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What's the Importance of Graphics In Video Games?
An anonymous reader writes "I develop games as a hobby. I've experimented with games on almost every platform available. For me, the gameplay is the most influential factor of a game, with history and graphics dividing second place. But, for some reason, it's not the technical beauty of the graphics that appeal to me. I have played Crysis, and I've played Pokémon games. The graphics of the Pokémon games entertain me as much as the graphics of Crysis. I think both are beautiful. So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games? I think it is sufficient for a game to have objects that are recognizable. For example, while the water in some games may not look as good as in Crysis, I can still tell it's water. What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics? Do you prefer easy-to-render 3D scenes that leave space for beautiful effects, like with Radiosity, or more complex 3D scenes that try to be realistic?"
is important in any game. Graphics can be cool and all, but they shouldn't be the primary reason for any game.
Not so sure, look at roguelikes. They consumed years of my life with naught but ascii characters. I think graphics are a luxury, not a necessity. Games can definitely get by with little to no graphics.
In the end it is all about communication. You could ask the same about movies, and conclude it's all about the story. The lion king would not work as well as a live action movie, since it will not communicate emotions as well. On the other hand, special effects nowadays aren't as scary anymore, because they have the sense of being unrealistic (see Michael Bay Movies).
For me, the appeal of pretty pictures wear off quickly, so I prefer simpler graphics with beautiful effects so my senses do not get overloaded. Also for crysis, I think all the detail clutters the screen and distracts attention away from the gameplay.
SHHH, The people at Crytek might hear you.
Realism is something everyone is able to grasp. In the not so distant past, any art that was not realistic was considered unprofessional. It was only after time that abstraction and impression were recognized as having value.
Now, I don't think it's that people think less of non-realistic games, but I think it's just a natural human thing to say 'that looks so real'. There are those that wish to take on the challenge of recreating that which already exists, and those who are more interested in re-interpreting what is real
The better the graphics the easier it is to be immersed in the game. Immersion is probably the best generator of enjoyment in a game.
I guess it depends on the person. I find good looking 3D games much more enjoyable than 2D games (with the exception of Peggle, maybe) - and I have played my fair share of 2D games as I did not have a decent computer for quite a few years.
I think people might be coming to actually *expect* good looking graphics too, so when they see a game that is not aestetically pleasing as games of a similar type this would make getting immersed in the game more difficult.
1) Eye catching: before you buy a game, you don't know the gameplay. Therefore they advertise the graphics
2) Promotion: high demand on graphic card is becoming a selling point. If the display is so slow that only mid-to-highend display card are supported, it'd be a glory for the game to be used for benchmarking.
3) Reuse: Gameplay and storyline can hardly be reused, graphics easily
4) Bloating the game: make it seems more money-worthy and make it more difficult to BT
It's not important to think they're beautiful. It's more important that they're not distracting. Making the graphics realistic makes them less distracting. When you don't find it jarring that nothing has shadows or the lighting is wrong or everything looks a little too polygonal you can pay a lot more attention to the game.
It's the same with everything else. You don't notice really good special effects. It didn't occur to most people that there were only a handful of people in the crowd scenes in Forrest Gump. You don't notice really good acting. You only notice it when it's unconvincing.
Don't bother with the show-off funky effects. Make sure they're good enough to tell the story and work out the trade off between time and how convincing graphics are.
If gameplay/storyline sucks I wouldn't play it regardless of how flashy it looks. I can play Chrono Trigger level graphics games just fine. Very good level for me is something like Disgaea/Guilty Gear/BlazBlue. Very realistic vater vs somewhat realistic water adds nothing for me. Those very realitic games tend to work that realistic on the future hardware anyway...
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They said that it's for the gaming experience. When you play a game, you want to immerse yourself into that world, playing games is about escaping reality. A jagged edge or 'water' can make all the difference in a world or environment that you're exploring. Try staring at Lara Croft's airbags in TR: Underworld and then try playing TR original. Although the original content may be much better, TR:Underworld isn't that bad because the environment covers for the lack of content.
In a way, it is a vicious cycle, but it's also innovation, you don't want games to become stagnant in terms of how they look.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Video games are an entertainment medium. So are movies. No one is going to argue that good CG effects can make a movie better, yet when it comes to graphics people want to stomp their foot on about gameplay and how graphics are meaningless.
They're not. Of course, it depends on the game--many games don't translate well to 3D, and the retro charm of 8bit is always nice--but let's not kid ourselves that "immersion" (yeah, yeah) is a part of game enjoyment. You can't make an 8bit WoW, now would you want to try, but a 3D pacman isn't going to translate well either.
You can't say "Oh, well I prefer this over that" because graphics depend on the type of game. Comparing pokemon to Crysis isn't fair at all. FPSes, which put you in an actual environment where you have to run, hide, and hopefully slaughter your opponents are a "Far Cry" (ha, ha, ha) from a lightweight (but yes, fun) RPG game on a portable. And imagine an 8-bit Silent Hill! Survival horror didn't really become popular until the PSX for a reason.
I find myself greatly missing the graphics of some of the old-school SNES rpgs such as FFVI's look, but I'm not going to say that FFX's (last FF I played) graphics detracted at all from the game's experience. So I can't say it's the type of graphics I enjoy so much as it is the game and how well the graphics fit in with the genre and the game's design. I don't see why it has to be a one-or-the-other situation.
Graphics can be great for immersion.
I've never really felt that nethack was fun, because it was ME running around in dungeons.
Nethack is fun because it speaks to logic and bad puns (i like bad puns. I like bad punch too, if it's spiked).
when first played games such as quake or bioshock, good graphic and soundscape helped me feel in danger of whatever was around the next corner.
I like a good shock once in a while, the sudden appearence of a darg grey 'D' or '&' just doesn't hit my nerves.
This might also mean that it's most im
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Much like any form of entertainment, graphics represent the final gloss on a product. A film that relys only on graphics to be successful (Final Fantasy Spirits Within anyone?) will usually find itself dead and forgotten months or years later. However, sometimes movies with poor special effects (or none at all) stay with us for lifetimes. We don't judge The Godfather based on how realistic the horse's head looked.
Graphics are required to give a game a theme and a feel. In that respect they're essential in creating an immersive environment, probably a bit moreso than the story or the voices, if only because while poeple do stop talking in-game, you never stop seeing the game rendered. This does not always mean that the graphics need to be good, advanced, or photorealistic. It means the graphics need to be appropriate to the venue.
If you're making a high-powered, over the top, epic game about a larger-than-life hero who can defeat whole armies singlehandedly, then the realism of the graphics becomes less important than being able to render large groups at once, or pretty particle effects for special attacks. If you're doing a film-noir detective story where you investigate dead bodies, then gritty, realistic, high-contrast graphics are probably appropriate.
You'd never want photorealism in pokemon; it has no identity outside of being a cartoon. At the same time you wouldn't want to play a Dawn of the Dead made with the graphics engine they used on Wind Waker.
Actually, yes, graphics should be the #1 focus of survival horror primarily because those games are supposed to draw you and and hopefully unnerve you. Nobody plays Silent Hill for super-innovative gameplay. Trying scaring someone on 8-bit arcade graphics.
If you are on an island, and sneaking, laying in the grass and you are about to encounter your alien overlords in an invasion, then the realistic graphics are a must. It's all part of the experience. Nobody is going to care about your game if the aliens invasion is on a 8bit coloured gameboy.
If you are playing an adventure game Mario/Crash Bandicoot style then your obviously want to keep in basic and cartoony.
If you... bla bla bla you get the point; it dependss on the game you make. The graphics are nothing more than a visual presentation of what you are doing, and so the visual presentation should match the type of game you are playing.
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Flashy graphics appeal to people visually and stimulate you before you get to play the game and judge it's actual value. I'd say that to make a game look the best is a marketing decision for the screenshots and the trailers to sell the game.
Graphics can be cool and all, but they shouldn't be the primary reason for any game.
Case study: Heroes of Might and Magic III vs. Heroes of Might and Magic V: same fundamental gameplay, except 5 was done entirely in 3D. The result? 5 is unplayable on a dual-core Dell laptop, (except with minimal settings in 640x480), and it got harder to recognize objects you can interact with.
For me it's all about the feeling. Graphics, background music, sound effects, narrating and of course the story line are all part of that.
I can love beautiful, near-photorealistic graphics and I can also love simple, cartoonish graphics. What I don't like is graphics that try to be photorealistic but fails to.
Remember that the more you put into details, the more the details you miss will become obvious. I wouldn't care that the water didn't look very realistic in a game where all graphics looks unrealistic, but if the grass and the trees are dead gorgeous, unrealistic water would suddenly become a minus point because it wouldn't fit in.
Basically, if you aren't willing to put major effort into making the graphics look realistic, don't try. Instead aim for some other style, like Prince of Persia, Zelda: Wind Waker or Little Big Planet.
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Graphics should be appropriate to the game experience you're trying to create. That's all there is to it, really.
In some cases, that means pushing for absolutely cutting edge technology. A big part of the Crysis experience is the "shock and awe" factor of the visuals, as well as the heavy use of foliage and other environmental factors that need to be done to a very high standard if they're not going to look silly. Personally, I think Crysis is a very, very good game - one of the best of recent years on any platform - and the graphics are a big part of that (though the fairly free-form gameplay is another big element). To be honest, if you're making a first or third person shooter these days that doesn't have a deliberately abstract setting, then you really should be pushing for the most technologically advanced graphics you can, because as gamers' expectations improve, games which fall behind the curve face a bigger and bigger challenge in not having their immersion broken through poor graphics. I remember playing Call of Cthulhu - Dark Corners of the Earth back when it was released and being generally very impressed by the atmosphere (despite the bugs). I tried replaying it recently, and the way that the graphics had aged so badly was quite a shocking bar to getting back into it.
However, not every game needs to be a technological powerhouse, and there are even cases where flash-whizz-bang 3d graphics can work against a game. My favorite example here (and yes, I know it's an old one) concerns the third and fourth Monkey Island games. Monkey Island 3 was for many years the closest thing I'd played to an interactive cartoon. The graphical quality certainly wasn't far short of the animation you were seeing in animated movies at the time, and was actually ahead of much of what you'd see in kids' TV cartoons and anime of the era. For a cartoony graphical adventure, it was perfect. Then for the fourth installment, everything went 3d and it looked rubbish. So we went stylistically from "interactive cartoon" to "badly designed Quake mod". You can see the same thing with the transition from Baldur's Gate 2 to Neverwinter Nights - beautifully drawn 2d backdrops changed to boring, bland 3d tilesets (though I guess this was necessary to make user created content easier).
Interestingly, the recent Sam & Max episodic games seem to have found a decent middle ground here. They balance 3d and 2 graphics in a way that works really quite well, and have finally pulled things back up to the "interactive cartoon" level (and a prettier cartoon that Monkey Island 3 was, though perhaps not by far).
Then occasionally you get one of my favorite experiences; something which uses really quite advanced graphical effects to produce a deliberately highly stylised effect. The best example I've seen of this recently is Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3, which uses some quite advanced 3d graphics and visual effects, but aims for a unique look, which is going neither for realism, nor for the typical anime look you see in a lot of Japanese games. I know cell-shading is nothing new (and has been much abused, particularly by Nintendo), but Valkyria Chronicles combines it with other techniques to pull off a unique and distinctive look that really fits the game well.
If I want reality, I turn off the computer. As for video games, they should:
1. Have graphics simple enough to quickly locate usable objects without having to strain through all the distractions. Myst series is a bad offender, especially since the objective is to solve puzzles.
2. Take you to an alternative world to take your mind away from real life
3. Be installable on a typical hard drive in dozens, without a need to hunt for - or worse swap - CDs or DVDs
4. Be playable in half an hour intervals, so that someone with kids can also participate.
I have the disposable income to buy pretty much all the titles I like and have time to play. Yet, chiefly because of #4, I am mostly downloading DOS games from abandon ware sites. I would gladly pay if someone was selling them for reasonable price and with instant download available. As a hobbyist, I think you would do well to write some adventure-style games and gain some audience without competition from most commercial developers.
WHat the hell is immersion anyway? I never feel like I'm a character in any game- I'm me. I'm playing a game. I don't want to feel more like I'm a pretend character, I want the gameplay mechanics to be more fun to use and the strategy level/difficulty level to be correct. If that's there, I have fun. If its not, trying to make me think I am the character won't help.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I actually wonder why game developers bother when most computers can't run games at there full resolution anyway. Most mere mortals put up with crappy graphics so we can enjoy skip free game play. It usually take me two computer upgrades to be able to run an old game at its full resolution. Game play has always been the priority.
Graphics are really important for an hour or two, then you turn them down to get maximum speed in the real goal -- killing your friends and unknown kids on the intertubes... ;-)
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I think the texturing is more important than the polygon count - good quality texturing can make up for a lot of polygons.
More important than both of these however, is the AI and game physics.
If I had a choice between a photorealistic game where everything was indestructible, vs a game that was more like say, WoW but you could actually dig holes in the landscape, destroy or build things and actually physically change the world (even if only temporarily) then this would add much more value to the game, in my opinion.
AI is also important - there's nothing more boring than mobs that act in a predictable way, or worse, have been given god like reflexes and omipotence in order to make up for crappy AI. Ideally, mobs in the game should be indistinguishable from other players, at least until you go and try and talk to them.
of course this also depends on the genre of the game. If you are writing a flight simulator or something, then visual realism is much more important than say, being able to create a big hole in the ground when you crash.
I would love a FPS where you could actually blow a shortcut through the wall (at the expense of wating a lot of ammo) or an RPG where your lvl 80 fireball was actually able to blow down that door or at least scorch it a bit.
especially in real games like Pong
Trying scaring someone on 8-bit arcade graphics.
Maybe not 8-bit arcade graphics but.... it has to do with locking someone in a room with an Atari 2600 and one game. That game being E.T.
If it's CounterStrike or GTA IV, there's no such thing as "too realistic". Even in most fantasy/sci-fi settings like say Oblivion or Fallout 3 you expect fire to act like fire, water to act like water and so on.
Other games are just about putting you in the right mood, like say Super Mario Galaxy - it's a cartoon. Or pretty much everything from Telltale like Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Monkey Island etc. Where it's important but not realism-important, where a 3D CGI animation can deliver a visual gag the way lesser graphics can't.
Finally, there's games where it doesn't matter. I play chess from time to time with a black and white 2D board, plain as it gets. Because I'm playing people and it's about the strategy, not the battle chess animations (though that was fun for fun's sake too).
I'm just one person but the importance of graphics vary from "very high" to "very low" for me alone, suggesting there is no answer. Look at your genre, is it important? Yes, then it's important. If you don't want to compete aganst all that, you can find a genre where it's not. If you still want to get in on the graphicly intense stuff, make a creative new game with decent graphics and try taking them on head-to-head in a sequel.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...everything starts to look like a nail.
The guys who are making the consoles are focusing on the hardware, and adding realistic graphics is a problem that hardware can help with. Better hardware can't really help with story lines. So they build the hardware for good graphics, and when you have that, suddenly developers start thinking 'what else can I add 3D realism too'
I play the first time because of the story line, because up until then I've never seen the graphics (on my machine). I keep playing because the story line draws me in and the graphics make it easier. Then...maybe not...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I AM THOGULUS WARRIOR OF THE UNDEAD. I EAT YOUR LIVER TO REGAIN HEALTH. Yeah I hate it when I am raiding and I start referring to myself in the third person and act more like the character than myself. Once in high school I put my characters name on a test instead of my own.
That was then, when it was all there was. I can't stand to watch black & white movies from the 50s with claymation special effects anymore either. No matter how great the game play and the story are, if the artwork isn't up to the same standard, it's just not a finished product.
Compare it to a book, with a great plot and a compelling story, but typed on a typewriter and littered with corrections, typos and spelling errors.
Trying scaring someone on 8-bit arcade graphics.
Definitely not impossible. I suggest you take a look at Eversion. Don't be fooled by the screenshot and the beginning of the game.
In general, I think gameplay and especially sound are more important than graphics in horror games. Hell, one sound you can get scared even if you haven't seen anything scary. Imagination is a powerful thing.
You can't avoid the first wave of games to take advantage of a new graphics technique or newer hardware being primarily about these upgraded features.
Decent games with an intricate backstory and well thought out gameplay do take time to make. It's not surprising that they arrive in the later waves.
It's definitely a decent goal to continue pushing towards photorealistic visuals. I'm excited about how the options and challenges are diversifying. I'm yet to see convincingly realistic characters simulated, but with some of the mocap solutions bieng developed, that's not far off. I can't wait to record myself with a webcam and have every little nuance of my expression mapped to an avatar.
A. For the same reason that Hollywood attaches such importance to CGI and vastly expensive special effects: - they are unable or unwilling to provide storylines or dialogue that can grip the viewers attention without them.
The same lack of imagination is the reason for the preponderance of sequels and films based on comic books.
I think that plot and good gameplay is much more important that graphics in the kind of games I do like, but this is not true in any kind of games.
IMHO Gameplay come always first, a game must be fun to play, then came the rest in an order depending on the game kind, as an example an online fps doesn't really need a plot.
Anyway it is also difficult to describe what "good graphics" means.
Saying that "good graphics" means high-resolution and photo realism is like saying that a photo is better that a painting.
