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The Comparative Value of 2-D Vs. 3-D Graphics In Games
GameSetWatch is running a feature discussing the value of graphics styles in games. The authors point out that while certain genres, such as first-person shooters, benefited immensely from the advent of 3-D graphics, some types of games didn't handle the transition as well. A player's perspective, and his interaction with the game's camera, can often make or break an otherwise excellent release.
"Before making the full jump to 3D, many genres made a move from classic 2D to isometric 2D as an intermediary step. For example, the original Civilization had a traditional top-down grid view while Civ 2 had a three-quarters isometric view. While this new perspective gave the game world a more life-like appearance, the change did come at a cost to the user's game experience. Namely, distances are much more difficult to judge on an isometric grid as the east-west axis takes up twice as many pixels as the north-south axis. To solve this problem, for Civ 4, our 3D perspective actually hearkened back to the original game as we showed the game's grid straight ahead and not at an angle. The easier the players perceive the grid through the graphics, the better they can 'see' their possible decisions."
Oh, come on...
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I am SO glad I decided to doublecheck before I hit the post button. Who knew I'd been wrong about how to spell a word for the last 20 years?
2D gameplay is generally best when playing on a 2D surface. All the problems come about from the discrepancy between 2D gameplay on a 3D surface. -Keith -www.expensiveplanetarium.com
Age of Empires and Age of Empires II is a great example of this. A great game that goes down the crapper in later versions trying to "go 3D."
...distances are much more difficult to judge on an isometric grid...
This is great fun to try to solve when a 3D CAD user moves an element "only" 500 feet away (temporarily, so s/he can re-use it later, and then forgets it) in the X-Y plane, but it goes 6 billion kilometres away in the Z dimension, making the graphic environment slightly larger than the solar system.
What usually happens then is that the wildly out-of-proportion 3D model is appended into visualization software (along with hundreds of others) and it's near impossible to figure out why the designed facility is so hard to find in the blackness of space.
Metroid was better as 2D. I thought Zelda was too. I can understand if they want to throw most of their weight behind 3d titles because they sell better, but I think new 2d titles of classic series would be cash cows on something like the virtual console, and cost a lot less to develop. Your only option to play good 2d games is on a hand held. No thanks, the last thing I need is to start at a 4 inch screen a foot from my face after 8 hours of looking at a computer monitor.
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The Worms series suffered greatly from 3D. The extra degrees of freedom made craters and other hazards much less of an obstacle (side-stepped!) - and stray ordnance was much less likely to hit anything hilarious.
I've been playing around with Entanglar lately - which is a 2D physics / multiplayer library. Hopefully I'll be rich off the next Geometry Wars, and I will donate my considerable riches to the person who can troll twitter in the funniest way possible.
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The advantage of 3D graphics, even without zooming the camera, is that it means you've gone away from the limits of the sprite sets. Consider how silly top-down flying games like Star Control looked when the ships could only point in eight directions. You fire your gun and the shot passes to the right of the target, turn one click, now it passes to the left. Ridiculous. IF this ship were rendered, you would have a true 360 degrees of rotation without creating an intolerable number of bitmaps.
Like anything in games, you can use too much and too little of the right tools. Dawn of War was pretty neat to look at but most of the capabilities of the engine were wasted. Yes, it's very cool to do in-engine cut scenes and yes, it's cool to be able to zoom right in and look a unit in the eyes but there's simply no time to do that when playing a frantic battle. There's not even a playback feature so you can see the results of your handiwork from the ground. No, you zoom in like that and you lose the ability to play properly. In the end it is a cool yet useless feature.
The thing that developers have kind of forgotten from time to time is that some play mechanics work in 3D, others don't. Others disagree with this but I never thought Sonic worked in a 3D format, it was always meant to be 2D. You can use 3D to render it but the camera should remain fixed and it should be a side-scroller. Was never a Mario fan so I don't know how they feel about the classic versions versus the 3D ones but I would imagine that they feel like entirely different games. Of course, we know why this happened in the PSX/N64 era. 3D graphics were the new thing and management pushed the mandate that everything should be 3D, period, just like Ted Turner colorizing old classics.
