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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."
Graphics might be good to look at but if there's no gameplay what's the point of putting down $50? If it's no fun, no matter how life like it looks I'm not going to spend my hard earned money on it.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
Parent article is definitely true.
Compare the "legs," or longevity, of games like Angband and Nethack to those of Quake and the Diablo games. No contest.
This is because there are different production values: the roguelike games have a lasting cerebral appeal, while games that are built on eye candy concentrate elsewhere. This may have to do with the business models of modern game companies.
Take id software for instance. For gameplay internals, it doesn't get much simpler than id games. Doom was actually a playable game from the map screen if you turned on display of objects, and doing this shows how moronically simple Doom and Quake are. The appeal of the games, however, came from the presentation of the data, and the atmosphere produced by the amazing, moody artwork.
Mid-end graphics are comparatively simple to do, and using OpenGL actually makes it simpler, once you get over a certain learning curve. The models are the sticking point: you're not going to be doing amazing mo-capped human character models, but there's quite a database of MDL format models already out there, and there are other types of games, such as modern military RTS, that don't really require extremely detailed models-- a good example is the amazing TA, a game that has excellent longevity despite rather dated graphics.
TA is a game where the graphics are just good enough. At the time, there had to be a lot of trickery to render that many units at once, and the trickery in the TA engine involved giving the graphics a stylization that is still quite capable of bringing its gritty, desolate image home. TA is a sterling example of turning flaws into advantages.
Linux games should focus on extensibility, replay value, using randomness (cf. Roguelikes), and multiplayer, which gives games far more gameplay depth than the engine would seem to warrant (cf. Quake, Diablo II).
We could have a hundred original, interesting games on Linux. Instead we have 45,000 versions of Freecell and Tetris. In fact, Linux is the indisputed king of these types of games, because of the minimal thought required in their creation.
One idea for curing this might be to leverage the existing codebases of games like Angband and grafting semi-modern rendering engines onto them. Even turnbased play is wonderful with these games, and I think realtime play a la Diablo might not be very difficult to achieve.
One thing we DON'T need is more Tetris and Tuxracer clones.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Amen to that. The astonishing graphics on today's games are quit fantastic, but I find myself increasingly disturbed at how shallow the plot lines and characters are of many modern games. Final Fantasy X is a good example. I loved the final fantasy games because of the complexity and the personal connection with the story line and characters. When I played X I was bored to death because I was just being strung along from one battle to the next and/or graphic cinematic. They had spent so much time creating the graphics that they could not devote programming time to creating a more interactive gamespace. Unless developers can budget both programming and graphics they need to stick to programming so that we have games that are still fun to play and get involved in.
Scott McCloud discusses this at length in Understanding Comics. As a rendering of a person becomes more stylized and abstract, the viewer begins to fill in details on their own. Not only can our minds fill in more details than an artist can draw, but the content we fill the drawing with is our own, which makes the character more accessible.
A similar effect occurs with The Sims. Their reductionist design and behavior allows users to ascribe all sorts of baroque narratives to their simple actions.
Well.. the real problem I see is that companies are adding realistic graphics without the mandatory elements that go along with them i.e. if you are going to render each finger individually, you better make them move like real fingers. If you are going to make the characters mouths move when they talk, you better make damn sure that the speech lines up with their motuhs, or else it will stick out like a big fking X painted across your face..
I've seen plenty of games that only used 2d sprites, cel shaded or low poly(relative) 3d graphics that had more expressive and deep characters than some if not many of todays games with lifelike chars
That said, as someone who uses game technology for uses other than playing games (ie machinima,) I can say that the real-time lighting effects in Doom 3 are a huge change, and a sort of breakthrough in terms of what's possible.
When making Machinima, we are able to come very close to the techniques of real film-making. But the lighting has always been a limitation. Film-making is all about light. So the fact that we can now position lights in-game in real-time and create shadows, means we are that much closer to real film-making techniques.
Of course, if the past is any indication, we won't actually start to use Doom 3 for Machinima until Doom 4 is released. ; )
The ILL Clan - Machinima Pioneers
Stunts looked pretty damned good, considering it actually had polygonal graphics going on in 1990. I don't thing there were many others doing even that at the time. 1980 gave us... Battlezone? Unfortunately I was only 6 when they ended. Either way Stunt Race FX came out for the Super Nintendo in 1994, sporting far worse graphics with the SuperFX chip. Still, good taste. Ah, those custom track memories vs Skid Vicious...
I guess we have to do with someone very unimaginative, who is discarding lighting/gravity as a non-gameplay item.
Bontago (www.bontago.com) proves for once that gravity can be used for the gameplay, and not gimmicky-like as in , for example, Mac Payne 2.
For the lighting : I see plenty of options, since it's the cornerstone of most 3dengines (the shadows give something 'real ' depth) , ifnot our real lifes.
I can see how someone can make a stand that only graphics, or only a cool gravity engine, can't make a good game on itself : But there are plenty of examples that are/will be.