It's not a matter of pixel, is something more complex, it's a form art, you have to choose your canvas, and you have to use it well.
An example is Okami (wii and original ps2 version), its low-resolution/low definition graphics to me is the most beautiful eye experience I had from a videogame. The plot and the game-play are just as beautiful, so to me is one of the best game ever.
Anyway It's a matter of taste ;)
Cya
Unluckily Murphy was right.
I partially agree, but that said, you can always over-estimate the complexity of in-game visuals to provide 'immersion'.
As an example, I had this discussion with some random guy on the internet, about Codemasters post-poning the next Colin McRae game to make it a DirectX 11 title. I argued that while both DX10 and DX11 are nice improvements, you should still be able to get to almost (or maybe completely) the same visuals you could achieve with the same card running DX9, now that GPU's have fully programmable shaders. It might be difficult, but it should be possible. His reply was that 'this is exactly what's holding back computer games, sticking with obsolete technology', and 'that would mean PC games would end up with the same crappy low-resolution graphics that consoles have'. Instead we should all buy GTX295 SLI setups that draw 500W of power, and run our DX11 games in 1920x1080 and above.
Well, yesterday I was playing Killzone 2 on the PS3, which has a Geforce 7800 in it, and runs at 720p, which is about on par with PC graphics technology from ~5 years back. I can say I had zero problems getting 'immersed in the game', because the gameplay takes care of that, there so much going on while playing that the number of pixels and polygons is completely irrelevant to the game and how you enjoy it. The same holds for (e.g) Mario or Zelda games, those games don't need realistic or high-def graphics, in fact, they'd probably discount the 'level of immersion'.
Just as it takes more than skillful special effects to make a great movie, it takes more than good graphics to make a great game. You'd think these points would be obvious but there are quite clearly game (and movie) makers out there who don't get them.
It does depend on the game but I love abstract graphics myself. Most of the classic games that I've played and loved over the years have tended not to be particularly realistic. If you look at something like Tempest say, or Robotron, or pretty much any of Jeff Minter's work. The visuals for Minter's next project look stunning:
http://llamasoft.co.uk/yak/grppp_jun.avi
The better a [product] looks the more attractive it will appear, usually convincing enough to purchase. This is a fairly common practice with any business/industry selling wares.
Nice visuals can make a bad game passable and a good game great. Looking good is what will get people to buy it and actually being good will keep them playing.
If I want realistic imagery and soopah dense meshes, I'll go outside.
Changing the theme is a bitch sometimes, though.
If I want to play a game, it had better be a /game/ because if it has suck-ass playability, it doesn't matter how dense the polygon meshes are.
Nethack/Rogue/Angband MUSH/MOO/ INFOCOM > $BADGAMEANYGRAPHICS
--
BMO
I've been more scared and nerve-wracked in a single game of X-Com than in many of the 'hyper realistic' gory zombie games that have come out recently.
Games are not a uniform thing. There are games where the graphics are stunning, and really pull you into the world. Then there are games where even the simplest graphics perform all the function needed to make a beautiful game. Why should we not have both? Independent games with interesting gameplay mechanism, an interesting visualization as well, are highly popular - it's not like we have lost anything?
Graphics require consistency - not realism.
If something looks "out of place", it'll give a much worse experience than if you go for a more cartooney style, but keep that style consistent and interesting.
I happen to think games like Psychonauts look quite good. Paired with being just about the most fun game I've ever played, and you have a powerful combination that makes a great game.
I can't stand to watch black & white movies from the 50s with claymation special effects anymore either. No matter how great the game play and the story are, if the artwork isn't up to the same standard, it's just not a finished product.
I have to agree with that. It has to be a combination of both story and graphics. I used to play nethack, I used to play muds (can we say wall of text?). A lot of them were great at the time. For the time. Now the world has moved on, the ability of graphics on these types of genre have helped to enhance the gameplay not detract from it.
Starcraft is a good example. When it first came out, the story and graphics blew my mind. It had me hooked from the first mission. Now, however, the level of the graphics has moved on. I would like to play it again but the graphics now detracts from the immersion that I once experienced. I will always look back on Starcraft with fondness, but I doubt I will ever install it again and spoil my memories of such a great game.
Yes, graphics are important, but they will never fix bad gameplay.
;)
Crysis had perfect graphics, and not that bad gameplay. Still, it scores low on my list, because it's to short in my opinion. They sacrificed game length for graphics, they shouldn't have.
Braid is a perfect combination of gameplay and graphics, the whole environment blended nicely with the game, and the gameplay was a wonderful experience. It's not that long, but also not that expensive to buy.
The new resident evil on the Wii is a perfect example of fail in my opinion. The graphics show horrible aliasing and the controls work frustrating making for a bad experience.
Now, as a hobby game builder, you don't always have access to perfect graphics. So you'll have to make up with gameplay for that. But still work on the graphics, they are very important. A screenshot can 'sell' your game, if your game looks like an old 8bit nintendo game, it's harder to get people to try it. But not impossible (see 'Cave Story')
Graphics are also an important gameplay element. I'm working on a GuitarHero clone which plays FretsOnFire songs for the Wii. And I noticed the game became much more enjoyable AND playable with a few very simple effects. As they provided more visual feedback on your actions. See how the dark grey area and small gauge on the left and right don't seem to fit that well. A few simple things can make a whole lot of difference. The gray star provides feedback that you hit a note, and the rest just makes it more pleasant to look at. While you are playing you don't even notice the backdrops that much, but notice how they caught your attention just now
It's clear that graphics alone do not make a good game. But graphics do remain very important in games, especially in 3D oriented titles.
For one, better graphics capabilities give game artists more flexibility in creating the right look and feel in a game. Think for instance how Team Fortress 2's unique visual style has been made possible by the advanced capabilities of modern 3D hardware and the Source engine. While graphics are getting closer and closer to photo-real, many game developers in the future will likely favour a more pseudo-real, stylised look. Why? In order to avoid falling into the uncanny valley.
While there is an obvious trend towards photorealism (this trend is nothing new), many of the best games of this generation aren't quite photorealistic. For example, in GTA IV, while the cityscapes are rendered in a more realistic style, the characters are rendered differently. Even in Crysis, while the environment looks amazingly real, the human characters are ever so slightly cartoony.
But ultimately, your question, pitting the world of Pokemon against Crysis is a bit pointless. It's like asking why people shoot live action film when animations can be just as entertaining. I'm not sure if titles like GTA IV or Crysis or CoD4 would have the same impact if they looked like Pokemon.
photorealistic, realtime CGI will be an advance equivalent to photography or television. While the industry is a major driving force, the intrinsic value of the technology extends way beyond gaming.
Photo realistic graphics would be good if the game world would also be realistically interactive. However, the interactivity is severely lacking. If I'm playing Crysis or whatever, I want to be able to knock out a soldier with a coconut I just picked up. Or use the top of an oil barrel as a frisbee to decapitate people, or other cool stuff. But no, all environments look very nice, but the interactivity just isn't there. Red faction is trying to make some progress in that area, but just being able to destroy buildings isn't what I'm looking for. Perhaps developers should scale back on the graphics and focus more on the interactivity part of games.
That great, you're of the "old school" traditional gaming camp.
However, many gamers have shown that they like being sucked into games to the point of becoming part of the story, the setting, the protagonist. Valve have run with this via Gordon Freeman - the game is designed to make the player play as if they ARE Gordon. He has some back-story, but the player ends up feeling as though they're the one fighting the combine instead of controlling some guy who's doing all the work. Hence the lack of cut-scenes or any concept of Gordon talking.
And you know what? The gameplay mechanics are fun too! You can have fun and gameplay AND get sucked into becoming the character, it isn't mutually exclusive. I don't know why you were modded insightful - maybe some people believe that opinions that buck the trend are somehow insightful for this very reason.
I wish I had mod points for you, X-Com was definitely scary even with huge pixels all over the graphics. The fact that you could not know where attacks came from, the music, all that helped to create this creepy atmosphere. Same thing with Maniac Mansion, big pixels, but weird people everywhere, the door bell ringing whenever you didn't expected it, and Edna chasing you in the kitchen, I was scared of that as a kid.
As far as artwork and "cinematics" are concerned, I loved Viewtiful Joe, who would have thought a bad movie would have made an awesome video game? They pretty much pioneered the "2.5D" game. On top of that, I hated old fashioned side scrolling beat-em-ups - this is one of those to a whole new level that made it awesome. It's cheap, check it out, you can probably get it at GameStop for under $10.
I tried explaining the game to my cousin one time "It's made to look like a bad movie" he asked "which bad movie?"
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Ah, here is someone who never played DOOM for the first time in his room at night, with no other light source than the CRT and with headphones making sure the first cacodemon that ever jumped him gave him a bloody fright.
In the end, there can be only one!
1. Larger potential market: A lot of the population are under-endowed with imagination (hence to become immersed in something, they need realism). If you make games that even they can enjoy, you increase your potential market.
2. Barriers to entry: The higher the costs involved in producing a game (due to complexity), the less competitors you will have. You build yourself a nice little part of an oligopoly for yourself. After a while you widen the moat by lowering your costs (but the startup costs get higher), reuse code/art/story/experience/marketing/whatever to further advance the state of the art or lower costs, both of which are barriers to entry.
3. E-penis wavery: those who have to have the latest and greatest of everything (and flaunt it) will have to have your game. Counterpoint: If you make it too hard to run, you also decrease your potential market. (But how many games does the low end actually buy?)
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
generally you can tell if a game is trying to look amazing and/or realistic. The important part is whether they manage to pull it off or not.
A game that tries and fails is in for a bumpy ride because the player will be completely aware of it.
Good graphics are based entirely upon what the designer intended. I think the following games (I have played) have great graphics...
Theme Hospital ... but I cannot tell you which has the best graphics.
Settlers 2
World of Goo
Farcry 1 (I remember stopping and looking out at the sunset!)
red faction
and I'm not alone on this one. Developers spend way too much time making the game look pretty these days. I doubt anyone cares how good a building looks if that building happens to be a place where a massive fight takes place. The thing is, developers probably spend months on making it as shiny as possible but most gamers don't even notice it. Game reviewers are the only people who really seem to care what the game looks like. For example, uncharted on the ps3 is my favourite game on the console. The graphics on that game are awesome. I was so drawn into the game that that I thought that this was how it would feel if Indiana Jones was a badass. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if the graphics weren't as good as they were. Then again, I don't really care for graphics for the most part seeing as I do most of my gaming on the ds. When gameplay is good the graphics are secondary. I'm probably gonna get flamed for this but I'm gonna say it anyway. Killzone 2, Halo 3, Gears of War had good graphics but in my opinion the gameplay was just dull and I'm really surprised to see why people seem to almost revere these games. Call of Duty 4 was better than these games but nothing revolutionary. I guess I just don't find games to be much fun when all it entails is going from point A to point B while killing things in a graphic manner ( can be entertaining sometimes) Let's stop here before I can get started on all the "dark/mature/gritty" games rant.
You can't really compare the graphics between Pokemon and Crysis because the purpose of their graphics are completely different. Games that are trying to get as close to realistic as possible are doing so because there is more immersion than in a top-down RPG like Pokemon. Not immersion in the sense that "I could play this game for hours" but immersion in the "I'm actually there" variety. Pokemon is trying to be more cute and iconic as a way of making the characters more lovable. Pokemon with realistic graphics would be a completely different game for a different purpose. There's nothing wrong with either of them and both types can be beautiful, as you said.
When picking an art design, you have to know the audience and the type of feelings you want to evoke. Also, more often than not, your design is dictated by your budget. If you're a single developer working on a game in his/her spare time, then chances are something like Crysis will be way out of your budget, as opposed to a game with a few stylized icons or models. The reason why it seems more emphasis is placed on realistic graphics is that realism is a challenge that only the big budget guys can attempt to accomplish. It takes millions of dollars to have hours of mocap sessions, hire cleanup artists, high-res modelers, animators, texture painters, environment designers, etc to make a full city of locations and characters. Then it's also a lot more challenging to figure out how to make that world realistic and still function on modern day machines, with physics, animation interpolation, various gameplay mechanics and effects, etc.
While it seems that most games are going for the realistic look, I'd wager that the vast majority of games are going the more stylistic approach. Pretty much anything on the biggest gaming platforms right now (Web, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and Wii) take the stylized route, whereas only the $20 million AAA titles on the XBox 360 and PS3 are going the realistic route, of which there are only a few dozen a year.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
"is important in any game. Graphics can be cool and all, but they shouldn't be the primary reason for any game."
Actually graphics are a *primary reason* for any game, but not the only thing obviously. They are called VIDEO games for a reason.
Art sets the tone of the game, if you check out the extra's on the God of War 1 disc they show you models that never made it into the game, and the different versions of Krato's that never made the cut, looking at some of the models you can see that *art* the vision in someone's imagination *definitely* makes the game better when one can bring it out of one's mind and one has good artistic discernment.
This isn't to say that graphics are the only thing obviously, but when it all come's together it's about putting all the pieces together properly to make the experience.
God of War would not have the same visceral Impact using the other model heroes seen on the God of War 1 disc as Kratos.
Technically God of war is an action button mashing 3D beat em up, yet there are other games like that that never reach the level of fun or success God of War has.
The truth is every part of the game experience matters in the game ideally. The problem is game developers don't have the resources to focus on all the parts equally so they have to pick the "core" and focus on making the the core they've chosen as best they can with the resources they have.
Graphics matter only in so far is that they are done artistically well enough.
I doubt anyone would take Metroid 1 (NES) over Super metroid for instance.
...you insensitive clod!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I think your assumption is wrong, people don't want realism, they want immersion.
A lot of detail in graphics helps provide that immersion, that escape from reality. While games as Pokemon, Final Fantasy 6, etc. can provide that immersion as well, once the player is used to high quality graphics, the lower quality graphics just don't really cut it anymore. Sad, in a way.
If a game with lower end graphics wants to do 'immersion' well, they have to do better than average on the other aspects of the game (Gameplay, story, ...).
Just my opinion, discard whenever you see fit.
Storyline? What are you smoking? Who gives a shit about the back story? Did Doom succeed because people cared about what Union Aerospace were doing on Mars, or because the gameplay was out of this world? I know where my money would be. Where's the storyline in Tetris? Yet somehow that was mindblowingly successful. Ultimately, it's all about gameplay. Nothing else matters.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Graphics are the traditional gimmic. No more no less. Most people who say they can't go back to old TVs or old games tend to be exaggerating on prima donna levels. "How could I ever look at something so ugly!? I have been brought up civilized!" :)
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Compare it to a book, with a great plot and a compelling story, but typed on a typewriter and littered with corrections, typos and spelling errors.
Looking at some examples of present-day typography, typewriter could actually be somewhat of an improvement...
i love that game. i still have it installed, load it up whenever i get the FPS itch. to bad the second one sucked.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Yes - the original half life was a spectacular game and it still is. But you know what? It's not the graphics that did it - at least not by modern standards. And still I enjoy playing that game (both single and multiplayer) a hell of a lot more than pretty much any new game with shiny graphics.
I immersed just fine in Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Final Fantasy VI, Avatar Tuner, Xenosaga, Dragon Quest III, Ar Tonelico, etc...
None of these games were at the cutting edge in terms of graphics.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
First there were no cut-scenes. Then it was technical possible to introduce them. And how they get removed due to game play.
And I though they were a bad idea from the start.. but no...
You are spot on - too bad I don't have modpoints.
....or the Matrix, or Star Wars, etc. if they didn't have amazing visuals?
There will always be similar games and films that don't have the amazing effects, and still be entertaining - the point is, these are usually outnumbered by those that do - and by a large margin....
^^^ Parent has a good point. It's not about the level of graphics beyond a certain point so much as it is the POLISH of what level you've chosen. If you go for crysis and wind up looking like crysis on it's lower settings I'm going to hold graphics against you but if you settle for a lower graphical standard and do it WELL with good quality textures then I'll probably say "this is well done, how does it play?" and go looking for gameplay.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
It really depends on what style the game itself is trying to pull off. Some have criticized Team Fortress 2 for its more cartoon-like look and style than its predecessor. I think, however, that it's incredibly fitting for the game. The voice acting is incredible and the characters fit the style quite well (the Meet the Team videos only enhance these qualities further). I realize that Team Fortress 2 isn't known for these qualities, but it really is a lot more fun because of the stylistic decisions made.
I myself have never really had the most cutting-edge technology, but I have never felt truly immersed in a game based on the graphics alone. In the back of my mind I always go "this is just a video game," but the story, characters, gameplay (i.e. the attributes that are truly meaningful) can reel me in. Games like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark come to mind here. The graphics were good for the time, but nothing close to realistic. However, they were still able to pull me in just as well.
As the Game Boy Color commercials proclaimed: "Get into it." If a game can get me interested in the other facets of its world, then it could be from the 8-bit era and still get me to feel immersed.
If you must err on one side or the other, err on the side of gameplay. But you should make both as high-quality as you can.
Concerning graphics technology, that's down to audience. Hardware-oriented fanbois will drool over the latest gear and games that exploit it; adult women playing games on Yahoo during their coffee break will not. Decide who you are serving and what your game really needs first.
I piss off bigots.