I like that they brought up Advanced Wars. The beauty of that game is that it looks great on the small screen and does it using techniques familiar to us from the SNES days, just with higher bit depths. But the core gameplay is there, the graphics look great, and the game accomplishes exactly what it set out to do and looks good doing it. I can just imagine some designer coming into the sequel and getting all gaga over making it 3D. Nope, it ain't a 3D game, never was and never should be. There's many good 3D combat games that could be made but they wouldn't be Advanced Wars. If that's the game you want to make, go make it and leave AV alone.
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What an awesome game! 2D was more than adequate! I still play it both under Windows and Linux. Just a lot of fun!
"2D gameplay is generally best when playing on a 2D surface."
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This will reinforce and reiterate the above. If you bring it down to the basics, it's mostly a question of style vs. functionality.
You can have a 2D game that looks 3D. (Pre-rendered sprites, etc.) And game play will still be pretty much as it was without the 3D look. So it's a style choice, and if done well it can make things look nice.
Likewise, you could have a 3D game that has the render engine set up to produce cartoon lines and cell-shading. Yet it's obvious from the mechanics and gameplay that it's built on a 3D engine.
The thing that should be considered first and foremost is the mechanics. Will 3D space benefit the gameplay, or will it water it down or make it too hard or confusing? If not, just make a 2D game but give it the 3D look (if desired) via the artwork. Going the other way is even more of a style choice. Cell shading can look wierd based on the light dynamics or color pallette, so it's actually more things to work out on the content side design wise. Although if you're doing something based off an existing comic or cartoon with an established look, the cell-shading might not be a bad idea.
LBP is an interesting modern example of mashing 2D and 3D together. It's essentially a 2D platforming game implemented in a 3D environment with 3 2D planes which your character can move between.
The creators chose this design because they thought it was more enjoyable to play. A full 3D world was too complex, and detracted from the simple fun they were aiming at.
Having played the game, I think they made a good decision. It's got the simplicity of a 2D platformer, but the extra depth provided by the multilayered approach makes the gameplay more interesting.
Lemmings 3D
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The Fallout Isometric Engine and Infinity Engine are incredible examples of the buffer between 2d and 3d graphics that didn't quite have that same effect when transferred to 2d.
The Gamebryo engine has been breaking standards since 2001, and the Aurora Engine, was a necessary step for Bioware to compete in the great graphics race of the new millennium.
Personally, my Anonymous Coward bias leaves me feeling the older engines left a lot more to the imagination. With less emphasis on 'to the T' graphic detail, a lot more focus and budget can be spent on scripting, and general atmosphere that the dimension the game is in holds no relevance.
Black Isle was able to make an award winning game using sprites that could be angled in 6 directions, and has nestled a place in our heart worthy of franchises resurrecting what was thought to be dead.
It's like technicolor television. Not necessarily top of the line, but a stepping stone that can still be appreciated.
I know many people don't like their rts in 3D, but Homeworld is an utterly amazing game. That being said I could imagine the game being just as fun in 2D, though it would loose its artistic value, and would thus be slightly less appealing. Then comes the sequel with jacked graphics and features, but a loss of that nostalgic feeling that the old one had. Not long after I started pondering why, I came with a very quick conclusion. Although I was playing a 3D rts, the controls and interface had turned it into more of a 2D game. There wasn't the feeling of depth, or the sense of no defined "up direction". The formations had even been taken out, further reducing 3D strategy. I realized that if the sequel had come out before, I wouldn't be such a Homeworld fan. In the end, 2D/3D just changes the art and availability of improvements, but you have to know what you're doing. An example of a 2D game that would appear to have a tough transition from 2D to 3D is MMM (momentum missile mayhem). It would be very tough to imagine a 3D system that would have the predicted chain reaction of chaos that you get from a well placed shot, which is essentially the essence of the game. In the transition I thought of 2 options would make and break the sequel. 1: You give the player an fps view of the game which would hinder you ability to see the incoming vehicles for better chain reactions and thus turning the game into an utter failure. 2: You make the strip that the vehicles trek into a spore-esque globe that can allow you add an amazing array of new features. But it would not be able to stop there, as some features would be critical. The game must allow you to see more than one part of the globe at the same time, otherwise stray vehicles could get past your line of sight. Then you would have to add features to get those stray vehicles to concentrate on the action. Then you can add all the cool features and cool artwork, such as projectiles that bounce up high for added crushing affect etc. If the game does not have the correct improvements, the transition will obviously fail, but if it's someone who knows what they're doing, the transition is usually an improvement in art and features that can be made available.
