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Why Haven't 3D Graphics Surpassed 2D Game Art?
Thanks to GameSpot for its 'GameSpotting' article discussing the longtime game player's "soft spot" for 2D games, and why, in the author's view, "3D polygonal graphics still haven't entirely surpassed 2D game art." He explains: "In a way... I think the cinematic power of gaming almost took a step back with the transition from 2D to 3D. 2D game characters are displayed precisely how the artist chooses to display them to you. There is no extraneous frame of animation to be found. 3D game characters, meanwhile, are yours to control, so you may rotate them and view them from whichever unflattering angle you like." It's also argued: "2D games handle collision detection (or the interaction between two characters or objects) better than 3D games do... [and] I think 2D game characters still have the capacity to display more-lifelike emotions than 3D game characters do."
Here's something else I've noticed, with rare exception, 3D games to me seem easier than their 2D counterparts.
Maybe its me, but games like Metroid Prime aren't nearly as difficult as the original Metroid. It just seems to me that 2d games are easier to balance and whatnot, easier to see where the player is going to be and to "force" people into using a certain strategy.
As far as art, well, thats subjective. Creating an immersive 3d world is much more challenging than creating a painting. Screenshots don't often do games justice, you have to experience them, see how they move, in order to appreciate the art and work that went into them.
kind of like the difference between animation and live action movies/television. There are certain things you can do in animation by not making the characters concrete. A live action family guy would probably be disturbing, much as the live-action tick is. The charm in those shows was that you were dealing with somewhat abstract beings. The same thing goes for games, for certain games, I just want an abstraction of what is going on, ie 2d, I don't want something that is nitty gritty realism. For others(doom 3!) that works out really well. I think it largely depends on the game itself and what the authors are going for.
you can use 3d badly, yes.
you can use 2d very badly too.
both can be used well too.
personally do you want to go back into having 2d graphics on a 3d game? candelabras that look the same to every direction kinda suck.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
There's some truth to the statement that graphics took a step backwards with the transition from 2d to 3d. The best example of this comes from the Monkey Island games. Curse of Monkey Island looked superb... graphically it was pretty much on a par with any cartoon you'd see on TV. Escape from Monkey Island looked awful, like a 3rd rate fps from a budget development studio.
However, I think 3d has come on a long way, particularly over the last year or so. Farcry and UT2k4 are stunning to look at and I'm sure that Doom 3 is going to take things even further forward. 3d games have to contend with the fact that the bar is set quite significantly higher for them. It's harder to do photorealism than it is to do a cartoon and it's taken 3d gaming a while to catch up, although it's finally geting there.
My particular dislike is this nasty half-and-half measure we've been seeing more of recetly, with cell-shaded games. I'm thinking of Zelda: Wind Walker, Mario Kart 64, Auto Modellista etc. The screenshots on the box look great, but I find that the games look pretty hideous most of the time while you're playing, except from a few select angles.
Two dimensional pictures have been the mainstream since there were cave paintings. Sure, there has been sculpture too, but never in the sheer volume of traditional two dimensional art. It's no wonder the quality of three dimensional art in video games isn't at the level we would like it to be.
The comparison between 2D classic graphics and modern 3D graphics could be seen as synonymous with the change to impressionistic art after photography came around.
...which is one of the reasons Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is still one of my favorite games. When all the 32-bit consoles were trying to get the most cutting-edge picture possible, games like SOTN were taking the artistic/gameplay route. Without worrying about things like model animation, the developers were free to work on other aspects, such as the soundtrack, physics, color balance, etc.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
1. The biggest technical problem with 3D games is that they all have a quiality of origamai. The objects mostly look like they are made of 2D paper folded and joined edge to edge clumsily. How many times have you noticed the seams between facets? 2. Too much striving for realism. As people have pointed out, detailed attempts at human-like faces seem like corpses. Blizzard is going in a better direction with the less realistic but more fun graphics in World of Warcraft. For more info about why comic book style graphics tend to be more compelling read Understanding Comics.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
The F'ing CAMERA! Do you know how hard it is to land on a platform that you can't see because the camera decided to get a nice face shot? Or having to fire at a boss that's only visible if you stop and point right at him as if admiting defeat?
Graphics wise, 3D games are coming back around. During the PS1 era, 3D games were generally visual crap. We went right back to "that blurry squiggly dot is a save point". Don't believe me? Try playing Twisted Metal. I never could figure out what was going on in multiplayer.
The thing that developers (including you Sony) need to realize is that you don't NEED 3D to make a good game. There's no reason to make Guilty Gear, Metal Slug, or Street Fighter into 3D. They're excellent as 2D. Besides, does milk coming out of your nose when you get stabbed in the chest look as amusing when done in 3D?
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I think a large factor in the continuing popularity of side scroller-type or top-down games is that they're usually a lot simpler to play than 3D (not to mention less resource-intensive.)
Case in point: I can fire up MAME and Ghosts & Ghouls on my laptop, goof around a bit, there are about 7 controls for me to "master" (back, forth, jump, duck, up, down, fire) and my machine never grinds to halt because I don't have the latest super-duper 3D drivers installed.