Lemmings was a game that occasionally invoked a few gulps from me. It was hardly realistic graphics -- this was a game built on the idea of making creature graphics as small (pixel-wise) as possible yet still produce a recognisable humanoid figure. You tend to treasure the little critters more when you need to save all of them (in the harder levels), and there's always the chance that there'll be one more trap waiting for death a few pixels further onward.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I don't think that kind of immersion is much related to the graphics, really. Graphics is more like this: Imagine you were sitting down to watch the latest Bond movie. You don't think you're Bond, you have no control over the action - but there's a story unfolding. Now Bond trips over something so it breaks and you see it's only a cardboard prop. That'd break all the immersion and remind you it's all just illusion.
Of course, in a movie they'd cut it but since a game is rendered live you don't have that luxury. Every time the graphics act unnatural it breaks the fantasy, reducing you back to "Yeah, it's just a bunch fo pixels thrown together". Of course you knew that all along just like you know Bond is a fictional movie character but it doesn't matter. It's not about making the fiction reality, it's about not breaking the fiction.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'd say anything up and beyond the source (half-life2) engine is pretty pointless, it looks good and it runs on most hardware well... Why would I want to go out and spend four digits on a new rig _and_ go through all the pain of setting it up just to have water look that little bit nicer? -.o
No games should be about the game play.
(This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why pr0n is always one of the first applications of any new graphics technology, e.g. printing, lithography, dial-up BBS and CGA or Hercules: when the mind is intensely engaged, the limitations of the medium, ineptness of the plotting, and the crudeness of the rendering don't matter as much, and since pornography hacks the will of our Masters, the Genes, it guaranties engagement [but please don't marry it].)
I think most /. readers and all hardcore games will agree: graphics take second place to storyline. However, what interests the big game companies are sales figures. What drives game sales? By far the most important are articles and reviews. How many reviewers actually spend more than an hour or two playing the game? Having "wow" graphics are important to making a good impression. The fact that the gameplay had problems will eventually come out, but only after hundreds of thousands of copies have been sold.
Mass Effect is the most recent mistake I have personally seen. It great reviews! The graphics really are pretty (though not as good as expected, given the system requirements). And the gameplay? There are four scenarios with some depth. All of the other encounters use the same small set of maps, with one or the other door welded shut - very repetitive. Using personal weapons is reasonably well done, but vehicle weapons are a joke. The main storyline is complete, but many secondary stories either never finish, or end abruptly - more was clearly intended, but never implemented.
In short: the graphics are pretty, but the gameplay is just good enough to get by the reviewers who spend a couple of hours with the game. Play any longer, and all the shortcomings become glaringly obvious. But that's ok, it has already sold its million copies...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I never feel like I'm a character in any game- I'm me. I'm playing a game. I don't want to feel more like I'm a pretend character, [...]
Serious question. Do you have any imagination? If I say imagine you're a trogladite in a territory war, what did you have for breakfast? Can you tell me the story or are you lost in a see of "why?" and "WTF are you on about?".
Playing a good game in part is escapism, make-believe. If a game doesn't somehow take me beyond my current reality in some way (even if that means intellectual immersion or a Skinner Box) then why play? Why not do something productive?
The graphics of the Pokémon games entertain me as much as the graphics of Crysis. I think both are beautiful. So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games? You must balance realism, gameplay, etc. Some games will favor one over the other and will get some attention initially... then they'll fade with time. But I think that's how it works. Some cool graphics technology will be invented and applied to extremes in a given game. Then another title will show up that favors a little bit more gameplay... then another one that mixes both.. that's evolution.
none
As you know, there are some nice examples which are famous for their non-realistic and "cute" graphics (some are even 2d) and excellent gameplay:
Little Big Planet, World of Goo, Super Mario Galaxy, Team Fortress 2
Back in the ancient days of video and computer games, there really was no way to put up realistic graphics. As a result, storyline and just aiming for the "fun" factor was the most you could hope for. Think of that period the way you would the early days of movies, where special effects were not an option, so story(and good acting) was the most they could hope for.
Now, as with anything, there would be two "schools" of thought on how to attract people. In movies, you had things like nudity that eventually came in as a way to attract audiences, followed by special effects, while other factors took a back seat. With computer games, you eventually had better graphics and audio.
What we have seen is that games with a great story and depth have really been pushed so far back that the adventure game has all but disappeared. Storyline has also taken a back seat(look how many people just click through the dialog options to PLAY games, rather than reading or listening). That is the big difference here. In film, there have been special effects movies, or movies with a lot of sex, but those that are more artistic have also continued to be produced.
The true games that are a work of art have pretty much gone away. You have shooters as the dominant type of game, and you have a handful of pseudo-RPGs that give perhaps 3 dialog choices, but without any way to REALLY change the outcome of the game(you just end up with a different end-game "movie" based on your dialog choices). There are also the "sandbox" type of games that give you a big open world like Oblivion where you can do a lot, but the depth of the world, and your options are very limited to what mods/adventures people write(nothing dynamic, all pre-scripted).
It really is the shooter genre that has had the greatest chance to change this, since the gameplay isn't all THAT much different from game to game, storyline COULD start to become a more dominant force, or to change the "if it moves, shoot it" style in most shooters to one where it COULD be more of an adventure game, or to use the engine for an RPG(Vampire - Bloodlines did this but bugs caused it to not sell as well as it should have based on storyline and gameplay).
The death of Interplay and Sierra is also a key factor in what has happened to the game industry. When one publisher dominates in releasing a certain type of game, and that publisher fades away, and the other publishers do not pick up the slack by releasing or at least publishing that type of game(to fill the void), that leaves a huge gap that SHOULD be filled, but for some reason has not.
There is room for a publisher to really take up the reins and start publishing adventure and RPG games, but due to the economy, we have not seen this happen. Until a more artistic approach is taken to game design, games will continue to have a hard time attracting the general public. In movies, if EVERY movie was a battlefield war drama or zombie film, people would grow bored, and only a tiny group of people would even pay attention to what new movies were released. The special effects movies at least are starting to incorporate SOME storyline and depth, but there are still plenty that fall flat(Star Wars Episode 1 for example). Special effects without a good storyline does not do well, and within ten years, the first person shooter market will also dry up if nothing is done to make storyline the key rather than the overdone "run around, shoot people without a reason" type we see today.
Give the player a purpose they can identify with, and it will attract people. Look for something that older players and those not drawn to shooting guns, and you will bring in the masses.
Nethack gets me most immersed.
tells you that game does not have to be photo realistic to be fun, enjoyable.
If your game mechanic is boring it will be boring running the Crysis engine or the DOOM 1 engine *but* you will sell a lot more unit using the crysis engine. People like good looking shiny stuff even if it's boring, limited or even stupid. For examples, see ipod (-1 flamebait); Paris hilton; Windows (+1 Insightful), Dubai and others. If you have a good game, good graphics will still attract even more customers.
What do you mean by "his movies are not realistic"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRS90V8BQGo
No... just played through Doom on Ultraviolence mode using PRBOOM. Tons of fun.
Doom can still be much more fun than most of the modern fps games. Its because of its simplicity. Not needing to aim up and down makes it possible to play that game at a very fast pace, and without the "hardcore" skills that required mousing in modern FPS games. You can spin and shot at something you couldn't even see moments ago, partially because you don't have to track up and down.
The design of the maps is pretty clever too.
That's the order of things. If you don't have content... your game is a pretty piece of trash. (Think most sports games from EA that are recycled). Sure... the first might be awesome... but we lack a tremendous amount of content these days. Content is what keeps a game interesting, it's what makes others want to buy it from friends recommending since most of us realize that the rating system on gamestop and most of the magazines is now manipulated completely. Look at the Final Fantasy series? A new story each time, each extremely enveloping... though most of us agree X-2 never happened.
Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Brothers... each one has an amazing new amount of content and that's why they are classics and always a quick sell. How replay-able is the game?
Controls come in second to me. To be able to envelop myself in a game I need the controls to be configurable to how I want to play the game. I'm known to NOT buy games because of this. This is a joke to do.. and pure laziness by developers not to do it.
Graphics come in last of these three (not of all) because to me... there is a point where it's all candy and not needed but that also depends on the game. I wouldn't want to play Assassin's Creed in 8bit, but would settle for ps1 level if there was more content. The game kinda gets old after a while. In today's day an age with the engines available for development there just isn't any excuse for a fast paced game to look worse than the Quake 3 engine.
However, games played at a slower pace (Turn Based, etc) are complete different. They also range depending on the game itself and what it's trying to do. If all game manufactures would focus on that priority list we wouldn't have so many great looking paper weights on the market and their pockets would be much fuller.
Check Upgrade Complete. http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/upgrade-complete The goal is not the game, the goal is to upgrade everything including the graphic engine. I confirmed for me that improving the graphics and music might help a LITTLE bit, but if you find a game boring, the graphics wont help at all. Actually... if you find it fun, you already don't mind abou the graphics I guess.
Agreed, Survival Horror and the horror genre in general don't win on graphics, otherwise you just have a gore slasher.
Dead Space has got to be one of the creepiest games I've played, though I haven't played a lot of the Resident Evil/Silent Hill games either. You compare Dead Space to Resident Evil 4/5, which still try to be horror even if they aren't as good as the old RE games. Dead Space had me on edge way more often that RE4/5 ever did. RE4/5 was semi-predictable on when/where enemies would show up. Dead Space you really couldn't tell. By the end of Chapter 1 I was paranoid about every wall vent, every ceiling vent, every floor vent. The game had my heart racing so much from the adrenaline rush that I had to stop playing it because it was so good to let myself calm down. I never got to that point with any of the Resident Evil games, even the old ones, and certainly not RE4/5.
In Dead Space, the game had me so far on the edge that if I heard any change in sound I'd immediately do a 180 degree turn if I didn't see anything in front of me to make sure nothing was coming up behind me. It was the sound of the game that hooked me, not the graphics, but I think without the graphics it wouldn't have been as top notch as it was.
God I'm getting goose bumps remembering the game.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
We don't need no stink'en graphics! I've been addicted to the same bloody MUD since 1993.
Ah, so your not a fan of casablanca, or more likely since this is a /. crowd 2001: a space odyssey?
I'm sorry, but just because something is old does not by default make it crap. Quality is quality, if something was ever truly good it should be able to stand up on it's own regardless of graphics.
Back in the days where good graphics simply weren't an option, the games still managed to scare you out of your mind through compelling story elements. Some of the scariest moments I've played in a game were in Project Firestart... back on the C64!
The importance is fairly simple in my ape brain.
1. It's the hook.
When you stroll down the street. All of a sudden you see that creature of amazing beauty. You are captivated.
At this point in time you know nothing else about this person. All you know is the visual physical form. No other positive attribute has been expressed. You have been hooked.
2. It stimulates "The" primary sense. :) You tickle that part of the anatomy that contains both a huge bundle of nerves and a large portion of the brain devoted to processing the signals from that bundle and you are basically playing with a future addiction. The brain enjoys processing this vast input.
Ask any woman out there.
3. Similar to #2. As one of your senses if you stimulate it in the appropriate manor the body will release a suite of pleasure drugs.
Basically graphics are immensely important to mass adoption of a video game or most products these days. There will always be a subset of people with more abstract cognitive abilities that derive pleasure the more complex aspects that do not involve graphics. But they are a subset. Graphics are critical in appealing to the masses. Case in point anything Apple. Stunningly designed products, mass visual appeal. But are apple products the pinnacle of current technology? No.
No better proof of these statements is the Television. Over night this changed world social interaction. Video games are simply one of the evolutionary steps of the television. The questions is. "Where is this evolution going to lead?"
The best games put gameplay first, controls second, and graphics/audio third.
Alot of games these days sadly no longer use this method of design. Today it's more of graphics first, physics second, and promotion third.
If you follow the older method of forever fun then you will get games like super smash bros 64, golden eye 64, mario cart 64, sonic adventure, shenmu, and of course wcw vs nwo 64.
nethack
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
I find it odd that a former nethack player/mudder would not see that towards the end of your argument you are essentially saying that if it isn't shiny, it is pointless.
Perhaps you need to remember that games are for having fun, maybe?
Somewhere there is moaning and scrabbling underground. The cartidges are trying to rise up out of the landfill...
Pixeljunk series of games on PS3 is a classic example, gameplay is number one, everything else comes lower down the list.
Pixeljunk MOnsters for example is one of the most enjoyable games I have every played, it's got a HUGE comeback value (despite being insanely diffucult, you still make progress in the game).
The best £5 I have every spent on ANYTHING, let alone PSN.
From time to time i load up Dune II to play it once again. And it has never spoiled my memories of it being a great game.
Why did I got attracted to WoW ? The cool graphics and huge variety in the areas.
Why did I abandon WoW ?
- Walking around takes forever (even with a mount)
- The variety in gameplay was disappointing
- User interface issues (yes I know you can modify most of it, but not all)
- After a while it is more of the same
- If you want to play it without looking up on the internet what you have to do it will take forever to find what you need.
In other words: Graphics are nice, especially to attract people. But (especially for subscription based games), in the end game play is WAY more important.
I notice that I quite often prefer my MSX (2) games over modern PC games... 16 or 256 colors, and pixels big enough to build a house with...
I doubt anyone would take Metroid 1 (NES) over Super metroid for instance.
As a major metroid fan (own every single game except fusion.. on my to get list), I must say, I do. that isn't to say I dislike metroid 3, but metroid one was quite an excellent game.
graphics only need to be there enough for the game designers to be able to express their intention in the game.
I also prefer Nethack over Diablo 2, simply because of the sheer depth involved in the gameplay of nethack. There are people out there, that prefer quality over shiny, but there do seem to be very few in comparison to the people who simply 'must' max their SLI gtx280's.
Immersion is when you are into a game, it doesn't have to mean you think you are in a game. It's when you are playing it and the outside world fades away, to the point that a persistent distraction can knock you out of it. The same way, I have been immersed into some movies I really love, but I never thought I was an actual character in those movies.
"What's the Importance of Graphics In Video Games?" To allow me to interact with a visual element (voice-only games are boring!).
"So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games?" Commodity graphics cards (where they used to be a massive, expensive, add-on only), excess of speed/power/capabilities, people buy "pretty" games for no real reason other than they are pretty, young people have "grown up" with 3D graphics, ease of putting out titles that are pretty rather than addictive, "competition" with videogame consoles, previous titles and industry competitors who think the same way.
"What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics?" Too much graphics, not enough gameplay. Graphics are *brilliant*, don't get me wrong, but after the fiftieth alpha-blended, anti-aliased, dynamically-shadowed, etc.etc.etc. game then it's no longer novel or impressive, even if the resolution improves or the thing being shown is using more detailed models. Half-Life Blue Shift, I will use as a case in point. It came with "higher res" models of the Half-life universe as an option. Hands up all those who knew that and/or used them (SvenCoop users don't count - it tells you in the installer).
"Do you prefer easy-to-render 3D scenes that leave space for beautiful effects, like with Radiosity, or more complex 3D scenes that try to be realistic?" Neither. I prefer people not to use 3D when it's not needed, and when they use 3D to go with a particular look that suits the game and/or the gamer's requirements. A silly puzzle game (even 3D) does not need lens-flare, dynamic lighting, etc. However, an immersive FPS which relies heavily on atmosphere to build tension (e.g. Left4Dead) might. In fact an immersive game like that might well do things strangely - such as add film-grain to deliberately decrease the quality of the image to fit in with the game's atmosphere. But at the end of the day, if it wasn't an addictive game, people would not be playing it in their thousands... you don't set up a powerful PC on a fast Internet connection and play multiplayer because it "looks cool". At least, not after the novelty wears off. Most gameplay-heavy multiplayer games NEVER die online, even if the game network disappears.
There is no "standard formula" for a good game in terms of graphics. Spy Hunter in the arcades WORKED in 2D, Lemmings worked in 2D, Street Fighter worked in 2D, but their 3D incarnations are *ALL* dire. Similarly for sequels, extensions, mods, add-ons, etc. that thought that adding some fancy rendering, higher-resolution, etc. would save them having to make a new game. Graphics are just a layer of interface to the actual game underneath. If the interface is crap, the game might still be good. If the game is crap, however, it doesn't matter how good the interface looks - it's like a Ferrari with a Fiat 100 engine inside.
Look at Quake. The amount of mods for that thing was PHENOMENAL. Even the official expansion packs didn't try to upgrade the resolutions or the renderer or this or that... they just made some more content and kept the game interesting (I think one of them did some QuakeC tricks to implement some very primitive physics, but that's *not* graphical, that's a gameplay trick). Now, of course, there's GLQuake, Quake with lighting, ray-traced Quake, etc. The graphics-heavy ones aren't that popular, they don't add much and if you play them it's only out of interest to see once. You might even "stick" with GLQuake or Tenebrae or whatever, but at the end of the day if you're just re-running the same old Quake levels, there's no real fun. However, *additional content* with new ideas, new gameplay etc. - that's completely different and will make you load it back up no matter what interface you prefer.
Look at the Half-Life engines - both basically unchanged since release (alright, HL2:E1 added that HDR stuff but you bought it for the story and the extra hours of gameplay, not the HDR - hopefully). Now look
"So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games?"
The current generation? Are you kidding?
When I was little I remember getting one of those prima game guides to "Killer Instinct" - a SNES game. In it was a foreword from one of the project leaders and I distinctly remember him saying something like the following:
"With the cry for "more and better" getting louder than ever, the graphics in Killer Instinct..."
