Graphics Don't Matter

Dave Long writes "My column at GamerDad features some musing on how unimportant graphics are becoming to enjoyment of games. Everything looks great today which removes the excitement of that bullet point on a game box. There's some historical context and speculation on next-gen consoles and graphics' effect on consumers." From the article: "I guess we're getting closer to photo-realism, but I just don't care. The games shown don't look markedly better than anything from this generation. I guess they're impressive in a 'that's close to the movies now' kind of way but the graphics aren't changing gameplay in any way that I can see. It just makes old types of gameplay look prettier. For the people who absolutely adore technology and this incessant need to replicate the real world, there will certainly be things to cheer in the next generation. I'm sure I'll eventually buy the new consoles myself and be at least modestly excited at the graphics, but I've just grown so accustomed to things looking nice on current machines that there's no 'wow' factor anymore."

Comments

Well...

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

Better is... better.

Gran Turismo 4 is light years beyond the original Gran Turismo. If I was a late adopter, I would be WOW'd (BIGTIME) in moving from a PS1 (Gran Turismo 1) to PS2 (Gran Turismo 4).

I imagine the same thing will happen, in time, with the new generation.

Because we are video game addicts, we (I assume the poster is like me, in being somewhat addicted to getting my favorite latest games) are constantly upgrading, and getting the latest release, etc. GT1 - GT2 - nice difference. GT2- GT2, really nice difference. GT3-GT4, somewhat nice difference (read: difference==improvement).

But the GT1 - GT4 hop is unbelievable.

Now use the above analogy with any of your favorite games. Final Fantasy VII vs. Final Fantasy X-2? Huge.

Grand Theft Auto 1 vs. Vice City/San Andreas? Unbelievably huge difference.

In 2 or 3 years when the best of the best come out for the next gen consoles, it will blow the pants off whatever came out in the early months of the current generation consoles, IMHO.

Re:Well...

[harrkev]

Perhaps, but look at it this way...

Take GT4. Reduce the polygon count by 1/2. Reduce the resolution of the textures by 1/2. Does it harm the game in any way? Perhaps, but not by much. It would still have the same game play. If you crash into a tree, it can have "blob" for the foliage on top, instead of rendering each individual leaf. But it is still a tree, and you still go boom.

Let me put it another way. Would you like to play a beautiful ultra-high-eye-candy version of Daikatana? Me neither.

You need a certain amount of graphics for game play. Anything above that is icing on the cake. But there has to be cake (game play). All icing and no cake is yucky (boring). Solid cake with even a little icing is still good.

I have always felt this way

[pthor1231]

I mean, just look at games like Final Fantasy 7. It had a great story, the people looked retarded. Didn't stop me from playing the hell out of it. IMHO, developers focusing too much on graphics actually makes a game suck, because they don't put enough effort into making the game have a compelling story, or, for that matter, making the game long enough to justify a pricetag of 50 dollars (or more). Just look at games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Fable, God of War. These were all good games with pretty cool graphics, but they were just flat out too short for what it should have been.

Re:I have always felt this way

[Sylver Dragon]

This, as with anything about gaming, comes down to individual tastes. Personally, I though FF7 sucked. Of course, I though every FF game after the first one (US) pretty much blew to some extent. The gameplay was repeditive, the stories unimaginative, and the dialog way too melodramatic.
Plus, the 40+ hours of gameplay usually involved 20+ hours of watching the same spell animations over and over and over again without any way to skip them. And, <insert diety here> forbid you die after watching a long FMV clip, as you would get to sit through it again.
On the other hand God of War and PoP:Sands of Time both had good stories, that weren't drawn out to the breaking point to fill time. The action remained consistently good, without the need to stop and level to beat the next boss. And, the dialog in both didn't feel insulting to my intellegence. Yes, you could beat either in a fairly short amount of time, but the quality of the game was consistenly high. And that is something I appreciate. I'd rather have a 10 hour game that was consistently good than a 90+ hour epic that drags at many points.
Also, like other posters have said, I have a life. I work, attend classes, and try to have some fun which doesn't involve electronic devices. I have neither the time nor inclination to devote that much effort to a game. I need something I can play for a few hours, leave alone for a month, and then pick up and play again without difficulty.
This is all, of course, just my opinion, and every person will view this differently. If you like the RPG epics, then great, buy and play them, but there are many of us that don't care for them, for us God of War, and the Prince of Persia series are perfect.

graphids DO matter

[alvinrod]

... but just not in the way that most people think.

Will it make any difference to me if each individual drop of water in a waterfall is individually rendered and given its own physics? No. But will it matter if the waterfall doesn't look like a real waterfall or doesn't seem to fit? Yes.

It's not about how photorealistic something looks, but whether or not the art style used enhances the game by making you feel as if you're there. After a certain point, the graphics won't get any better. We'll be able to pump out more polygons than we know what to do with. Game designers need to use them to create a world that we can immerse ourselves in.

