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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
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.
At GDC 2003, Jason Rubin, head and founder of Naugthy Dog, a highly successful development studio for PS1 and PS2, delivered a speech (slides available here, audio and slides available on Gamasutra (free painless reg. req.)) on a closely related subject : improvements in graphics quality will not be sustained over the next few years, and relying on them to impress potential customers is a bad idea.
Moral : as long as gameplay, character development and story do not suck, nice graphics are of course an asset, but they're useless in case of an already shitty game...
Who needs a
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
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
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.