Graphics have ALWAYS been given high importance. If you look at back of boxes of old MS-DOS games you'll see phrases like "cutting-edge graphics" and "beautiful environments" banded about just as often as they are today. Ever since computer hardware has been improving, games developers have been trying to push it to its limits, and the primary way to do this has always been to put fancier stuff on the screen. So don't go pretending that this is an issue that's only just recently occurred.
you insensitive clod.
Seriously, wtf is wrong with the person writing the title? It's like saying "What's the importance of air for human beings?" or "What's the importance of water in the ocean?"
Graphics and eye candy should never be substituted for FUN gameplay, but they certainly enhance it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think you have a good point. While the special effects may have been revolutionary for the time, I still sometimes giggle when I watch Star Wars (A New Hope) because some things are obviously miniatures and it brings me out of the movie when I realize what I am watching is not real. There is obvious differences between people (real), the set (semi-real), and miniatures (obviously not real) - and it is apparent that all three things are not the same.
In a game, as long as there is nothing disrupting the "realism", it is still very engaging. If it starts as low-res, it can stay low-res. If you start high-res, even small pixel issues can ruin the entire effect
I wholeheartedly agree. Dead Space is amazing. It's a shame it doesn't get the recognition is deserves. I'd even venture to say it's as good, maybe in a way better than RE4, which was one of my favorite games *ever* (haven't played RE5 like you have yet, though).
I don't think that kind of immersion is much related to the graphics, really. Graphics is more like this: Imagine you were sitting down to watch the latest Bond movie. You don't think you're Bond, you have no control over the action - but there's a story unfolding. Now Bond trips over something so it breaks and you see it's only a cardboard prop. That'd break all the immersion and remind you it's all just illusion.
Or how about if the latest Bond film was done in black and white, with as much technical expertise as a Charlie Chaplin film. I hope all of these non-graphics snobs would be lining up to see it.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Enjoy??? One compound word: HEADCRABS.
Urhhhh.
I'm sure there are many varying opinions on this matter.
My opinion is this:
The mass production studios need to have "the best graphics" simply because the game they are creating is more or less the same as the next studio...
Therefore, if the gamer is presented with the option of purchasing two games with identical gameplay, however one looks "ok" and the other looks "f'n fantastic", which do you think the gamer will purchase?
As much as I love good gameplay, if the graphics are bad, then I'll look for another game the offers similar gameplay but looks "shinny" ;)
Actually I couldnt care less about the storyline.
The most important thing for me in a game is given away by the name: gameplay.
Most of the games I play the storyline is a limp excuse to justify gratuitous violence of one kind or another. I could be shooting aliens (quake, etc), running people over (gta) or marshalling my troops (command & conquer). In all of them though the things I appreciate are a challenge that is hard but not too hard, and some variation in the way the to achieve each objective.
The vague storyline is really just there as a pretence to the action. A game can have the best storyline in the world but if the gameplay is dull or non-existent then I am not going to play it for very long. I would go so far as to say that storyline is the single least important aspect of a computer game. One of the most popular online games I play is Americas Army 2, and that has no storyline what so ever.
I do on the other hand like pretty graphics, but even they are not as important as making the gameplay addictive and challenging.
I dont read
And unfortunately that's what counts.
When you look at the box of a new game or at a demo, what do you see? You can't see the gameplay, because that's something you have to experience. You do see the interface but it doesn't immediately make sense because, well, most interfaces first of all need a wee bit of explanation and maybe a tutorial. You certainly won't get to see its replay value because, well, you haven't even seen it's "first time play" value yet.
But you see the game's graphics.
So which of those I mentioned (graphics, gameplay, interface, replay value) will dictate whether the game sells? Sure, the other three are way more important in the long run and they will determine whether the game is considered "good", because graphics age poorly (seriously, Quake 2 graphics were HOT when it came out, but look at them from a 2009 point of view... bleagh), but when it comes to buying a AAA title right after release (i.e. when it generates real revenue for its maker), which one will count?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dune II? You barbarian!
I replay the original Dune about once every 2 years, just for the heck of it.
"I am Duke Leto Atreides, your father". Gee, thanks dad for finally coming clean, I never would have guessed!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Its not just the current generation. In an earlier day we endured the bit wars; where the systems at the time boasted 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits. What it boiled down to was bragging rights. Look at the Atari Jaguar, promoted as the first 64 bit system, its rivals at the time were the SNES and Genesis. The graphics sucked, and the games sucked compared to the vast librairies from its rivals. Eventually the bit wars ended. Did more bits make a better game? The answer seems to be no as the Jaguar was Atari's last production model console. The lesson seems to be a balance of graphics and gameplay. If the graphics are suited to the game then great, you've got a winner. Look at the Nintendo DS vs the Sony PSP... the PSP is capable of much higher quality graphics, but partially because of bad marketing and Sony trying to push it as a portable theater it is no where near as succesful as the DS. It also does not have the same level of game library that the DS has.
ASCII characters are also graphics. It's just a very restricted form of graphics. But roguelike games definitely depend on the graphic-aspect of the display (i.e. the relative position of different characters on the screen).
Having said that, there are games which don't need graphics: Text adventures. While they also write text as ASCII characters, that's not a necessary part of them. You could easily imagine the text being read to you through the speakers, and the commands given through speech recognition instead of the keyboard. Then you'd need absolutely no display device (you could switch your screen off).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is a good answer.
Graphics are a bonus but totally not required. I have seen so many terrible games with great graphics (mostly movie spin-offs).
Download a copy of BeebEm (BBC B Emulator) then go download Repton 3. This is a great example of a great game with poor graphics (mainly due to its age).
This is still one of my all time favourite games (I've been playing it on and off for over 20 years!) because it has good puzzles and to be a good player you have to have good timing and your wits about you.
The graphics are very simplistic (3 colours!) but good enough that you can recognise things.
In the modern era, my favourite game is Portal. The graphics are reasonable, and do take advantage of graphics cards, but certainly not at the level of Crysis.
They got it right by doing lots of user testing (check out their "developer commentaries" to learn more)
So, stick with it. If you get the gameplay right, that's all you need.
"You can have fun and gameplay AND get sucked into becoming the character, it isn't mutually exclusive."
Apparently you didn't read the original post. They are mutually exclusive. There is only some many resources you can put into a game. Spending most of your resources on graphics may not be the most efficient use of them. If game play is more important than the look of the game, then it would be better use of your resources to put them into game play and not graphics.
That was the point of the OP, what is more important to the consumer.
Your post was not insightful.
As long as the graphics are capable of showing me what I am doing, clearly, and accurately representing what it is the game developers mean for me to be thinking I am seeing, then I think the graphics are "good enough". More eye candy is always fun, but not necessary to make a good game. Half-Life was graphically good because the developers a) made an interesting world that could be represented effectively with the system resources they had available and b) they used the graphics to represent the game world effectively.
HL1 is interesting visually because of the unique, interesting environments that you encounter in that game (granted, they are mixed in between long periods of laboratories, offices and air ducts). Crysis-grade graphics would not have improved HL1, except if the developers took advantage of Crysis-grade graphics to create something more interesting.
Stylized graphics can be great too, and generally offer more lasting visual appeal than high-grade realistic graphics. For example, when Nintendo makes a new Zelda game for hardware significantly more powerful than the Wii, Twilight Princess will be eclipsed graphically, but Wind Waker will not because wind-waker is a cartoon. Same with TF2: TF2 will not look graphically outdated for a long time, simply because the characters have a distinct look, and are not simply the best approximation of real soldiers that was possible in 2007.
Apparently the graphics only have to be as good as Castle Wolfenstein to satisfy my brain. That's the first game that caused me to bob my head to see around a corner on my monitor. Compared to today's games, Castle Wolfenstein is about like Pokemon, though I've never played Pokemon so I'm guessing. On the other hand, I get a different kind of enjoyment out of the graphics when they succeed in bringing distant objects into the field of vision and paint things with actual photos of things. I agree the game play is the most important. Nobody wants to spend hours overcoming the same challenge in slightly different circumstances over and over again. I get a bigger kick out of a good physics engine and amusingly good AI than the graphics. I was highly impressed when I was the subject of vehicular hot pursuit in Far Cry and when I turned around to try a head-on confrontation with the pursuers, they veered off the road and crashed into a boulder, blowing up themselves and their vehicle. It may have been a random binary accident but I was very impressed.
World of Warcraft is the most popular game of all time. It attracts hardcore power gamers as well as 7 year old power nappers. The graphics engine for that game has essentially never been upgraded, and most of the graphics are downright cartoony. Subscription fees alone gross over $150 million every month. Graphics only sell to hardcore gamers with high end machines, and while they most definitely add a great deal of immersion, many people who play games could care less how much better this water looks than the last game's water. All that really matters is that it looks good enough, and plays very well.
You need to remember it's selling the games that are important. If you put to games side by side that you haven't played you will probably pick up the more visually appealing of the too if you have no other knowledge about the game.
Rest assured that most people picking up the game have little or no knowledge about the title.
As a PC gamer I would say the game play is much more important. Graphics are good as long as they are not so intense that it brings the PC to its knees to draw them. I have a decent machine with a good graphics card (Nvidia 8800 GTS). If the graphics are very good but the game play sucks the game will tank. If the game play is really good and the graphics suck you will at least get some followers. Balancing these is the key. Game developers in some companies haven't figured that out yet.
I'm glad someone else mentioned this!
X-COM still has the distinction of being the only game that has ever caused me to jump out of my chair. If you don't think you can get scared by 640x480 graphics or whatever that was...try it.
I still think the original was the most terrifying though; Terror from the Deep never quite worked for me.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I like more interactivity, like what you achieve with a physics engine, over improved graphics. But the main concern is about how the game changes in difficulty, to make something that continually stays challenging and never becomes impossible or extremely easy. Sometimes ranked multi-player systems achieve this, but i would like to see more single player games that do not have set difficulty caps, but a changing difficulty based on your performance.
I prefer different graphic styles with different games. I like having top graphcis for Half life and say crysis, but i also like the graphics in plants vs zombies.
It the game drops below 30 fps, it breaks the magic with the same kind of effect as when you watch a TV show and they break the 4th wall... Which is why I laugh so hard at all those X360 and PS3 fanatics out there. I don't want to play a beautiful slideshow.
capcha: Twitter. Damn, that troll is EVERYWHERE!
I am divided on this point.
Sure, I still like Ports of Call, Dune II, et cetera, because their game play holds up very, very well. But there is a limit.
I found that out when I tried to replay Carmageddon -- OH MY EYES TEH GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING! -- I remembered it as being a fairly pretty (if gore-filled) game with nice body damage (the cars! I'm referring to the cars!) ... but when I replayed it, it suddenly dawned upon me that it wasn't 3D-accellerated, everything was blocky almost beyond recognition. This was quite a shock, because I swear I never noticed that when playing it the first time 'round.
I guess what I'm saying is, good games don't need good graphics, but games that make a point out of their graphics better have good ones.
This holds up rather well I find: I was an avid Day of Defeat player (before the DoD v2 days), and even though the graphics could have been better they were *sufficient for the task* -- which was to get you to duck the hell for cover at every crack, not to be impressed by the effects.
Conversely, a certain unnamed rally game may have all the lens flare effects in the world, but if the physics are all wrong then it's a dud. It's all very good that the car doors get dented and the windows smashed when you hit the rail, but if just turns your vector instead of slowing and turning the entire car, the rest is just pointless bling.
"Good news, everyone!"
HoMM III is good... but what about HoMM IV? Entirely 2D but, I felt, it plays absolutely terrible. V came along and entirely renewed my faith in the franchise. I logged many hours in Heroes III, but Heroes V might be my favorite of the series. I like being able to spin the Camera, see character trot around as fluid, 3D models. For what it's worth, Heroes 2 is pretty much the same game as Heroes III, IV, V... why aren't you playing heroes II... or I for that matter?
Do not discredit our most holy historical documentaries!
"Good news, everyone!"
"I also prefer Nethack over Diablo 2"
But you're forgetting most people believe the first games they are exposed to 'are the best ones' I call it the first ecounter effect(tm) because they have never experienced anything like that before one gets an overdose of excitement/fun and tends to embellish the experience because one has *never* experienced it. The more you experience same or similar games the more difficult it can be to remain entertained.
The order in which you experience games has an impact on how you decide later generations of games quality. For anybody that never played nethack, Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 certainly live up to being great fun experiences of deep enough complexity and that's what matters.
We can never assume gamers will have played every obscure game under the sun, this is why medicority tends to be the norm over time - as new kids come into the world without any history of games their level of taste and discernment is low, they are easy to please because they have no prior experiences.
The fact is after playing Super metroid, I found it hard to go back and play metroid 1. You are unusual in the fact that you downgrade your experience. I doubt you would mind an upgrade to nethack that enhanced the visuals and keeps the game exactly the same, since the mechanics are still the same.
By and large many gamers see metroid -> super metroid as the same in terms of game mechanics, so why play one with crappier graphics when you can get the same experience?
The gameplay mechanics difference between NES metroid and Super metroid is marginal at best. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel here IMHO.
If they were radically different you'd have a point as in the difference between say Supre metroid (2D) vs Metroid prime (3D). Even I found the metroid prime's not as good as the 2D games on the cube, but... that's only because doing metroid in 3D doesn't quite work the same way as the way metroid is structured.
I found Echoes boring, and there were parts of the original metroid prime that bored me to tears so that I couldn't play it through a second time without being bored to tears by the lack of action and the lethargic pace, the FPS style did not work well for metroid since I was always itching for more action instead of the slow as mollases cumbersome-to-control metroid experience.
While games with flashy graphics often work well when they're just released, they quickly die after they age and newer & graphically better games are released.
It's the game with superior gameplay and/or superior content that live forever. Take Fallout (the first), it is immortal due to its content (story, setting & atmosphere are excellent) and solid gameplay (real decisions, tactical combat,...). This while the graphics were very mediocre when released (we're talking the same era as HL1, people tend to forget that), and some gameplay was severely defective (companions, scrolling the inventory, money,...).
But before someone tells me to 'get with the times' and 'stop championing ancient outdated turn-based games', the same goes for classic shooters like Counterstrike (beta to 1.6, non-Source). In essence, the game was good due to simple gameplay, and not graphics. People still play it actively today because of it. Today it is ugly, hitboxes are crude at best, and so on, but the gameplay remains hard to beat for an online teambased shooter.
It's really too bad, but understandable that the industry is mostly going for the 'easy buck' by implementing the good graphics games and running with them. It generates revenue, so so what if it doesn't become a legend in the industry?
It is a very sad day where companies who champion content and/or gameplay over graphics have trouble finding publishers and funding. Troika, we'll never forget you!
If it had a better plot and characters than Casablanca, I'd be first in line.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I'd argue that you're comparing fundamentally different things. Consider, clearly graphics aren't important for a story - I can enjoy reading a book. Similarly there are comic books where the graphics clearly aren't realstic. But if I'm watching a story in the form of a film, it detracts from the experience if the props are made of cardboard, and the characters are played by bad actors, who are wearing obviously false beards.
So just as with books and comics, there are plenty of examples of games that can be enjoyable with no or unrealistic graphics, such as puzzle games or rogue-like games. But when you're playing something like an FPS, that is meant to provide a first person viewpoint, I think some level of realism is important in the way that it is with films.
Would an FPS work with either text, or unrealistic iconic graphics? I'm not sure it would work as well.
Of course, then there's the issue of cartoon-style rendering - unrealistic, but to do it well still requires decent 3D engines and good hardware to run it on.
And an obvious point is that whilst books and comics, and I imagine some styles of games with non-realistic graphics (e.g., puzzle games) still sell well, you don't tend to see films or FPS games that sell well with unrealistic years old graphics. So I'd argue that bringing up the example of rogue games is no more relevant than the example of a book - you need to show me an example of modern day FPS games with poor graphics.
Oh hell yeah. The moments when you twitched when you heard that PZAUH from behind your team when you thought you already scouted an area, only to find out one pesky grey managed to hide behind a blind corner. Especially during night missions when you couldn't see well, plus the general creep factor of the music.
I hope I can still find my copy, I think I know what I'll play when I come home. Anyone know how to run it sensibly on XP or Vista?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wait up, you're telling me there are games now with 3D graphics? Woah, that's like, craaaaazy man.
Still I don't see the point of it. I know that my little yellow dude with the pie-slice mouth eating the little dots is the good guy and the arch-shapes with raggedy bottoms are 'ghosts' and that's all the graphical information I need. I say sound is more important. Wakka wakka wakka wakka... eat them up yum yum
The main reasons I preferred Super Metroid over Metroid 1 have more to do the fact Super Metroid fixed all the previous flaws of Metroid 1 (save points, better controls, no grinding for health and item pickups), and really brought out what made the first one great in the first place (non-linearity, bigger world, more upgrades, in-game map, more interesting *gameplay* mechanics). The better graphics were a nice, minor bonus at most, but that didn't even factor into my comparison of the games when I played Metroid 1 after Super Metroid years ago.
For similar reasons, this is why I prefer the remake of Metroid 1 (Zero Mission) over the original. The graphics really have little to do with it.
This all being said, Metroid 1 is still up there amongst my favourite games in the series.
"Suspension of Disbelieve" is the professional term for the thing you're describing.