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I think the transition doesn't work because most of the time either the developer is trying to milk the popularity of an old game or they're trying to reproduce the gameplay of the original without properly taking into account the 3d medium. The former, of course, is almost always the case.
But there certainly have been exceptions. I think the Metroid Prime series is one. It might not have the charm of the 2D version, but it certainly is great in its own right.
I think the games that make the transition well are those that reinvent the gameplay of the original to some extent. Or in the case of Final Fantasy 3 and 4 on the DS, they've basically recreated the original. Being an RPG, however, does make the transition a lot easier.
Ultimately, it comes down to the creativity and sensibility of the developer, not the chosen medium.
Well, 3D games require a heck of a lot more work, thus making the development more expensive.
For some reason, managers consider 3D to be the Latest And Greatest - why? Some games certainly require 3D (flight simulators come to mind, and I'm sure STALKER looks better in 3D than 2D), but on many others it's simply completely wasted. An commenter mentioned the great (2D) game 'Worms' - lovely and very funny in 2D, boring in 3D.
Many games (strategy) are simply easier to view, judge and control using 2D. And, interestingly, the same counts for quite a few shooters. For example, have a look at http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill/ - nice little shoot-em-up. The graphics are quite simple (not even scrolling), but they fit perfectly, and I'm having a lot of fun. In 3D, this would be a whole lot less good.
2D also has the interesting advantage of being able to have higher-resolution graphics. Compare the concept of a pile of skulls in the corner: in 3D, this takes up a lot of triangles and even with good texturing, simply does not look as good as a detailed 2D-image of that pile, which also uses a lot less GPU power to display. ;)
Yes, of course this depends on the game - on an FPS, it obviously has to be in 3D
But I find myself playing a lot of old games these days (maybe I'm just an Old Fart), and enjoying the simple 2D graphics involved. They are quite a bit more fun than most new (and expensive!) games who insist on being 3D.
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I found Warcraft 2 (2D) a bit easier to play than Starcraft (isometric), but Starcraft looked a lot better. I didn't like the Warcraft 3 at all. Not only it looked worse than Starcraft because of jagged 3D graphics, but you also got to control the camera. And you know, I do want to control the strategic aspect of the game, not to fumble with the camera during the battle. It's just stupid micromanagement.
I can think of few scenarios where 3D isn't going to be better but the issue is a lot of 3D games simply have bad implementations.
Whilst some games are far better in 3D as the summary suggests- FPS, RTS again as the summary mentions, some not so. For me platformers spring to mind here, a lot of platformers that went 3D absolutely suck- Sonic the hedgehog in 3D was never any good imo for example. There are however some that work well, there are those that went third person succesfully such as Mario 64 and franchises that started in 3D such as Tomb Raider also. Here's my point however, I'm not saying we get rid of 2D style perspectives such as your side platformers, your top down games and so forth but I am saying that even these are better in 3D- games like Cloning Clyde, Little Big Planet for example.
Again going back to RTS, it's much easier to have tanks flip over when they're blown up or helicopters fall out the sky reasonably in a 3D engine. My favourite RTS ever, Command and Conquer wasn't 3D and I liked it's sequels less but I believe it was poor game design not a question of 2D vs. 3D as one of my other favourites, Warcraft, only got better when it went 3D.
It's simply down to fluidity of animation, primarily, you can have things turn as you see fit without having to draw a sprite for every angle. You could have things look good in 2D by spending many many hours drawing millions of frames, but then you almost certainly wouldn't have convincing shadows or lighting still for things such as RTS.
