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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
...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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>>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."
You mean Age of Empires III, right? I and II were 2D.
And, yeah, I totally agree. Moving to 3D made the game worse.
Along the same lines, I'd say that Super Mario 3 was better than the Super Mario for the N64, but game companies always have to have the latest buzzwords or they think people won't buy it (and they may be right -- I bought Force Unleashed for the PS3 instead of the Wii since the Wii's resolution is so blocky).
While the main reason people do 3D instead of 2D sprite games these days is that 1) 3D scales (you don't have to have individual artwork for each resolution level) and 2) You don't have to animate each frame individually, you can do "2D" games that are actually 3D, but presented in such a way that the player doesn't need to worry about depth. Civ IV did a very nearly perfect job with this, with the exception that when you zoomed out, it sucked the map back onto a globe which obscured most of the map you were trying to zoom out to look at.
"2D gameplay is generally best when playing on a 2D surface."
Chess as a peel'em and stick game.
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While the main reason people do 3D instead of 2D sprite games these days is that 1) 3D scales (you don't have to have individual artwork for each resolution level)
You could do this way more easily with Vector Graphics
and 2) You don't have to animate each frame individually, you can do "2D" games that are actually 3D, but presented in such a way that the player doesn't need to worry about depth.
Again, Vector Graphics
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Lemmings 3D
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Which also covers brand-new perspectives.
Consider a 2D game, say an RPG -- so you add all sorts of animations. Emotions, attacks, etc...
And you add different customization options. Clothing, various weapons and armor...
Now, what do you do when you add horses to that mix? Sure, vector is going to help a bit, but you're still probably going to be drawing fundamentally different pictures, at least for the pants (and maybe the weaponry), otherwise it's going to look stupid.
The question is whether this is going to be more work than moving some props around in 3D. Having not done the work, I can't really say, but I would think that 3D is easier -- especially as you start to think of more possible perspectives and movements.
In 3D, you could suddenly decide to make your character shrug, and not necessarily even test all the different clothes and weapons to make sure they look right. In 2D, a shrug would be a difficult proposition -- again, without making it look ridiculous.
Oh, and the "retro look" is a cop-out. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing in 3D as well -- just look at the Wii.
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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.
Along the same lines, I'd say that Super Mario 3 was better than the Super Mario for the N64,
I disagree. Not because Mario64 is better, but because *both* are damn good. The thing to realize is simply that 2D isn't 3D and visa verse. You can't really do 3D gameplay in 2D and neiher can you do 2D gameplay in 3D (well, you can, but it will most often feel ugly and restrictive). None of them is better then the other, they are simply very different forms of gameplay, with 2D being much better for clearer graphics and straight forward gameplay, while 3D is better for more complicated exploration orientated stuff.
The annoying thing is that almost all developers see 3D a a 'must have', so you see close to zero 2D games on the big consoles, the DS still gets some, but even there 2D is slowly dieing out for no good reasons, on the PSP its already as good as dead. I just wish that there was more stuff like Braid or Wario Land: Shake It!.