No, this isn't true. Half-life is, of course, such an important milestone in gaming mainly because of stuff not directly related to the graphics. However, Half-life simply could not have existed if it had looked like Doom. A certain level of realism was required for Valve to reach their goals in terms of gameplay and story telling.
Graphics alone will rarely make a game better, but better graphics actually create the possibilities of certain types of improved gameplay. Could Star Wars have been created with 1950s movie tech? No, the advances in special effects had to be created first and then used in an exciting way.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
One word, my friend: marketing. A shiny trailer, or a few nifty pics for reviewers to reference, will get the core gaming market to eat your game up like candy, with very little concern for anything else. It's an easy cash-in.
The fact is, most places are replacing the story with special effects. Why? I think it has to do with corporate types who like to be able to see and understand what they are working on.
Special effects? You can show these guys a clip of this great looking water for 10 seconds and there will be ohhs and ahhs all over.
Try to show them the story line for a game that will make a game last for 20 to 30 hours? That means they would have to pay attention for a certain length of time.
Don't believe me? Here is a nice article on the subject.
While they are referring to pron in the article, I believe this also applies to games. I prefer games where there is some sort of progression or storyline, which is why I have not bought a new computer game in like 2 years.
My favorite game of all time for gameplay?
Tie Fighter the original when you play as an Imperial pilot to take down the rebel scum.
Graphics? Terrible, but the Gameplay? second to none. That really got you involved.
I'm probably in a minority here though :)
...A game with great graphics and poor gameplay will have decent early sales, but these will drop off quickly as people discover the bugs or design errors in the gameplay....
This has happened far too often. The most recent example I can think of is Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which has amazing graphics but gameplay that is nearly broken. (How the bloody hell am I supposed to shoot my gun and hit something in a third person game if there's no auto aim and not even a freaking targeting reticle?!) Without that problem, I think the game would have sold well.
I have a bad feeling about this...
I think some poeple just want to push the envelope, which is great. There will always be an audience for the latest and most amazing graphics even if it is temporary.
But I think most good delelopers know that while engaging visuals are important, it comes secondary to gameplay and mechanics.
Perosnally, I will always try a demo of a game showing off the latest graphics (I am a visual artist), but if the gameplay is terrible or passe, it gets deleted quickly no matter how beautiful it is, it is definitely not enough to keep a game around.
I think all games should have a good story that is replayable. Gamers are paying $50 plus for games now and developers are spending way too much time on graphics and they are losing franchises because of poor replay value or poor gameplay. It would be nice to see the prices come down, but that won't be happening, so let's see some better gameplay and storylines.
For me graphics are not a selling point. I would rather play a low quality game that keeps me entertained for weeks than a high res, good looking game that I'm bored of in an hour, especially when I have to shell out the $$. I think the answer to your question really comes from the marketing. High quality graphics is something that is very easy to sell on, it has an immediate "wow-factor" (to quote the Billy Mays). You can show a 20 second clip of a high res game and very clearly get your message across. However it is much harder to show how enjoyable a low res game is in a commercial setting. (At least that's my take on it).
There are tilesets that people have developed for nethack, and even some with 3Dish isometric views. However, a lot of people including myself still use the ascii version since in reality the tileset actually gets in the way of the game itself, especially with respect to identifying stuff in the game. It's also just a distraction in general from the core gameplay itself, which is what most people remember from it, not the kind of graphics or tileset that it uses.
No they aren't, you really haven't played either of them if you think that. I bet you also think Zero Mission is just Metroid 1 with better graphics.
"So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games?"
Simple answer? Money, Greed, and Profits. Sure, Wii games compete with the best of them, but you sure as hell aren't gonna sell that hardcore gamer your brand new Dual-proc, Quad-SLI mobo and a double purchase of Nvidia Thundercrossflame 2GB DDR4 triple-headed SLI video cards and 1200W six-rail power supply with lame-ass graphics that can run on any embedded Intel chip. We need to be convinced that $1500 worth of upgrades is "needed requirements" for ultra-real gameplay. Again, no offense to Pokemon and Wii, to each their own, but seriously, like we actually need 8 cores and 6GB of memory to run the OS, an Office suite and a browser? Please.
Really makes you wonder if Game companies aren't being "subsidized" by hardware vendors to keep sales up and convince us we "need" to be in the upgrade loop every 2 years with home PCs.
One thing to remember though, Half-Life was a generation behind on the graphical curve, it was no where near state of the art when it came out. Quake 2 was already out a year when it came out and it was based on Quake 1.
Graphics don't have to be both. By this date the graphics of Civilization 3 aren't cutting edge and weren't even when it was released but they are done well.
Graphics do assist with suspension of disbelief, but so do, just as much, the physics of the game and level design. Better graphics can enable better level design and better portrayal of fancy physics systems, but by themselves graphics only do so much to assist in that suspension of disbelief.
A pretty world for your character to explore will help little if there are texture seams all over the place or if your character can't interact with the world, up against it as if it were merely a painting. By intelligently laying out levels and world details, super graphics or no, and by making sure world physics and character interactions are detailed and have some basis in realistic expectations (unlike the perennial inability of characters to climb on top of objects which only come up to their chest) you tap into something which I think is more important that merely the number of polygons and shaders being applied to the world.
was it ever playable? had to ask you
Actually, yes, graphics should be the #1 focus of survival horror primarily because those games are supposed to draw you and and hopefully unnerve you. Nobody plays Silent Hill for super-innovative gameplay. Trying scaring someone on 8-bit arcade graphics.
Have you ever played the Atari VCS game, Adventure? Those dragon/ ducks scare the fscking crap out of me. They roar, gobble you up, and can appear out of nowhere at any time.
There are only 3 of them lurking somewhere in the maze. You have to watch your back while going about your buisness. You may laugh, but they can be quite unnerving.
All this from a single colored sprite, on a 128 byte RAM machine without a frame buffer.
Trying scaring someone on 8-bit arcade graphics.
OK, done.
It runs awesome in DOSBOX.
You are correct that a certain minimum in graphics can make a very large difference to a game experience. But I have come to the conclusion that gameplay still beats graphics every time. Although I still drool over these shiny new graphics game every single time and I wish my favorite games had better graphics - in the end gameplay is STILL more important to me. Most of the games that I still really enjoy playing are older games. There are some few notable exceptions (e.g. Portal), but they are far between.
The key is not graphics, but art. Nethack is probably the last game to be good with little artistic merit. Every good game after that has had great art. Art could mean things besides graphics, like good stories. But the most obvious thing is graphical art. Art is why the graphically-average Half-Life will be remembered, but the graphically-cutting edge but artistically weak Crysis will some day be forgotten.
Graphics are like the special effects of a movie. Absolutely they shouldn't be the "point" of the game, or movie. But if the graphics (or special effects) are well done, and convincing, they can really help the immersion experience.
Graphics ARE gameplay. These are not my words but those of one of the writers at Rock Paper Shotgun.
It's something I've always thought myself.
Talking about gameplay and graphics as separate things is like talking about gameplay without talking about the goals or rules of a game.
Couldn't agree more. Look at some of the concept screens for Braid, as compared with the final product. Without the incredible atmosphere that game would have been neat but not quite as magical.
Perhaps everyone here is missing the point. So lets break out the car analogy shall we?
If there are two cars on a lot, and both of them are in good running condition, and both are pretty sporty, but one is shiny and polished with clean lines, and the other is dull and faded with boxy lines.. which would you look at first?
It isn't that one is necessarily better than the other it's that one has obviosly had more care than the other and that is the issue here. Game manufacturers are just as wise to this as are car dealers. They know people believe that the shiny clean graphic mean there is a better chance they will get a well thought out game
once more into the breach
The concept of Dead Space had me very much looking forward to playing it. Once I did though, I had a very hard time continuing for any amount of time because some idiot put the camera behind the main character's back, so roughly 1/3 of the screen is me staring at someone's back and trying to see around him because, you know, I'm leading this expedition. Let me get up front please. Anyway, with the obstructed view and bad control scheme (not fully remappable) I wasn't able to play it any more past the first level, though I would have liked to see how it ended, I could not stand playing it another minute. Then recently I was looking forward to playing the ghostbusters game and found out it has the exact same perspective. "you can always see if your proton pack is overheating by looking at the glowing gauge on your back." Because you know, looking at a guage on the back of your backpack is so easy with the eyes that sprout from the back of your head. I wrangled one ghost in the basement and that was more than enough for me. I uninstalled it and hope someday someone does a better job with a remake or something. I have little tolerance for bad game design. 3rd person is okay when done right. All of the Grand Theft Auto games for example get it perfectly right. Mercinaries 2, and most recently 'Prototype' (excellent game btw) do 3rd person well. Dead Space, Ghostbusters, Gears of War... do 3rd person terribly. Directly to the topic...a bad choice in graphics style can ruin a game just as easily as bad graphics, bad gameplay, or bad story. The graphics on the bad games I mentioned were really good, but the way those graphics were implemented actually ruined my enjoyment of the game.
640x480? LUXURY!
That was 320x200.
Interesting perspective. Of course, one of the most immersive experiences anyone can have is to sit and read a good book for a few hours. And that, in most cases, doesn't involve graphics at all. The imagery and the immersion is all inside the reader's head. In some ways that's always going to be better than anything you see on the screen. I suspect the same thing is true of the roguelikes.
For that matter, it's probably true to an extent of all those old, old games with 8 and 16 bit graphics. I mean, I can remember being just as enthralled playing Doomdark's Revenge on the Spectrum as ever I've been playing Oblivion. It's not as if you take the pictures on the monitor for actual reality: the graphics just provide the outline of a scene: the player's imagination fleshes out the details.
I'm not suggesting immersion isn't important. From a game design viewpoint it's vital. But then, immersion is what it's always been about - ever since the first caveman told the first fireside ghost story. Immersion is a desirable quality in any media experience, but as in the case of a good novel, you can have immersion without good graphics, or indeed any graphics at all.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Well Valve took the QuakeWorld engine, but they heavily modified it, and even incorporated some of the Q2 features. I wouldn't say that the Q2 engine was significantly better or worse than Half Life's GoldSrc engine.
One of the best games I have ever played. Atmosphere was great, story was great, and the graphics were terrible even at the time of release. I would have never bought the game on an impulse due to the fact that the graphics just made it look old. I was an informed consumer that had read many reviews about how great a game it was so I bought it. Most people aren't informed consumers so graphics are some of the appeal when they look at the box in a store. This game never did too well despite being awesome and I think the graphics were a large part of that.
I believe you mean "Suspension of Disbelief"
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
Technically no. Half-Life was near cutting-edge when it was released. The Quake2 engine added colored lighting and multitexturing to the Quake1 engine (I've looked at both sources- they share a lot of the same underlying code). Half-Life was based on the Quake1 tech, but Valve added multitexturing and colored lighting as well, as well as Direct3D support (HL1 had software, OpenGL, and D3D modes out of the box).
I could possibly argue that HL was technically superior to Quake2 as it had decals (bullet pock marks and blood spatters) and skeletal animation.
Sigs are for losers
Meh...who needs graphics?!?
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with
a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Depends on the game. Zork didn't really rely on graphics, and that was a great game. Still available, free, at http://www.infocom-if.org/downloads/downloads.html .
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Thats it. Thats the key.
The atmosphere.
A great book can create a greater atmosphere than a good movie.
Its all about edging on what makes us jump or dash for something.. the old monster under the bed mentatlity we held when we were kids..
I just think that now that the suprise has been taking out of a lot of things and people know the formula.. they 'expect' brilliant graphics as a compensation for doing some kind of work. i.e knowing how the game will end when they finish they want the journey to be eye candy.
I dont know if I am onto something here.. but if I am.. I would love to here other peoples thoughts here.. moreso on what makes a game create atmosphere without eye candy..
I used to play various Vampire Wars based MUDs and was only limited by my imagination....... When I play a game with graphics I'm stuck with what's on the screen
When you're hammered everything looks like it needs nailed....
Yes - the original half life was a spectacular game and it still is. But you know what? It's not the graphics that did it - at least not by modern standards.
Would Valve have been able to create the same experience with worse graphics? I just don't think Half-life on the Duke3d engine, for instance, would have worked.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yes, it holds a favourite place for me as well. There is a new one which appears to be even more destructive to the game environment. The first one had the Geo-Mod stuff but it really didn't feature at all beyond a single point where you needed to make a hole around a door - most of the time the game environment was static. Multiplayer was awesome though. But I think what helped it was the combination of weapons that was in it as well as the game play. I was thinking about playing the original just before too!
I always wondered where this setting was...
By saying that I don't mean that they have to be "state of the art photorealistic 3d" or any such thing. The graphics must have a good artistic style to them, and be consistent visually with the rest of the game itself.
My experience is that while gameplay is equally important, the best game gameplay wise won't keep me playing without "good" graphics. Just as fantastic graphics won't keep one playing if the gameplay sucks, and that doesn't mean say, nethack doesn't have good graphics, the ascii map is exactly what the game needs to be fun. So it's plenty good enough. On the other side I've seen games with the most fantastic modern up-to-date 3d engines, that are so barren and boring visually that who cares that the engine is good, who can even tell, the graphics are crap.
I think what you hit on perfectly here is that the graphics need to serve the game. The 3D graphics in 5 were more technical and higher resolution, but they weren't as good for the game. Being turn based top-down/isometric meant that with 2D there was much better separation and identification of units and items.
In a driving game, for example, high fidelity 3D makes the game more playable rather than less. The judge of graphics should be playability, rather than resolution/poly count/texturing.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Actually, the immersion is when you play the game without noticing it. If you can't tell how much time you have been playing, it's pretty much immersion. If you can stay concentrate on the game without having something that disturb you. That's exactly the immersion.
Playing a good game in part is escapism, make-believe. If a game doesn't somehow take me beyond my current reality in some way (even if that means intellectual immersion or a Skinner Box) then why play? Why not do something productive?
Because of the challenge. In what way would you say that chess, poker, or basketball takes you "beyond your current reality"? I don't think they do, they're fun because the game mechanics are good. You don't need make-believe to have a good game.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Not sure if you'd consider it 8-bit arcade graphics or not, but in Doom 2, the sound of an Archvile howling always scared me. The sprite itself wasn't realistic or scary, but I knew what it was capable of, but I hadn't even *seen* it at this point. It was far more horrifying than any shiny ray-traced monster saliva.
I played Doom 2 after I played Half-Life, and in HL the scariest moments were probably stepping round the blind tentacle monsters, or running towards the kill switch while the behemoth charging after me down a corridor, and all I could see was its one red eye.
Graphics are of some importance to atmosphere, but they are not everything.
I think it is "suspension of disbelief".
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
Personally, I think to a degree it's about getting people in the consumer sector to fund certain kinds of technological development. Realistic simulators with a good interface are important to, say, building military drones, and Americas Army: The Game is pretty compelling evidence that the military thinks it's important to be involved in this sort of technology. Could be there are back room contracts that game engines are being built to meet, after which the creator can scoop up some extra cash selling games on the side.
Hell, John Carmack builds a) 3D engines and b) spacecraft. He would totally have both the skills and the connections that would make these sorts of business arrangements plausible.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
...I'd like to see more time spent on making the game world more realistic to be in, not look at.
We already have (for example), games with beautiful reflective water, swaying foliage with real-time shadowing, stunning skies and scenery. With character modelling the way it's going, we're well on our way out of the uncanny valley too.
The problem is that none of this stuff matters if you - the player - is basically a camera pole mounted on tracks with a couple of utility arms tacked on. You can swivel your vision around, you've got a gun for shooting stuff, you've got some kind of 'use' tool (most of the time) and you can alternate speeds and posture. I.e: Walk, run, crouch and jump a bit (usually without ever getting tired).
But you can't climb over that metre high wall, lie on your back and watch the sun rise and set in real-time and you can't dance.* You can't really interact with the game world at all except to "activate" stuff with your 'use' button. It's like being a brain in a robot body.
I'd like to see some basic physical interaction with the environment along the lines of things getting wet from water, fires started in grass and bush actually spreading by the wind, and then the scenery staying burned afterwards.
I'm not interested in how my gun fires individually modelled bullets or the floppiness of my enemies' corpses.
*Jumping up and down on the spot and shuffling/running around is not dancing. Unless you're a punk or high.
Yes, I was hoping someone would mention that game. Creepiest/scariest game I've ever played.
Now Bond trips over something so it breaks and you see it's only a cardboard prop. That'd break all the immersion and remind you it's all just illusion.
I'd like to add something to this point. For me, it's not so much about graphics looking realistic as it is about a game looking *dynamic*. The greatest shortcoming of most games is that the world isn't dynamic. If I see a photorealistic fancy flag waving (or not waving) exactly the same way from day to day, hour to hour - then I remember it's just a game. I'm in a picture, even if it's an animated 3-d photorealistic one.
Then again, it does breaks immersion to see something utterly unrealistic. I had such a moment playing Star Wars: Galaxies, when I realized I could see stars through moons! From that moment, I wasn't seeing a moon, I was seeing a translucent texture in the sky..
A dynamic world works wonders for me. Even in a game like Dwarf Fortress, which uses textmode graphics. Every single thing in the game can be cut, including everything from mountains to cats, and a dwarf becomes a dead dwarf when he dies (or maybe parts of a dwarf, depending on what killed it). I find no problem at all getting immersed to the game and caring for my dear ascii characters.
