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Videogame Graphic Advances - Not That Important?
Thanks to the IGDA for its 'Culture Clash' column discussing the recent advances in graphics quality for games, and why increased detail isn't always a good thing. The author, referencing a previously Slashdot-covered article about "unsettlingly funereal" hi-poly face models in games, points out: "Dependence on increasingly real visuals alone to generate emotion will inevitably hit a wall: at some point game graphics will look as good as real life. Developers have an arsenal of emotioneering tools at hand; to limit themselves to just one, however prominent, would be ill-advised", before further warning: "Overfocus on hyper-realistic graphics and modeling, while not a bad idea in a general sort of way, can also impede quality of gameplay."
Dependence on increasingly real visuals alone to generate emotion
Just look at South Park, for example.
The characters are full of emotion expression, even if the graphics are ridiculously simple.
The Graphics vs. Gameplay issue comes up on Slashdot a lot. The more vocal group (majority? dunno) seems to think that the gameplay is suffering, because the graphics are getting more attention.
My response to that is....bullshit. Games now have bigger budgets- meaning more people. They take longer to create, meaning more time. Even if graphics are 90% of that time x money formula, just 10% of the total effort that goes into most modern games is far more than what was put into the entire game 15 years ago. First comparison- the Atari 2600 had the game 'Skiing' where you move a square down a white screen with occasional green blobs that you were supposed to avoid. Consoles have games like Amped and SSX. If you can't see the improved gameplay, you are blind. And of course the graphics are like 45^99th times better too.
To me, games are a little like hairstyles. I'm sure you've seen women going around with a ridiculous 20 year old hairstyle. Well, 20 years ago was probably the best time of her life, and she is going to hang on to every part of that era that she can. A lot of gamers are the same way. 'Platformers from the 80s are the best'. Okay...chances are you are over the age of 25, and most modern games intimidate you. So, it's much easier to stick with those games essentially for the rest of your life. Oh, you'll look at them, but soon dismiss them because you understand Kaboom! so much more.
Some people think that Quake was the pinnacle of first person shooters...my guess is that they were in a college dorm (or similar situation) when Quake came out. Now, if a new game comes out, they don't have 20 guys sitting around who want to play (It's called Xbox Live..check it out) and it isn't as much fun. So therefore, the new games just aren't as good. (Even if they do have things like a real vertical plane, smarter enemies, larger/more complex maps, etc etc)
Also, as games mature, they get more complex. The computing power is available to do more, and the graphics cards can handle better/more complex graphics.
Age of Empires was a good game. Age of Empires II was a great game, and Rise of Nations was even better. I still know people who are stuck on the first AOE, and aren't willing to move on. In fact, they look at Rise of Nations, and think that all of the other stuff is un-necessary... Yet, ask someone to go backwards (somebody who played Rise of Nations first) and they will feel that the previous games were absolute crap. Well, some people have a limited capacity for learning new things (games included) and they stick with what they know.
Okay...enough rambling. Thank you for listening. (and for the record, I'm 36 years old, and I hate older games because I LIKE new games with nice graphics and more complex gameplay.)
No reason to lie.
Having worked for a gaming company and in the game industry for over ten years, gameplay and graphics go hand in hand. Yes, good graphics will improve sales but it will not make the game. I think most of us are smart enough to know that while eye candy is dandy, being real is the deal. But there is a lot more to developing a decent product.
There are four important factors in a games success:
1: open sourced/editable for improvements and new version (i.e. battlefield1942 morphing into desertcombat or starwars's galactic conquest, nethack)
2: gameplay that can extend beyond the original campaign(dynamic campaigns, add-ons)
3: good customer interaction and support for the game community (ie.combat mission, halflife, quake)
4: product that does something new or is not scared of rattling the conservative right (Grand Theft Auto).
The fourth will garner attention as free marketing. Rockstar used it for GTA:Vice and it worked brilliant.
Put those into a game, you've got a home run every time.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Wow, I was going to reply with something similar to what you wrote. But you said it better than I would have anyway.
I wish people could remove the nostalgia glasses and really compare the games. I'm sorry, but just because people play nethack doesn't prove that crappy graphics mean better gameplay. I don't see why the author is complaining. Let's get graphics as real as possible until it hits the "wall" of being absolutely realistic (and I really doubt it will be as quick as they think). Now that we hit that wall, will graphics never change again? Will game play suddenly improve? Of course not. People will take graphics in new UNrealistic directions. Good games will have good gameplay, bad games won't. Why argue against improving graphics? I guess his argument is overfocusing on graphics will cause gameplay to be worse. Well, duh! If they overfocus on marketing, that will hurt gameplay. If they overfocus on their family life, that will hurt gameplay. What a dumb statement. Articles like these make me wonder how these people get hired. There is really no analysis, just a rehash of what other uninformed people like to complain about.
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In my opinion, there are multiple uncanny valleys that gasmes can fall into. Graphics is only one of them and the most obvious of them. The other two things that have uncanny valleys are AI and physics.
One of the problems that people are having now is the ability to make characters in the game behave in a realistic fashion. In older games, you had things that behaved in such an artificial manner that it didn't jar our expectations. Now that we're trying to make games more realistic, creating characters that act like humans, we're going to find the ways they fall short of actual humans rather jarring, for the same reason that we find the zombies of modern games disturbing. We're wired to react to people socially. We can deal with artificial things easily enough, but someone that acts like a weird human will push mental buttons that clearly artificial things won't.
Likewise with physics. I think one of the reason a lot of very old games do very well in replayability is that they had totally unrealistic physics. Of course they had totally unrealistic worlds so we weren't jarred by the fact that things did not obey the normal laws of physics. Why did the things in Centipede or an early platformer act the way they did? That's just the way the world worked, and that was that.
Now we're trying to create games with realistic looking worlds. And people wonder why they can't pick up a rock and break open a window. Or move aside crates blocking a hallway. Games are getting more real, and that means we're sliding into the Uncanny Valley again as our expectations rise up to demand realism and what we are wired to expect.
Eventually things will get better, as we get good at creating synthetic digital actors who can express a range of emotions, and artificial personality programs that process player-NPC interaction and generate appropriate NPC reactions, and we have libraries that automatically model the physics and behavior of realistic objects.
Incidentally, even as the polygon count goes up, I don't expect the artistic cost to go up proportionally. I do expect the artistic tools to get better over time. An artist who wants a forest scene will just tell the computer to create a forest and he'll be able to tweak parameters and make a few manual adjustments over time. Just because an object has a zillion polygons doesn't mean an artist has to specify each one by hand. I do expect the demands on artists to level off.