This sort of goes into the whole difference between "casual gamer" and "hardcore gamer"--it is the same reason I enjoy Angband on the train, before a meeting, before going to sleep, whatever--the controls are more difficult and involved, but I can quickly start it up, futz around a bit, and close it when I don't feel like getting too mentally involved.
Whereas, when I start up Call of Duty or something similar, I sit down with a coke and my headphones for a few hours and really get into it, as I would with a movie. I wouldn't be able to sleep or concentrate on work after 5 minutes (good luck anyway keeping it that short) of playing the car chase missions in CoD.
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People wonder why folks still play Atari, old NES games, MAME with ROMS from back in the day. That's because games back then had quality game play. I'd bet if you sat a 10-12 year old down with one of those plug-n-play "retro" games they would have a blast.
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I was a huge fan of the 2-D platform games. While I do think that there were planty of bad 2-D platformers, but I really think that they had a much larger percentage of good games than most genres. When the 3-D platform games came out, it's like all game companies just abandoned the 2-D platform. The gaming companies saw 3-D platforms as an upgrade instead of seeing 3-D platforms for what they are, a different gaming style. Soon Mario, Zelda, and Sonic all left the 2-D arena (except for a couple of subpar 2-D games like Yoshi's Island and some Sonic compilations of older games). Then everyone else followed. 3-D platform games should never have been seen as a REPLACEMENT for 2-D platform games, and that makes me resent most 2-D to 3-D conversions somewhat (ESPECIALLY the 3-D bastardization of Bomberman on N64). That doesn't mean that there aren't 3-D platform games that I like (ex. Sonic Adventure series). It just means that I've got this unintentional bias towards the 3-D platform games that I can't always seem to get past.
There's a number of excellent strategy RPGs that do the same thing, as far as combining 2D sprites with 3D environments-- including Final Fantasy Tactics, La Pucelle, and Disgaea. Because the characters are typically small and superdeformed, perhaps something would be lost by making them 3D...
You need a GBA, if you don't already have one. (and I suspect you do, if you're that addicted to the 2D platformers) It's the last vestige of 2D gaming, and more than a few of the games are truly great. If you don't like playing on a tiny screen, get a cheap-o used gamecube (I think they're like $70) and a gameboy player, which plugs into the bottom of it. Then you can enjoy a steady stream of new 2D content, at least until the "scourge of 3D" moves into handheld territory in the next generation. Which, of course, will push you into cell-phone gaming-- but that's still at least a year or two away.
It's the old battle of graphics over gameplay my friends. 3D came about and everyone just assumed, 3D is better ergo 2D is crap. They abandoned a time honored format for buggy collision, low framrate and lets be honest jaddedy games.
Early 3D looked terrible. Just think. Street Fighter II(any of them) or Tekken One. Which looked better. Crash Bandicoot or Super Mario World. FF6, FF7. OK FF7 looed better, but only because of its pre rendered backgrounds.
Game companies figured that people would say, "2D graphics. That's lame!"
And guess what. They DID!!
The new wave of casual gamers snubs 2D like the plauge. They must have the latest and flashiest, regardless of the gameplay. Essentially games companies now sell the game's image. Not the game itself. Case in point. Need for Speed Underground. Ick. Lovely cars, but awful game.
The sad thing is, this will continue forever. Just look at the movie industry. Only the flashiest survive, regardless of actual merit.
May the Maths Be with you!
"2D game characters are displayed precisely how the artist chooses to display them to you."
Yes, this is true. It was easier to fill up those pixels when you had low resolution images to fill. Kind of like how it's easier to fill up a lite brite than it is to make a full color painting that will stand close up scrutinizing.
"There is no extraneous frame of animation to be found. "
None of those extraneous weird things like rotating cameras to worry about, etc.
"3D game characters, meanwhile, are yours to control, so you may rotate them and view them from whichever unflattering angle you like"
I'm not sure if he's pointing out that there's only so many polygons you can put in something, or that something doesn't look 'cool' from every angle. If it's the latter, the answer falls neatly under 'duh'. It is VERY hard to design something that looks cool from just about any angle. A lot of times, you just can't reasonably do it. It's not like living in the wonderful very limited world of 2D where you nudge the proportions around until each frame looks decent.
"It's also argued: "2D games handle collision detection (or the interaction between two characters or objects) better than 3D games do..."
Right... that would be because of the limitations of 2D, makes it MUCH simpler to detect what part of the sprite is touching what part of another sprite.
My responses are a little half assed here, so I'll put it together in a nice little summary: 2D graphics make the world simple enough that these challenges are much easier to overcome. 3D graphics need a LOT more work to accomplish the points this person brought up. Why haven't they done it yet? For the simple reason that in some cases you need more talented artists working on it (more in this context means both quantity and higher level of talent. Not a bash against 2D, but a lot more has to be considered...) and you also need hardware capable of it. It's like comparing a comic book to a live action movie.
"[and] I think 2D game characters still have the capacity to display more-lifelike emotions than 3D game characters do."
This is plainly untrue. Play Mario 64 or Wind Waker, then find a 2D game that's just as expressive. I'll concede that 2D games in a lot of cases had more character, but this is strictly a 'talent of the team' sort of thing.