Funny, if I were to list my top 10 favorite games of all time, the vast majority would be what you consider to be inferior. And I'm only 25 for Christ sake.
In no particular order:
Deus Ex
Starcraft
Nethack
Earthbound
Chrono Trigger
FF VII
Portal
FF X
Mario 64
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Of those, I would consider only Portal and FF X to be 'modern' games and neither one is really known for their amazing graphics. And no, it isn't just nostalgia that makes them good; I still break out nearly all of them from time to time and play. Earthbound is especially noteworthy because it had sub-par graphics even for the time it was released and what's more, the graphics were sub-par on purpose because the developers didn't want the graphics to distract from the game play.
So Might and Magic V had, wait for it, bad graphics! You just made the argument that graphics go hand-in-hand with gameplay. You can have great gameplay that is ruined by bad graphics, you can have great graphics that are ruined by bad gameplay, or you can have both.
Now let me explain "good" and "bad" here. "Good" graphics are those that support the immersion of the player within the game. Good graphics complement the gameplay. Good graphics let you slip into the story. Bad graphics remind you that you are just moving pixels.
Good and Bad gameplay and graphics are purely subjective of course. It's possible that someone out there thought that Might and Magic III was a neat game crippled by horrible graphics, and fanatically adores Might and Magic V.
There's a patch for the gold edition to run in XP. Otherwise you can run DOSBox on it just fine.
Clovis is on to something here. I think when we say graphics, we also mean game physics. Improved reality-simulation is how I'd describe it.
Improved "reality-sim" is just another way to provide contrast to a user and developer. The more the graphics/physics remind a human of real life (or at least life that is familiar), then the contrasting relationships of materials become intuitive (people don't have to re-learn what everything will probably do--if they see a beer bottle sitting on a trash can, then it would be easy to imagine breaking the glass or putting the bottle into the trash can). People like to solve problems in systems that are intuitive. I is why games that simulate reality are sometimes successful. People like something new and fresh.
Also people like to market with quantifiable / visually-qualifiable information. You have a sales-edge if you say your game has double the g-bits. And people can get wowed by the spectacle of a game like they've never seen before.
Graphics often define the style of the game. Rocket Riot for example has a complete 8-bit retro style, which is obvious in the artwork even though it's a new game. Had it been made with beautiful modern smooth vector sprites, it wouldn't have the same retro feel. On the other hand, serious games like Crysis are obviously serious when you first see them because of the excessive amounts of realism reflected in the graphics ( and the whole game ).
Precisely. The definition of the word Immersed is "To engage wholly or deeply". This can be done with or without good graphics. Some people just can't wrap their heads around a game that doesn't have pixel shaders and z-buffers. I recently started playing Final Fantasy VI(a two dimensional sprite based game) and I am completely immersed.
Funny that nethack and Diablo 1 and 2 are mentioned in the same sentence - Diablo 1 was originally intended to be a turn based, graphical rogue/hack clone, but when they experimented with realtime they found it extremely fun and addictive and thus the game evolved into what it ended up. Having worked for another game company, I can tell you we'd have never been given the chance to do experimental changes like that - if it didn't fit into the original design document, it didn't go into the game (and they tossed games entirely rather than changing them to make them fun).
To me, gameplay often makes or breaks a game, as well. I played Wing Commander on the PC and absolutely loved it, but Super Wing Commander on the mac was terrible, despite updated graphics. Why? the mouse controls were awful, and the joystick controls mediocre (a cheap joystick may have been better than the flightstick like I had). Really it was almost unplayable. Civilization was just the opposite - while civ 1 was good on the PC, the mac version was vastly better. Not only were the graphics vastly improved (256 colors vs 16), but it included numerous easy-access convenience features like civpedia.
As far as graphical realism goes, I don't think there is a wrong answer - Dali did cubism, surrealism, dada, sculpture and even realism and animation (Destino, with Disney), Picasso did cubism, drawings and ceramics, Disney did cel shading and animation. All created fantastic pieces of art in their own respect.
As far as the original post goes, effects like true radiosity are still a ways off, though they can be approximated. True radiosity rendered in realtime would be extremely expensive, even in simple scenes - when I used it with ray tracing, my ray tracing was about 100x slower - note that I was using a 100MHz MIPS processor at the time and it took about 7 hours to render my scene, and I believe the scene had about 200 objects (one of my teammates wrote the shape code and the scene, another wrote the ray tracer, and I wrote the radiosity code).
Graphics and prettiness are a Good Thing - BUT, should not be the first priority. Function (websites) or Gameplay (games) should be the cake, and then you apply the icing afterwards - if you have the resources, and if it doesn't spoil the cake.
Pardon the double layered metaphors. Mmm double layered.
I'm prepping a video review of the game, and you've just touched on a major strength. Nothing says "brown trousers time" like walking through a doorway, finding a pack of Snakemen waiting for you, and having *just* enough to time to fire *one* snap shot.
The graphics on the game are not astounding, though by the standards of it's day they did look nice. It's the gameplay that makes it.
The enemy in that game doesn't pop out of nowhere like a lot of survival horror game enemies do. In XCOM, the aliens get the drop on you because of tactical errors and advantages. If you play it right, you'll see them coming like a pro. Play it wrong, you'll walk right into a death trap.
Everybody name your favourite game.
Yeah, thats what I thought, no one said Crysis. Your favourite game is never the latest and greatest graphical appeal. Its the most addicting Gameplay, and all Graphics have to do is suffice well enough to understand the gameplay.
I got into Red Faction: Guerrila Recently. It's graphics are about on par with Mass Effect, which was released like a year ago. What makes it fun is leveling buildings, not the stuble on my character.
It does run very well in DOSBox. Steam is selling the original game for $5, and you can buy the whole pack of sequels for $10.
Steam actually packages DOSBox with it, but it runs great in your own DOSBox install. Just lift the data files out of the install directory and you're off.
IMO you can tell if a game is innovating or not when you look at what they are boasting. If people only talk about the graphics in the game, you can almost always be sure there are no real innovation in game play. It's a long and annoying running theme in FPS games. In the end, a FPS is a FPS is a FPS. Regardless of story or mini games, the core game play of these games changed very little since the 1990s. How people can get immersed in the same thing over and over again is beyond me. Why people would 'escape' to a war zone is even more mind boggling. I think that rather than being immersed in a FPS, people play those kind of games to vent frustration or to prove superiority at the comfort of their own home. If it is only about realism, they might as well stop playing games and start playing paintball.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Chess is easy. It's no trouble at all to get lost concentrating on any highly abstract problem. I can "zen out" playing Chess with no trouble at all.
Basketball and poker, I don't play. I do, however, think that physical like basketball have a different psychological profile to computer games. I think it taps into a different part of our mind. That said, I've had extremely immersive games of pinball before now, which I'd tend to put more in the category of sports than of computer game, so I suspect it's entirely possible.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Sonofa, where are my mod points?
Agreed. But other factors can mitigate graphics too. Sound, for example -- In The Pit is an XBOX community game that has no graphics whatsoever, and is incredibly fun. You play a blind monster in the bottom of a dark pit, hunting down the pathetic mewling victim of an evil king who throws them down to you as food.
The podcast "Hatchet Job" did a marvelous interview with the designer/programmer R. Hunter Gough. They intelligently and thoroughly discuss how a video game works without video. There's a link on the site to the marketplace to pick up ItP as well.
WHat the hell is immersion anyway? I never feel like I'm a character in any game- I'm me. I'm playing a game. I don't want to feel more like I'm a pretend character, I want the gameplay mechanics to be more fun to use and the strategy level/difficulty level to be correct. If that's there, I have fun. If its not, trying to make me think I am the character won't help.
Immersion doesn't mean "I have forgotten that this is a game and I now believe that I'm Bob the Dwarf."
Immersion means "Holy shit, it's 4 AM, when did that happen?"
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
You should play Dead Space then. There were several times, as I was playing that game, when I peed a little.
BRE
"Dude check me out. I'm like a little otter. A SEXY little otter"
I've been immersed in a book before, not to mention an interactive fiction game. I don't mean that I completely forgot that I was holding a book or typing "take no tea." I just mean that if an experience is compelling enough, it draws you in whether by great description and powerful language or high realism. Once you abandon a verbal description, you kind of have to rely on the graphics, but a great deal can still be achieved by words, sounds, tones of voice, etc.
Take Diablo II as an example. Half the fun of that game is the sound. This post is getting a bit directionless so I'm going to stop now :|
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Nethack did not need flashy graphics to be fun.
Neither did Ultima 7.
Neither did Fallout 1 and 2.
Neither did Zork.
Neither did Civilization 3.
Neither did Heroes of Might and Magic 2.
Neither did Postal 2.
I remember these games more fondly than I remember Battlefield 2, Quake 4, Doom 3, Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2, Civ 4, Farcry, Fallout 3, HoMM 5 and so on.
It may just be that I'm remembering them through the rose tinted spectacles, but I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that you did not need solid graphics to make a game that was enjoyable. Hell, I remember games that pretty much died before they went gold where the alpha demo release was more fun than most games I've played since [Please reference "Amulets and Armor" and "AIWars"]. Here is a good idea if you want to write good games:
STOP WORRYING ABOUT GRAPHICS. START WORRYING ABOUT STORY. I don't care that you're utilizing all 5,000,000,000 pixel pipelines to render the most lifelike water possible. In fact, I don't want you to. That's right. It is a waste of money on everyone's part (yours, R mine, bigger faster hardware) that everyone is better off not dealing with. Modern gaming is often like giving a shiny new paint job to your dented up old 1992 Cavalier. It still doesn't change the fact that you're trying to polish a turd. Stop half-heartedly implementing story affecting elements. I don't want an illusion of a choice. I want an actual choice. I'm looking at you, KotOR (and Infamous, and KotOR 2). If you're going to have some sort of morality system, make it be believable issues of morality, and not just two oversimplified choices such as "Devour the orphans" and "Build them a new orphanage". May as well just ask me straight up in the beginning if I want a blue lightsaber or a red one, and then just skip straight to action. Stop insulting me with your watered down plot and actually give me something to muse about. For examples of this, see Fallout 1 or 2, or possibly Planescape: Torment if you can actually find a copy.
Pretty water is nice for a tech demo or if you're making a CG movie, but as I understand, games don't have the budget that Hollywood can come up with, so if you're dumping coin into pizzaz, then you're taking coin from story writing and making the plot more in-depth.
And for fuck's sake, bring back co-op multiplayer and LAN play.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Because the rest of the world doesn't agree with your views. You're a game developer, you're going to be probably more of a purist than the end-gamer (is that a term?). That's like saying, why do we have Blu-Ray? I just care about the plot and history of the movie.
The obvious question is, why shouldn't gamers expect it all? Compelling gameplay, great story lines and breathtaking graphics?
What sort of harebrained nonsense is this? Starcraft survived from 1990s to today, with 800x600 2d graphics. There are lots of people still playing the classic arcade and atari games on their hand held devices. Tetris is as popular as ever. The only reason to have nice graphics is so your game can 'wow' people and catch attention. The same can be achieved with a high end sales team.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Yes, but that's the nature of the Roguelike. It's turn-based and most of the keyboard keys all serve some function, so why shouldn't the graphics reflect the gameplay in that way?
If a game like Crysis had monochrome visuals with low-poly models, it wouldn't be the same experience.
It's like if you took a metal band and had a hip-hop producer make their album. Sure, the songs would be metal, but none of it would sound right.
I'm a graphics boy... I'll admit. I love a good plot line and game play mechanic as much as the next guy... but beautiful and highly technical graphics are a sure sale for me every time. It's like a guy tinkering with his car to see how far he can push his engine... I love seeing companies and programmers producing highly complex, technical, and beautiful graphical scenes. I think its a true testament to our ingenuity and grants the medium a certain artistic merit when a game is released that is graphically so game-changing that it gets folks even outside of the industry talking about the so-called "realism" of games (case-in-point, Gears of War or Heavy Rain).
Perhaps that's why I'm just as happy digging through open-source code for real time raytracing demos as I am playing games...
Are we seriously bickering over graphics vs. game play? You can't have a videogame, without some form of graphics, even text is just color(s) on the screen. Without game play, or player input, it is just a picture, or movie. I actually play more 2D games than 3D, but immersion can be better in 3D, not always though.
5 is unplayable on a dual-core Dell laptop, (except with minimal settings in 640x480),
Bulllllllllshiiiiiiit.
I play it every day on my much-wimpier-than-a-dual-core HP tablet.
Comment of the year
I just completed the game again with my original copy after 15 years.
I ran it in DOSBox on Linux, and it was flawless.
No reason it should be any different on Windows.
This game is guaranteed not to disappoint even today.
I only suggest that you replay it at a high difficulty level, as you will notice your hard earned understanding of the strategy and logistics resurfacing again, and you will have more of an edge against the aliens as you make many wise decisions in advance.
"Nobody plays Silent Hill for super-innovative gameplay."
Ain't *that* the truth.
I'd love to have a survival horror game that -does- innovate gameplay and not rely on zippy OMG ITS SO DRIPPY AND JAWFUL graphics.
I had great hopes for Call of Cthulhu, especially given the major trope of Lovecraft's monsters: you never really get to see them. I'd hoped for something more psychological and uncanny. Instead, it still came down to "look how many polygons we can render on a Great Old One -- and you can count them because he's right there in plain sight." Bah.
Apparently my kind of thinking just bounces off the shiny, radiosity-enhanced, antialiased, ansiotropic armor of game development houses these days.
"To me, gameplay often makes or breaks a game, as well."
It does for me also but this does not do away with the fact that a game has almost always had to have a minimum standard of visuals unless the mechanics were so beyond average of every copycat of everything you've played before.
As I said in my above post *all the elements of a game matter* it's that there is usually never enough time or resources to accomplish everything the team would like to get done.
For instance I always go back and play freespace 2 every now and again while I never really had the itch to play freespace 1 more then twice. When games are so good you get an itch years later to relive the experience that is proof positive they are made well.
In DOSBox you can bump up the resolution to 640*480 and it still looks awesome. :) They're doing great things to classic with scalers these days. Ur-Quan Masters has a nice array of scaling options too, for you Star Control II fans.
Depends on what you're playing, of course. Verisimilitude is something that can keep players involved as the story develops - think more of the 'interactive novel' approach to game-creation rather than the traditional 'do X, Y, Z'
I'd classify Planescape: Torment as a good example of this, particularly because of the quality of the writing within.
Ah, so your not a fan of casablanca, or more likely since this is a /. crowd 2001: a space odyssey?
I'm sorry, but just because something is old does not by default make it crap. Quality is quality, if something was ever truly good it should be able to stand up on it's own regardless of graphics.
Casablanca? no. I know it was memorable for lots of people for various reasons, but by today's standards the story is simple, the acting is wooden, and the lack of color wasn't by design but because of technical limitations.
I wouldn't say that something is crap just because it's old - the pyramids and the Saint Peter in Rome are still worth seeing - but that not all art ages equally well.
Video games and TV shows are examples of art that generally doesn't age very well. Probably because these media are relatively new, and have made such rapid progress in production quality in our lifetimes.
Immersion doesn't necessarily mean you feel like you are the character. Immersion is when you get so into playing the game that everything else stops mattering, i.e. time, other responsibilities. Have you ever sat down to play a game, and then realize later that you have been playing for HOURS but it felt like minutes? THAT is immersion.
In reference to the original question, I think that a mix of storyline and graphics is very important. Graphics don't have to be great if the gameplay and storyline is great. I made a card game with MS XNA for the Xbox, and the graphics were crappy, but the gameplay was good, so the game was fun.
> A good combination of a storyline and graphics is important in any game.
Oh please.
0. You can always tell who the kids are, thinking graphics are necessary having never played classic Text Adventures like Zork, Rogue or Nethack. (I refuse to label them with the lame "Interactive Fiction." designation.)
1. The reason games like Chess and Go have been around for over a thousand years isn't because of some story. Tetris, Tony Hawk (original), Quake (Deathmatch), etc are not great games because of story, but precisely because of great gameplay. Let me know when someone designs a computer game that lasts _that_ long. (The closest would be MUDs because of the community -- player driven story.)
Story is completely orthogonal to great gameplay. It may help. It may hinder. Its sufficient, but not necessary. Usually not required in multi-player competition games, ala Warcraft 3.
Too often story gets in the _way_ of gameplay. i.e. unskippable cutscenes or JRPG. A well done story supports gameplay.
The same is true in movies (granted much, much harder to pull off). Baraka has no character development, plot, or dialog, but it's one of the great movies. Documentaries come a close second.
That said, I appreciate a well done story. Currently playing "The Dig" -- I'm impressed with the nice blend of gameplay and story -- has a good balance of what an interactive movie should be, IMHO.
--
Having shipped games on PC, PS2, PSX, DS and Wii, I think I might know just a little about game programming & design.
The race for realism in a game strikes me as such:
People do not liek their own reality and seek to create a new one. Thus the more realistic the graphics the closer to their new reality they are.
When graphics are less realistic (I am not talking about quality) then the direction seems to strike me as an escape from reality rather then an attempt to invent a new reality.
You will hear code words like "immersion" and "experience" used rather then "entertain" or "enjoy".