3D in itself is much better and has much more potential than 2D, the question is whether game designers can adapt to it and use it to it's potential. We already know the answer to that somewhat- some can and some can't but just as we had good and bad 2D games we have good and bad 3D games. There is no fundamental reason why 3D has to be worse, only poor implementation- again something that can happen with 2D but that we often forget because we only remember the good 2D games as the bad fall from our memories and this is why so many people have such a rose tinted view of 2D.
Would love to see more 2d games. I think it says something that the 2d art on the box of games often looks better than the 3d gameplay art.
For me the golden age of gaming ended when the playstation, with it's fairly crappy 3d art (remember cloud strife and his yellow triangle head?) replaced the SNES, which had pretty nice art considering the limited resolution and color palette.
Since then gaming has become a technological race, with not enough attention payed to gameplay and art, and too much payed to pixel shaders.
Yeah, I get it, we have really realistic looking water now. Whoopty friken doo. Realism aside, it still doesn't necessarily look as *good* as when it was hand drawn.
Who remembers that game, IIRC it was a 2d game however there were some minor 3d aspects to it, and it was one of the best platformers I've ever played
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The implicit problem is that it is presumed that 3D is _always_ better than 2D and that games needed to make this transition in the first place. There is no one interface or method of presenting data which is best in all cases. Sure 3D works for first-person-shooter games (FPS)[1] but in many other cases is sacrafices function for form, as the OP noted.
[1] I'm going to plug Dungeons of Daggorath here and point out that FPS games arose in the early 1980s.
welcome our 2d overlords.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Personally, i prefer RTS games to be in 2D. It is much easier to perfectly place and build my cities and palce my armies.
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anybody have any recommendations of any more good games (for the PC preferably, and definitely no handhelds like the OP) that meld 2D and 3D like the aforementioned? Especially RPGs or strategy games with a good story?
Well, I don't know how much 3D-2D "melding" you're looking for, but The Witcher for PC uses the Aurora engine (same one which powered Knights of the Old Republic) with some significant modifications. The game lets you play in over-the-shoulder mode, for a closer-to-the-action perspective, or you can zoom out and play from an isometric perspective, making it more like an old-school PC RPG (Ultima series, e.g.). The whole game is 3D and has an excellent story, non-linear gameplay and lots of choices to make, things to do and women to woo.
Also, the Warhammer 40K Dawn of War series is a 3D strategy series, and lets you manipulate the camera as much or as little as you like, your choice. Play it in a Starcraft perspective, or zoom in to the battlefield to watch your space marines hack an Ork to pieces with a ripper.
2D games are often cheaper to make, which means that you can make more niche games that wouldn't be justified with a big team of modellers and artists and a 3D engine.
republic: The revolution was a political strategy game (niche) that took about 50 people 5 years to make and cost millions (I worked at Elixir). On the other hand I made Democracy on my own in under a year, purely by doing away with the (largely irrelevant) 3D world and going back to a 2D style of gameplay.
This means that Democracy made a profit (and got a sequel) and Elixir went bankrupt.
If people are happier to accept that 2D games can be fun, you would see a lot more low budget, indie developed games for the PC, rather than just triple-A shoddy 3D console ports and yet another WW2 FPS.
This can only be a good thing.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
then what nD doesn't mattter.
Ok 2 exceptions: 1D and DD
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It's 3D but you can't rotate the camera unless you turn an option on. Normally, all you can do is zoom. I prefer the 2D gameplay with the 3D graphics so that at least your soldiers look nice no matter what direction they're standing.
Do you want to simulate a light source in a 2-D environment? You can't do that by simply rotating a sprite. You would need multiple sprites.
Or one sprite with a bump channel.
Again, Vector Graphics
But in order to make your Vector Graphics character face any direction, you need to give your vertices three-dimensional coordinates instead of two, so that the system knows how to move the vertices when they're between the stored positions. Such a Vector Graphics engine is called (yes) a 3D engine.
The annoying thing is that almost all developers see 3D a a 'must have'
Even more annoying is that the console makers agree. If your game used 2D graphics, and it wasn't a straight port of a well-known arcade game released in North America, Sony Computer Entertainment America would more than likely decline to license your title.