand this simple fact, the games market will be shrinking .
More imagination, less fireworks.
and WarCraft 3 has some amazing graphics. Or did you mean WarCraft 2? Nonetheless, great game.
I'm an old school gamer... but I also want the video game industry to keep rising. Even though I still play King of Fighters 96 on my Neo Geo, I would still play a new nice looking game. Although it's not ALL about graphics, I don't think that it would benefit the gaming industry to use choppy graphics in new games. After all, it's the medias and new-age gamers that promote the games the most... and what feature do they all seem to crack down on more than anything else? Yep. Graphics. As long as the game plays great, I'll always love it, but someone else who just wants it to look better probably has their pick over me, simply because there are more people like that in this world.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Correct me if I'm missing the point (or misunderstand/abuse the term 'physics'), but surely the physics don't have to be life-like any more than the graphics do, they're still physics and improving them will improve the games.
Pong, for instance, had physics of 'if the ball hits a wall or paddle, it will bounce off'. Legend of Zelda had 'if x hits an enemy, the enemy will get hurt. If Y hits the player, the player will get hurt. If the player hits a wall, stop'. More recent games have loads - 'if there's nothing solid beneath you, start moving downwards. If you hit something solid, stop. If you stop from a fast enough speed, get hurt'. Etc.
Different gameplay experiences are not caused by games looking different. They come from different game designs.
The Gamecube doesn't have a programmable pipeline. It's got a configurable one. It still allows for some amazing graphics, which goes counter to your claim that fixed-function doesn't allow for variety.
But I always bristle at the notion that "games lately look so much the same" and "there's no originality anymore, not like back in the day".
Here's the deal: the reason why so many games look the same is because for every innovative game you have 20 or so derivative titles that want to cash in on the popularity of the original. Though we like to fondly look back to the early days of video games and think that they were so original, the truth is that the same problem existed back then as well. I recently got one of those 200-in-1 NES emulators for the GBA, and let me tell you that the 20-to-1 ratio of crap to innovation still applies.
The author of this article makes another mistake: thinking that games will stop looking like each other with the advent of pixel shaders. Of course this is rediculous. I do believe that technology can enable new aspects of gameplay, but to think that pixel shaders are going to make people more creative is just plain wrong.
I understand 3D graphics as well as you do, and half of the things you pick holes in there strike me as perfectly acceptable explanations, if slightly over-simplified. Just because you can show off doesn't mean you should.