We wary, there are plenty of people that would gladly exchange their material world for a virtual world to their own tastes. People it seems in growing numbers find the real world much to their disliking.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Serious question. Do you have any imagination? If I say imagine you're a trogladite in a territory war, what did you have for breakfast? Can you tell me the story or are you lost in a see of "why?" and "WTF are you on about?".
I don't know about OP, but I have found myself putting down games simply because I did not agree with the premise of the character's motives.
If the trogladite was doing behaving in a way not fitting with my personality or in ways that I could not relate (like constantly having to do things that I would consider retarded) I would loose interest very quickly.
Which is why I liked the Fallout series simply because it gave me this freedom. I could of course did things I would have considered retarded but the game didn't force me to play that way and I would have to have personal motivation for my choices.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I wish I had some mod points -- you make a great argument.
The Heroes of Might and Magic franschise are basically hex map games. There's no real benefit to going pure 3D, having revolving viewpoints and such. In 3D, units can obscure each other, making it hard to see their real positions and put them in the right spot. Turning the map around in mid-play is disorienting. (The enemy gate is DOWN!)
The 2D map view is superior when you're playing the general, moving your men around on a map. Relationships are easier to see than in 3D, in which everything is pretty while completely obscuring the tactical realities.
"Realism" is easy to chase. You don't need a strong artistic vision. You can easily guide a large team down this path: "just make it look as realistic as possible, in these restrictions" is pretty easy to articulate. The programmers can dig into research papers, the artists can go outside.
(There can be a hell of a lot of hard work put into this goal; something like Crysis has clearly been polished and loved. But its visual goals are conceptually simple: "make it look real".)
When you're striving for something striking but stylized, you need a unified artistic vision. If you have more than a couple artists on the team, you need one person whose job is pretty much just going around and saying "that's a nice model, but it doesn't quite fit the artistic vision - tweak this, this, and this and pass it by me when you're done." And the programmers have to find ways to support this style. There was a paper making the rounds a while back on the very sophisticated shaders that were developed to give Team Fortress 2 a particular feel to its lighting, for instance. There was a hell of a lot of directed work that went into making it look a certain unrealistic way.
When your restrictions are tighter, visual style becomes more important. The Pokémon games are done on 2D hardware with pixels big enough to see; they are already highly abstracted by the nature of the medium. You pretty much have to stylize and caricature the hell out of things to make them read.
Not every team has an artistic visionary. When you don't have one, "realism" is pretty much your only option.
egypt urnash minimal art.
The problem with most new games is as soon as you buy them you realize you need to upgrade or replace your entire system just to play them. I used to build my own gaming machines and year after year I had to upgrade and be my own tech support. I got tired of it and quit. Now all I have is a laptop and a netbook. I used to love playing UT99, not because it was visually stunning, it wasn't, but because it was so much damn fun. With all the cool mods and being able to design your own maps and weapons, it never got dull. Then they came out with "improved" versions of UT with shiny new graphics and reflections and fog, etc. but the game play sucked! And in order to get any kind of responsiveness out of it you had to turn off all the shiny effects or it ran like crap. I stayed with the original for as long as it was still around. I've seen all of the great new games that have come out since, but I refuse to buy a new system just to play them.
It should go without saying that the most important part of any video game is the game play; game play is the reason someone typically purchases a game. A pretty picture with beautiful graphics offers no real game play, and if Crysis were text-based it might feel a bit ... primitive, rudimentary.
I think that video games and movies share the same problems and dilemmas - especially now that CGI sequences are a dime a dozen. There are directors and producers that would rather use a simple camera trick to pull off special effects, and there are those that would rather spend $100,000,000 on CGI sequences. Is either method incorrect? Not necessarily...
Those who produce and direct games or movies need to focus on the end product - their actual goal. By intelligently and thoughtfully incorporating each and every available method, and properly using each tool, they can create a masterpiece. A game's claim to fame shouldn't be based solely on it's graphics, game mechanics - or physics engine. A truly well-made game utilizes everything to the necessary extent in order to fulfill the creators' vision or goal.
I, for one, can't play roguelikes with the ascii graphics. The original Rogue is fine, but I draw the line once you get to dozens of monsters and items sharing the same letter/symbol and only distinguishable by the color. I don't want to use the 'look' command every time something appears on the screen. That's why a roguelike needs a decent tile set before I play it (and happily, most of the good ones have one or twenty.)
Exactly. See "Too Human" for the Xbox....
(High quality doesn't necessarily mean high-end graphics technology; it means aesthetically competent and suited to the game's setting.)
This. You can create an artistic style for your game that doesn't require high-end graphics, but if you're game has a realism based art style your graphics should match. This is exceedingly important as your TV ad shows up on my big screen or during the ads at the movie theater. I'd actually say graphics are more important from a marketing point of view than enjoyment point of view.
Graphics can be great for immersion.
I've never really felt that nethack was fun, because it was ME running around in dungeons.
Nethack is fun because it speaks to logic and bad puns (i like bad puns. I like bad punch too, if it's spiked).
Although I get your point, my experience is a little different; I remember playing 'larn' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larn) (a kindof easier-to-understand/play version of nethack - i never got the hang of nethack, too many buttons perhaps?) and being really immersed; as in, addicted, driven, while playing, affected when dying, and being terrified of the letter 'd' on the screen (some dragon).
In bioshock, less so, although I still enjoyed it. I could go into why I think this is but your guess is probably as good as mine. (By which I mean, quite good, but lengthy.)
If the game is abstract, for example, realistic graphics generally don't make a lot of sense. Should somebody do an abstract game with realistic graphics, I would appreciate the art of doing that, but I don't feel it's needed.
Simulation type games lean toward realistic graphics. On those, I find quite a high value associated with realism. The game is more immersive when this is done well.
RPG games are all over the map, but generally best done with recognizable objects and good art direction. These things are an escape of sorts, and too much realism breaks that.
Then there is the simple text adventure. No graphics at all! I'm quite sure somebody could do up a 3D "Zork" like place, and a whole lot of people would recognize it for what it is, just like many people "recognized" places depicted in "Lord Of The Rings".
Pretty graphics alone don't add a lot of value, unless the game is lightweight, or maybe some kinds of puzzlers.
There just isn't one answer to this question. There are enough variables to make it an art, not a science IMHO.
Blogging because I can...
Graphics do come a close second to gameplay. I have been recently playing many of my titles from the past 3 years and with my current hardware I can crank to setting so it looks better, which is great, but the reason I am playing the game again is the gameplay, immersion and story. I tend to pick more on the little things now than the quality of graphics. like physics being just off, or AI being stupid.
I found though that good games standout regardless of graphics. Games like Oddworld, Halflife 1&2, S.t.a.l.k.e.r., and Hexic. Hexic - great game, addictive , polished. Half life series has always been stunning but if you play the first one now it seems dated in the graphics department but its still a must have. Oddworld is a game I recently picked again and its really good all around; Still is. and STALKER is the great mesh of story/gameplay/graphics, only down fall by GSC is that it is WAY too buggy at launch. Even , *hurk*(I hate wow btw), WOW has qualities that lead to great gameplay and atmosphere and the graphics are far from stunning. Every example here shows small issues that would diswade anyone from playing the game if all combined into one game, but alone as small issues the gameplay pushes it forward to being a great game.
Team Fortress 2 relies heavily on its visuals but Valve did not go for realism. Valve developed a specific look that compliments the gameplay.
Games such as the upcoming Forza Motorsport 3 and Gran Turismo 5 will rely heavily on realism. The more realistic the games are the better they will be. The enhanced graphics play a huge part in the gameplay.
Tetris on my iPhone does not need to be on the same level as GT5 (visually) to be a great game. Motion X Poker (iPhone) looks fantastic and that does add to the enjoyment factor.
I think it depends on the type of game. For FPS games, where you "are" the character, graphics really help with the feeling of immersion. For simpler RPG games, graphics are less important and the storyline becomes more important. For more complex RPG games, where exploration of the virtual world is big on the agenda (like RuneScape and WOW), graphics are a larger part of the experience than simple RPGs like Pokemon. Then there are the strategy games, like Freeciv, which depend on one's own experience and playing style to deliver a pleasant gaming experience. Of course, we can't forget older games (e.g. Super Mario Bros, Need For Speed II, Pacman), in which the fun is in the familiarity. For someone born recently who didn't grow up in a Super Mario Bros household, the original Super Mario might seem to suck because of its crappy graphics. But someone who grew up with Super Mario Bros would still enjoy it today due to that feeling of nostalgia and familiarity. Personally, I still prefer the older Need For Speed games over the new ones. Because I grew up with them, I feel more comfortable with their familiar appearance and gameplay, despite their crappy graphics (compared to today's standards).
Storyline? Like Tetris?
320x200 if you can believe it, and it STILL holds up as one of the best games ever. I once had a dream when I was a teenager that aliens were invading and MI5 hired me and my friend becasue of our extensive knowledge of aliens through the X-Com games. I so wish that dream was real.
I used to play various Vampire Wars based MUDs and was only limited by my imagination.......
When I play a game with graphics I'm stuck with what's on the screen
Ah, the Infocom defense, huh?
My perspective is rather different. Part of the experience of gaming is allowing the game designers to convey their ideas to me through the game. Graphics are just another tool for them to do that more effectively.
Do you know the old expression "a picture is worth a thousand words"? It's actually not true. A picture can convey things that would be nearly impossible to effectively communicate, regardless of how many words you might throw at the problem. (And, in fact, the more precise and elaborate your wording, the less effective it becomes...)
Bow-ties are cool.
Good graphics are definitely not important to me, but they need to be "good enough". There are two main criteria for "good enough graphics" : "readability", i.e. you can recognize what's on the screen (ground, water, sword, skeleton...), and "coherence", i.e the artwork is homogeneous (balanced color scheme, same level of detail for every object...). But yes, the gameplay trumps it all.
Actually, I think you'll find it's generally known as "Suspension of Disbelief".
Dune II? You barbarian!
I replay the original Dune about once every 2 years, just for the heck of it.
"I am Duke Leto Atreides, your father". Gee, thanks dad for finally coming clean, I never would have guessed!
Well, Paul was born out of wedlock... Maybe there was some lingering confusion?
Bow-ties are cool.
Actually Starcraft only runs at 640x480 (PC version anyway, I don't know about the Mac version). First game I know of that Blizzard offered 800x600 was the Diablo 2 Expansion.
Fear is the mind killer.
I identify three distinct supergenres of games: skill games, immersion games, and social games. Skill games test the players skill, either against other players or a computer. Examples: chess, starcraft, DDR, pacman. Immersion games seek to awe the player with some sensory or story-driven experience. Doom, Oblivion, etc. Social games are glorified chat systems. Graphics are most important to immersion games, and game developers are constantly pushing the envelope on graphics to give the best immersive experience.
Better graphics are always good, despite what some purists say. But better doesn't necessarily mean more realistic. Skill games usually benefit from clear, iconic graphics, because players don't want to feel cheated by confusing graphics in a skill game. But in an immersion game, graphics can be intentionally unclear to build anxiety, and this can be a good thing.
I love a good story line but if the graphics are not very good im not enjoying the game. I.E. FFVII, i cant stand walking around when my pody parts are made up of blocks.
That's exactly why I keep telling my friends that WOW graphics are shitty, and they keep telling me that they're fine. Not that WOW is the most immersive game to start with*, but it *really* ruins what little immersion it has when your sword clips right through your character's ear. Or when your polearm is half-inside the gryphon you're riding. Blizzard doesn't even pretend to care about clipping.
* A friend of mine, a hard-core RP MUD player, tried Ultima Online he washed his hands of all MMOs for good. Why? Just as he was getting into the game, his hunter character made its first kill, some moron walked up and said, "hay you killed bambi lolol". He quit the game, right then and there, and never came back.
Comment of the year
2001: a space odyssey
I utterly despise that movie, just for the record.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I'm split on the issue. I love the immersion factor in 3D shooters on PCs, I play them as much for the environment exploration as I do the game play. On the other hand, Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy has such amazing game play that I ignore the platform's graphic shortcomings.
I'd love to say that as a long term gamer, the graphics are just a minor element in the overall expereince. However, when I played the C & C retrospective, I found god old Red Alert (classic) to be nigh on unplayable with the primitive sprites. Where games like Darwinia survive on play alone, BAD graphics can DESTROY a game. Also "Good graphics" are relative. Just because something is overworked, highly detailed and colorful doesn't make it "good". I'll take a 90's "Wipeout" over the last DOOM - the doom graphics were elaborate, but I found them to be pretty insular and just left a bad taste in my mouth. It's impossible to watch the GOW III trailers without thinking, "Flipping wow I want to play the game just to see that!" However I would like to ask the question the other way: considering how expensive and time consuming the graphics element of a game is, why can't producers spend a fifth of the resources they dump into graphics on game play? Honestly, I don't think there is a FPS scenario left that will get me off my ass and make me want to spend $60 on the game. Isn't there other gameable aspects to life that are worth exploration -- how about a meter maid game? a religion sim? Dinosaur wars? really -- gaming has gotten glossier, but it has also gotten WAY too safe; "Hey lets put out tiger woods 10 because people are stupid!" I think graphics have progressed where game design has regressed because the financial pressures run that way. Its safer to make a high-gloss racer that plays well on TV then a Darwinia that is just darn fun but doesn't have that "gotta have it" TV commercial appeal. Graphics are mechanistic and carry over value from game to game. Game play is by definition only valuable when it is unique and new concepts are risky, a phrase that investors are not really interested in.
Graphics can be cool and all, but they shouldn't be the primary reason for any game.
Amen to that. Graphics are good to help you get into the game, but it's really secondary to gameplay and to the story. If the story isn't there, then graphics won't help at all. But a good story with good gameplay can survive poor graphics.
Example: I still re-play the original Spyro the Dragon (PS1) from time to time. In fact, over the weekend, I went back to it again. This game has great re-play value because it has a fun and engaging story. Simple, yes - but it has a story that I care about. But those old PS1 graphics are very poor compared to what you typically see today.
If I still ran Windows, I think I'd occasionally re-play the original Thief game. Man, that was a great game. The graphics weren't all that great (even for the time, IIRC) but the game had an awesome story that really drew you in.
I would definitely re-play the original TIE Fighter game (DOS). Again, graphics weren't that impressive, but the gameplay was tight, and the story was good.
While I was a fan of Tomb Raider on PS1, I just couldn't get into Tomb Raider Underworld. The graphics were undeniably awesome. But the story felt pretty weak - and often I'd feel like the developers added another room just to give the player something to do. A definite example of "great graphics can't save weak story or poor gameplay."
Uh, what? There is nothing new or old about his attitude, it's just a different approach to gaming.
Microsoft's xbox community requires that the style be consistent throughout the game. This is more important (in their game acceptance criteria) than how flashy the graphics are. They want a person to be able to identify the game if they see a picture of any random unit, building, weapon, or anything like that.
I grew weary of most non-multiplayer games ages ago, and recently switched back to enemy territory from newer games due to the ability to have more players on the same server. For me it is efficiency (speed of game) largest team size, and the ability for gamers to rapidly develop new boards to ensure novelty. Graphics is an issue, but even a old game like enemy territory's graphics are good enough as long as the other prerequisites are met. Even when I play strategy games I tend to play games that randomly produce their own environments. Repeating storylines or boards over and over again just isn't fun. I can't wait for a few years when users can easily produce high resolution environments at a whim.
Nethack, tome or privateer ascii sector, are my favorite games. You get much more imaginative with ascii art.
Graphics can be great for immersion.
True. I can't imagine Doom 3 would've scared the crap out of me like it did, if it had Quake 3 graphics. However, I think classic pen & paper RPGs (D&D, Rifts, etc.) are a great example of why graphics are definitely not necessary for immersion.
It's not the processor that matters in 3d games but the graphics card, and I'm pretty sure your Dell laptop has some crappy Intel integrated graphics chip.
Mada mada dane.
It makes no difference whether a game is "innovative" or not, the only thing that matters is whether it's a good game or a bad game.
Really? The game mechanics of Doom, Rainbow Six Vegas and Crysis are all the same?
Why?
What the fuck?
use dosbox to run it on windows
Some graphic improvements are not clear cut. In the first sims the views were all locked and to change them slowed down game play. The ability to rotate your view in sims 2 was a vast improvement. I think currently graphics has little effect on game playability where as before it was very important and often affected the playability of the game.
Good graphics are relative. Doom was the Crysis of its time. Even in the eighties reviewers gushed about graphics.
Valve have run with this via Gordon Freeman - the game is designed to make the player play as if they ARE Gordon. He has some back-story, but the player ends up feeling as though they're the one fighting the combine instead of controlling some guy who's doing all the work. Hence the lack of cut-scenes or any concept of Gordon talking.
Wait, so I DIDN'T actually defeat the combine with little more than a crowbar? It was a game?
Great graphics are important to persuade people to BUY the game.
Great gameplay is there to keep people PLAYING the game.
Of course critic scores and word of mouth about gameplay change minds, but that takes time and when a lot of competing games hit the shelves, it is about graphics.
Did you not read his post or are you just unable to comprehend English? Starcraft had great graphics when it was released. I can remember as a kid how cool the cut scenes were and how I couldn't wait for the next one. But the core of Starcraft is fantastic gameplay and balance. That is what makes people keep coming back for more. Do you think if Starcraft was released today it would be as popular? Of course not, people wouldn't be able to get over the awful resolution. But since we played it when it was new and the graphics are good, we know the gameplay to be great and keep playing it.