For example, I absolutely love the graphical style used in Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2. The world I'm exploring feels so much deeper than Halo 2's. Don't get me wrong, Halo 2 has excellent graphics, but they just weren't used to design the same type of rich world that Metroid has.

Re:graphids DO matter

[amliebsch]

I agree with you, and both agree and disagree with the article. I think there needs to be an aknowledgement that there are fundamentally two different kinds of games.

The first kind is non-immersive; it either requires the use of imagination (e.g., text-based games) or doesn't attempt to immerse the player at all (e.g., Tetris.) For these kinds of games, graphics are irrelevant and gameplay is all that matters.

But there is another class of games, mostly RPG and FPS, that have as their goal total immersion - that the user forget s/he is sitting behind a display device and believes that what s/he is seeing, hearing, interacting with is real. Gameplay is still important here, but graphics are also important, because the better the graphics, the more complete the immersion is.

So I don't think it's fair to categorically state that graphics don't matter, unless you don't believe that immersion is a valid goal of games.

Doy

[Apreche]

Some people are real gamers. They care about games. These people don't care about graphics, only gameplay.

There are others who are not gamers. They just happen to be people who play or enjoy playing games. These people are often prejudice against games with less graphics and towards those with better.

Just like people who care about movies often go to see movies based on quality regardless of budget, while people who simply enjoy movies see big budget blockbusters.

The key is that the big money is in making the big games with fancy graphics. Because there just aren't that many people who actually care about games as opposed to people who just enjoy them.

Need proof? Play counter strike. You make a lot more money selling some fancy looking piece of poop to those shitcockers than you would selling a balanced work of art to the 100 guys who actually care. Look at the MMOs where you have people addicted to collecting worthless digital items and customizing avatars that look cool, obviously they never played a MUD. And of course, the people who didnt like Wind Waker before ever even playing it based on it's looks. They do realize that at heart it is essentially the same game that Zelda 64 was and the new one is going to be? No, because they aren't real gamers.

Those of us left who ARE real gamers have to stick together. Gotta make sure that quality games keep getting made for us to enjoy regardless whatever fancy graphics crap comes out. I have high hopes for Civilization 4 and the Revolution. Let's see if they can be fulfilled or not.

It's time for a Picasso

[fwitness]

The reason Picasso came up with some of the most brilliant art of our time is that his age saw the introduction of the camera. Artists no longer needed to struggle to replicate actual scenes, as the camera did this faster and better. Art needed to evolve to find a new niche. Picasso showed that art need not be about the image itself, but portraying the subject in a more abstract (and some would argue more complete) manner.

Games are going to have to focus on content as we approach photo-realistic real-time rendering. People are not going to buy one game over another because the grass has clearer shiner blades. It's about time too. Bring on the Ico's, Katamari's and Viewtiful Joe's of the future. Let's get back to exploring gaming as interactive entertainment and forget looking at purty images that move.

Consider chess

[TheSHAD0W]

Ever play chess with a really elaborate set? Intricately engraved figures with so much fine detail you could scream? Kinda difficult picking out the pieces, isn't it? I really prefer a nice, simple, classical set, where you can identify the piece at a glance.

I think videogames are approaching the same limit. You aren't going to be paying attention to detail when you're actually playing the game, it's at best ignored and at worst a distraction. The best thing for developers to do would be to work at reducing distractions.

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

And a commercial during the Super Bowl doesn't make your Doritos taste better. But damn if it doesn't sell a lot of Doritos.

People have always felt this way.

[jaredforshey]

When Atari was released, people were amazed by the graphics (I'm sure this point will astound several of our younger readers). Even then, there were people complaining that the graphics really only stood in the way of allowing you to do whatever you wanted to do in the game the way you could in text-based games - as long as you could figure out the syntax!

The real point here is that, since games have had graphics, there have been people that felt the state-of-the-art graphics only got in the way of what they liked about the games they liked previously.

I'm only conjecturing, but I think part of it is that people have a tendency to assume that graphics have pretty much gotten as good as they're going to be for a long time. Even in the atari days people couldn't imagine how the graphics were going to get much better. To say that the games on the upcoming consoles don't look any better than they do on the current consoles is true, but these are just release titles. After developers have had a couple years to unravel all the tricks, we should be seeing amazing things.

To me, graphics don't make the game. But they can certainly go a long way to enhance a game with a solid foundation of gameplay.

Re:To a point..

[Rallion]

You know what? I think that would be better.

Doom 3 is the ultimate example of graphics not mattering. They spent so much time on the graphics engine that they forgot to make their game fun.

Re:Two fun games that buck the "uber graphics" tre

[jclast]

I can't speak for Lego Star Wars, but the graphics in Katamari Damacy were amazing. The sense of scale and size were phenomonal. The models weren't composed of millions of polygons because the individual elements weren't the focus. You were looking at the world as a whole, and KD's engine presented the game world flawlessly. The experience definitely wouldn't have been the same if there were a loading screen every time you needed to zoom out a little.

Good graphics and innovative graphics aren't always about who has the most polygons or the best lighting. Sometimes, they're just about creating the game world properly.