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Harvey Smith, Ex-ION Storm Staffer, Profiled
obchrisj writes "Harvey Smith, formerly of ION Storm and now Creative Director at Midway Austin, gets his trials and tribulations profiled in FileFront's latest F! True Gamer Story. Here's a clip: "The hours were long, sometimes putting in as many as one hundred hours a week, and he stayed in QA for a year before moving into development. From there he has worked on a variety of games since 1993, including Deus Ex: Invisible War, Deus Ex, CyberMage, and System Shock. Over the years, he has seen a lot, and believes the emphasis in graphics may finally be slowing down. 'We might be moving beyond the graphical arms race soon, focusing more on player-driven experience,' he said.""
Some companies have done this. Unfortunately, those are usually the "sleeper" games that few people will play, and the ones that do will rave about. Perfect example: Katamari Damacy. Very simple, very fun game. The graphics look like something a 1st-gen PS1 might have spit out, but it does in no way detract from the game.
:)
The downside is that people will pass it up because it isn't pixel shaded with 4.5d gfx running on the newest and greatest thingamahooie.
Graphics engines don't really need to become any better than the UT2 / Doom 3 / Crytek /HL2 ones. With those powerful engines and top-quality artists, you can display pretty much whatever you want.
From a graphics point of view, the Half-Life 2 engine is actually fairly basic beyond its (admittedly pretty) shaders. It doesn't appear able to do volume-specific fog (as could Quake 3), there's no LOD on non-model geometry, and lighting for model geometry itself is derived from a single point, whatever the size of the model.
But the second part of your equation is the most important aspect - it's the glorious artwork that makes Half-Life 2 look so lovely (to me, anyhow). The engine is 'good enough', and should allow Valve (and modders) to concentrate more on the gameplay and design aspects...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?