"Derp de derp."
If there are breasts involved, it should be 3D
In this summary statement, the author himself states that he is comparing basic graphics to art. Nobody cares that bout this - what needs to be done is either a comparision between 2d graphics and 3D graphics, *OR* a comparison between 2D Art and 3D Art.
The only advantage of 2D movies is the fact that you can draw fancy art to as high as a detail as you want. 3D sequences, while not looking as fancy, do not require as much space as their 2D counterparts (by reusing models, textures and so on), and can be consistantly modified without having to redo many frames of work. Also, I am finding that modern games have cinametics comparable to how it should look like - it's a big jump from Dark Forces (an old Dos game that used simple cinamatics) or Jedi Ourcast (3D cinamatics don't look ultra-fancy, but get the job done.)
Not only that, but there are ways to convert 3D-graphics into pre-rendered 2D movies without problem. From there, it's quite easy to do the "editing" that the author seems to want. Not that it matters, since I have very rarely seen an issue with 3D graphics in the games I've played. The closest thing would be those "classy" screenshots posted on PlantUnreal, and those could be pulled off in a 2D game with the same complexity.
Besides, the author ignores the "rotating-corpse" issue that was visible in Doom where you could only see one side of the body after it was killed.
This is easily countered by using Wing Commander 1 compared to X-Wing. While X-Wing might not have looked fancy, you could easily tell when you were about commit suicide by ramming a Star Destroyer. In Wing Commander 1, the collision box was independant of the sprite, and you could thus accidently bump into a Ralari without knowing it (not only that, but the collision box was based around a static box rather than the visible model/sprite.)
Now the other problem with collision detection in 2D games - in the games where collision means death, you either have a per-pixel collision detection, or bounding box collision detection. In the former, you die as soon as one pixel nicks whatever you are supposed to avoid. In the latter, you can't tell if that tight squeeze is fatal or not, let alone know the tolerance for that squeeze.
Mabye this was true in the era of Quake 1, but not anymore. 3D games have evolved since then, and are much better - either through graphics or some other complaint based on the difference between 2D and 3D.
The reviewers whining about this sort of graphics is just superficial. The real quality of the game is not how it appears on screen, unless there are glearingly major problems that interfere with gameplay (either through obscuring critical information, showing information that should be hidden, or by being distracting).
When you get into the world or racing games, third person rules nearly absolute. Why? Because you have no peripheral vision in first person. You can't rotate your head to look to the inside.
If there's any genre that's benefited from 3D the most, it has to be racing games. Collision detection has improved from where 2D games ever were, there's no sprite scaling issues, jumps are really jumps, and hills are really hills. And the cars look fantastic!
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Look at Suikoden III. It does it fantastically. Instead of having super high poly count faces with textures that make them look like zombies, and eyes that stare off into space, all the people in the game have low poly count faces, and a 2D facial texture is mapped onto it, so they can quicky change the expressions on the face.
It makes a huge difference. You can see characters looking at each other. NPCs look like they're actually engaged in conversation because they make eye contact with each other. Characters look pissed on-screen and not just in the little 2D portrait that sometimes matches their expression in the lower text box.
If more people would go with this method, I think we'd have less of these types of debates.
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Another example of 3D environment with 2D play style that I think really works is the battle system in Tales of Symphonia. Everything happens in a 3d environment, but when you target an enemy you face that enemy on a linear plane. You can only move forward, backward or jump. The camera is always a decent distance from the monsters on screen, allowing you to be aware of all the other monsters. Want to doge an attack? Switch to another monster, refocusing the linear plane your character is on. This technique is actually key in order to dodge the effects of some of the higher level spells later in the game.
The artwork on some of the old Nintendo games was amazing. The established art style in SNES Zelda is a perfect example of expressive simplicity.
I love oldschool 2D games, and I think there is still a place for some of that in the indie scene. You need really good artists to make it worthwhile, though.
In fact, if you know of one, contact me. I may be able to offer a job.
I seriously think the worse transition from 2D to 3D would have to be the Castlevania series. The last 2D Castlevania, which was SOTN on PSX, was seriously the best 2D game in the series. The new PS2 version does not even come close to its 2D counter parts. You could also say the same thing about the MegaMan and MegaManX series. Beautiful hand animation in all those games. Then they came out with the MegaMan legends games, which are horrible representations of the MegaMan series. So what do you guys think is the worst transition?
I feel the same way. However, I think that I finally do see the light at the end of the tunnel. An artist working in 320x200 VGA space can certainly make careful use of pixels to provide a much better visual result than one gets from the Quake I engine. But as resolutions increase, the difference becomes much smaller: an artist working at high resolution is essentially working with vectors rather than pixels (think of a painter or cartoonist), and so in some sense has already lost his "pixel perfect" advantage.
It also seems that we are getting so much 3D power recently that it's no longer enough to simply have dazzling numbers of alpha-transparent triangles. 3D games are needing to resort to more interesting visual styles (cf Zelda: Wind Walker), and I think that may ultimately bring them to the same artistic levels that we see in modern "2D" games like the Capcom fighters or GBA side-scrollers.