Furthermore, right in the guy's post he states that the graphics need to match a games settings. A simple puzzle game doesn't need to look like Crysis. But Crysis would sucks pretty hard if it had Tetris level graphics. Understand? Graphics don't have to be cutting edge, but they have to be good enough that they don't detract from the gameplay.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Better graphics also enable other things that don't seem as intuitive though. The NPCs in Half-Life 2 are much more convincing and have more realistic features and expressions, so it's easier to tell one from another and they become unique. Because they're more unique and human, we care about them more and so you can create a story with more interesting characters.
It's not that the graphics being better make the game better, but that better graphics allow the developer to portray things in a more detailed way which increases the options for variety.
WHat the hell is immersion anyway?
It's the same feeling that you get when reading a good book, or perhaps watching a good movie.
Better yet, consider this: it's what is NOT there when you're reading a BAD book, or watching a BAD movie.
Graphics can make a good game great, but they can't make a bad game good.
dosbox
The graphics should fit the game. If the game is focusing on realism then the physics engine and graphics should attempt to impress even the most critical customers. Games like Crysis focus on trying to make the player feel like they're really a special forces soldier doing everything they see on the screen. Other games like Team Fortress 2 take a more comical approach and so the cell-shading is welcome. Portable turn-based games are more about strategy and out-smarting the computer so graphics aren't important so long as you know what symbols mean. So realistic graphics don't make a game good unless it's aiming to be realistic. Games that appeal to other aspects of entertainment like fun or thought-provoking don't need graphics to impress me so long as they don't take away from the game.
The problem is that your definitions of "good graphics" and "bad graphics" fly in the face of what most people use those terms for. To most, the game with the good graphics would be V, and the one with the bad graphics would be III, simply on account of the lower level of technology used in III. I don't think you'll find many people here that will disagree with your idea that graphics are better when they improve immersion. I know I certainly support that idea.
Use Dosbox, it works like a charm.
In fact, the version for sale on Steam is just bundled with dosbox.
I think this question is similar to asking a film critic why action movies do sell well at the box office.
Before you ask "So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games?", you should first ask the question "So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the average person rather than a gamer who can appreciate it in multiple facets?"
And of course, that question is easily answered. Market.
One thing to remember though, Half-Life was a generation behind on the graphical curve, it was no where near state of the art when it came out. Quake 2 was already out a year when it came out and it was based on Quake 1.
NO. They started wth the Quake engine, then added some Quake II engine code. It wasn't difficult because that's exactly what ID software did when they wrote Quake II. In terms of map surfaces, Half-Life could handle anything Quake II could. I think they were similar on lighting - lightmaps plus a few dynamic lights. Hell, I think Half-Life even supported colored lighting, although I can't remember for certain.
In addition, Valve added skeletal animation to the game, which made the movements and interactions with NPCs a LOT more convincing. This was important, since the game is story-driven, and the story is told by NPCs. When NPCs walk, they walk convincingly. When they talk, they emphasize what they are saying with limb movements. When they die, they fall down much more smoothly than anything I'd seen before.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Well, just like being engrossed in a good movie or book, a video game can do the same thing with a story. FEAR is just another FPS, but the story really took me. The graphics were great, sure, but finding out what made Alma kept me focused. The basic gameplay is the same as Counterstrike (point, shoot) but the story is what caused the immersion.
HoMM IV never had any problems for me. A little slow calculating opponent moves, maybe, but seemed okay. I played the heck out of III and IV, but when I got V I got so frustrated by the slow and unusable 3-D maps I only made it through a few scenarios before getting tired. Definitely a case where adding fancy graphics didn't add anything at all to the game, but certainly subtracted. I would have been much happier without them.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I for one like a variety of different games. I've had great fun playing this one game where you run around beating people with sticks and blood unrealistically comes poring off of them turning the ground red. The graphics weren't very good and if they were I probably wouldn't have wanted to play that game. TF2 was originally going to be a highly realistic game and they changed to a cartoon style that I think has worked well for it.
If I'm playing something that's slower moving than I generally want something that is prettier to look at. That can be stylistic, or more realistic. I prefer the graphics of NWN1 (Neverwinter Nights) to NWN2. While NWN2's graphics are "better" I think that NWN1 looks better because of how smoothly the engine reacts and when I get shot, or shoot someone with an arrow I want to see it sticking out of them. I know NWN2 had to get rid of the sticking out arrows to make a Teen rating, but it ruined the experience for me.
One of the things that kept me in DaoC so long was the pretty graphics. Graphics cannot make up for gameplay. One of the reasons why I'm not impressed with most MMOs, they look pretty, but in the end they are just massive multiplayer medieval Quake.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Immersion is the difference between playing Bioshock and reading the storyline.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Playing pinball isn't gaming and it's not a sport.
It's a religious experience.
Someone plaase archive this thread. We had the same conversation in 1987, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2002, 2006 and 2008. We'll have it again.
The answer , by the way, is 'why not?'. If gameplays is identical, I'll take the better looking game. Why not? Duh. There is no trade off.
That's "8-bit arcade graphics"? You're almost a decade off!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Then again, it does breaks immersion to see something utterly unrealistic. I had such a moment playing Star Wars: Galaxies, when I realized I could see stars through moons! From that moment, I wasn't seeing a moon, I was seeing a translucent texture in the sky..
Reminds me of the first 3d game I made. It was a space racing game, and the course was enclosed in a giant skybox. The inner surfaces of the skybox had various textures on them, planets and nebulae and things like that. The stars were small white cubes pushed back to near the skybox, so all of the "stars" ended up being in front of the skybox textures.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Looks like doom, but with a better story than half life?
Somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting...
It's sad when people need realistic graphics to before they can get immersed in a game -- no immagination. Anyone remember Zork?
Why waste money developing storylines, cinematics, and 3D models when all people want is something that blows up real good?
I played WOW for months before someone told me there was a storyline, that's what I call poor implementation. Obviously the story has nothing to do with the success of the game.
LOL! By this logic, every modern game is "unplayable" because they can't usually be played on a laptop.
Newsflash: gaming companies don't care about laptops. This is why, on the list of supported hardware, you'll see "Notebook or laptop versions of these cards may work but they are not supported".
Sounds to me like Might and Magic V had good graphics, you just couldn't play it on a portable system. That's no surprise. Crysis has great graphics too (along with a bunch of other games) and most of them are unplayable on laptops. Hell, Portal crashes on some desktops with integrated graphics (shocked!).
I'm not sure if titles like GTA IV or Crysis or CoD4 would have the same impact if they looked like Pokemon.
"I choose you pikachu! Steal that tank for me!"
I dunno, seems like a good idea to me.
I think the push for ever-more-realistic graphics can be summed up in one word: Investors.
Investors often won't know bupkiss about games, and they often won't be able to tell tragically flawed gameplay from really solid gameplay. So if you're trying to get funding for your poor-graphics-but-great-gameplay game, it's going to be harder than your great-graphics-but-poor-gameplay game. The investor can look at a screenshot or a demo and go "oooh... purdy!" in about 3 seconds and be seriously impressed. To do the same with gameplay could take hours... and there's a good chance that he still won't get it.
To "get" good graphics, the investor just has to have eyes. To "get" good gameplay the investor has to either be part of your target audience, or know your target audience really well.
Thus the focus on graphics.
I doubt you would mind an upgrade to nethack that enhanced the visuals and keeps the game exactly the same, since the mechanics are still the same.
It's been done before, falcon's eye etc etc. I checked them out for shits and giggles but always wound up getting rid of them and returning to ascii love. Also, I had actually played Diablo 2 before nethack, however you were right in me playing Nes Metroid before Snes.
The gameplay mechanics difference between NES metroid and Super metroid is marginal at best.
Style wise they are very similar of course, it's a sequel after all, however the devil is in the details. Level design in the original metroid is vastly different (out of necessity almost with the nes hardware limits), to this day when I pick up the game I can instinctively know where every hidden thing is from basic pattern matching I learnt as a child.
If a book has great cover art you're more likely to buy it. You won't know that it's good until you read it, but the cover art has gotten you to make the purchase.
With a game that is involved it might take you a week to find out if the gameplay is great or not, but you can look at great graphics and be swayed into making an impulse buy.
I disagree about this. The sudden appearance of a purple L or h (only noobs die to D and & :p) is a bigger shock for me than anything in more modern games, probably because the stakes are higher in nethack, what with the permanent death and all.
I also think it's somewhat unfair to compare a roguelike to an FPS since the FPS has the additional element of "I have to figure out what to do in the next 0.5 seconds or I die".
Have you ever played Dungeons of Daggorath for the Tandy CoCo? One of the earliest first-person real-time 3D games, and still one of the most intensely creepy and haunting gaming experiences I've ever had, thanks in part to the graphics (as well as the game's terrific use of sound). I think the abstracted, pseudo-wireframe graphics made the monsters even more menacing.
(No need for an emulator to try this one -- PC and Linux versions are available here, and you can get the OS X port here.)
Personally, I get a few things out of FPS gaming (and gaming in general, in most cases):
1. "Literary" experiences. I don't know a better way to describe it. These are rare, but they are spectacular. Deus Ex is the king of this. I'd class the Half Life series in here, too, though it's more film-like in its design and execution. Same concept, though. This isn't just having a story; it's a combination of good story, competent writing, and atmosphere. Most games that I'd call good have at least a little of this, though it's not always the only thing that carries them (Bioshock, System Shock 2, Portal, Max Payne 1&2, STALKER, and the Thief series come to mind)
2. The ability to have a taste of feelings and circumstances that I can't or don't want to experience in real life. These are some of the most valuable bits of gaming IMO, because you might only get to feel it the first time through--in re-plays you will know what's coming, and maybe have seen enough of the game to start seeing the cracks and tricks in the game engine so it feels less real. Call of Duty 1 & its expansion had quite a bit of this (a couple parts of the Russian campaign, the Battle of the Bulge, a certain mission that takes place in the air that I won't describe because part of the thrill for me was realizing where these wonderful game devs had just put me and what they were about to help me experience). Most games with horror in them (and quite a lot have at least a bit of it, not just pure-horror games) have some of this. These are things that stick with you. Maybe they're virtual versions of things from real-life like in CoD, or maybe it's just seeing some truly beautiful and striking landscape in a totally made-up world (Morrowind had tons of this, at least for me, and Oblivion's failure to strike me the same way is perhaps the biggest part of why I don't like it very much). Or maybe it's being creeped the fuck out in ways that movies and books can't manage (not that they're worse, of course--just different).
3. Sheer arcade fun. The GTA games excel at this. Doom-like games are defined by it (Doom, Quake, Serious Sam, Painkiller, etc.) Most FPS games need at least a bit of this to not suck, even if their real strengths lie elsewhere (the Half Life series has other positive attributes, but it's also good clean shootin' fun, for example; Max Payne is a well-acted, well-written, pulp-fiction romp, but the actual shooting is fun too). Portal managed to satisfy this without even having a real gun!
4. Having fun with my friends. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark back on the N64, Left 4 Dead more recently.
Other people enjoy the competitive aspect (Counter Strike especially, but any game you can play online will attract these types). I don't, but it's another reason people play FPS.
I think your missing the point.. While Might and Magic III's graphics were less superior than V's, they were more functional. Whats the point of having more realistic graphics if it performs like a dog or it impedes interaction with the environment?
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
I've tried twice to play the original System Shock, but I was unable to get very far either time.
Mind you, I can still play games like Doom and Blake Stone and enjoy them, but SS seemed to be stretching the limits of its graphics a bit too far. Everything feels cramped and awkward, if that makes sense. It's like playing an FPS on a console, in a way--you have to concentrate so much on compensating for the shit interface that you can't really get in to the game.
How would Dead Space or BioShock be without the atmosphere? How effective would Doom 3 have been without its shadows? How many people had trouble telling the difference between a dangerous mine and an ammo clip in GoldenEye on the N64 in a squashed 4-player split-screen?
Answer: Graphics are very important if you use them well, and they're meaningless if you don't have a game to back them up.
Twinstiq, game news
It's very obvious that there is a fairly deep schism in whether or not players care about graphis. This stems from the two fundimental reasons why we play video games. The first is to "play" the game, the second is to "experience" the game. Many people are a mixture of these two things, but you'll find a lot of people (especially geeks on slashdot) that don't care or even WANT to experience, they just want to play. Playing is challenging one's mental and physical abilities. SHMuP space shooters are a good example of a game with a high level of play with low level of experience. The purpose of a SHMuP is to challenge oneself through rediculously difficult trials. There is no attempt to experience the feeling of actually being in a spaceship, as most of the action is highly stylized and simply an excuse for the gameplay. On the flipside, you have the experiencial side of gaming, which stems from a pure entertainment/artistic side of us which wants to experience an interactive environment. RPGs and adventure games tend to appeal to the experiencial side of gaming more than most genres. Often, the gameplay is actually secondary to the experience: the gameplay being simply a reason to be in the environment, and to give direction in order to move a player one experience to another.
Every player has a certain balance between play and experience that they wish to have, though this also can change depending upon mood or state of mind. Most gamers tend to want their games to have a mixture of both. However, there are a few gamers who play games for ONE reason alone: the challenge. They have no interest in the gaming experience, in fact, many of them feel that the experiencial side gets in the way of their ability to achieve mastery over the gameplay.
Even within these reasons for playing, there are different stylistic differences: some experiencial players wish to have a high level of control over their experience, while others want to let go and be taken on a dramatic journey. Some experiencial players emphasize realism, others wish to be immersed in stylized environments that are drastically different from the world we normally experience.
There are no real right and wrongs in all of this. The Video Game genre spans an incredibly wide area of interests and philosphies. It's more a meta-genre, incorporating elements of both arts/entertainment as well as skill challenges. Some people subscribe to the notion that one aspect of these is wrong. If someone suggests that experience has no place in games and the genres of cinema and literature being fully capable of sustaining a person's experiencial desire, then I ask them, "but what if I wish to be an interactive part in exploring and controlling a fantasy world?" they're usually at loss for an answer, because games is the only place in which that is possible. So games provide an outlet for certain aspects of experience and challenge that no other genre can. Therefor, both are reasonable and both are here to stay. Both are worthwhile endevours to both create and play.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Dammit, Heroes 4 was the best! This coming from one who logged hundreds of hours on HoMM3 and its expansions too. The graphics are 2D sprites made from 3D models, and I believe it turned out far more beautifully than the full 3D models in HoMM5. Part of it was, as somebody said, they made it look more WoW-like by getting rid of the realistic proportions of the characters. The music was absolutely fantastic; I have about 4 CDs in my car, and one is the HoMM4 soundtrack. And I don't care what anybody says, having playable heroes is awesome. The skill system overhaul was so much more natural. There were a few niggling issues, like the trouble obstacles cause in combat, but the good far outweighs the bad. I did miss the ability to upgrade units somewhat, but that also removed the frequent headache of mixing upgraded units with non-upgraded ones. There are fewer creatures, too, but I didn't really miss any.
So Heroes 5 ruined the series for me, with no small part of it being unable to run it smoothly on my budget laptop, which runs all of the previous games perfectly.
The level of graphical capability of the HL engine was a major selling feature of the game. The game continues to be a classic in some sense, because it was a deeper experience than that, but it sold because the graphics were incredible compared to its peers.
Will Crysis be a classic because its graphics were great? I doubt it. Far Cry 2 for me was an example of a game that looks pretty good but who's immersion in the AI and other areas was sorely lacking.
Graphics quality is just like audio or film quality in music and movies; they're a big part of the whole package, but they aren't in themselves the package. Does a good movie look better with a higher quality camera and better film? Yes (in many cases). Does the video quality make it implicitly a good movie (unless its a silent doc)? No, of course not. Does a good recording engineer make a song good? No. Does it help? Certainly.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Hell, I've seen text adventures that are scarier (and way, way better written) than the average horror movie.
Babel* comes to mind.
* it's down that page a bit, you'll need TADS to play it.
And the lack of professionalism in gaming journalism is astounding some days, so I doubt they're aware of that phrase :-)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
LOL! By this logic, every modern game is "unplayable" because they can't usually be played on a laptop.
The point is, graphics did not add anything to the game, as the game logic was fundamentally the same as the tried and tested HOMM3.
What it did was 1. increased the system requirements for no good reason, 2. obscured the important objects on the map by adding pretty but useless new ones, which of course, being 3D, had a good chance of concealing something important you'd seen from a different angle, 3. every time you clicked a castle, it forced you to view a nice animation that you've already seen 3 million times, thus making the management of multiple castles painfully slow, 4. by having a 3D map with no apparent grid viewed from an arbitrary angle, it also made estimating movement costs a lot harder.
It also took away from the cutscenes, as the characters talked without lip movement.
Have you played Wurm Online?
Now if only the trees would stop swaying so much, I'd be happier.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Use DOSBox -- it runs acceptably. You can buy it cheap on steam if you've lost your copy. They have it packaged up nicely so you don't have to futz around to get it working (it uses DOSBox).
Nice to know some folks read carefully. :-)
I piss off bigots.
TOA is crap IMHO. When the new content is released for WoW, the VERY first thing I do is crank the video settings all the way to max and go see what surprises that developers have hidden away in little corners of the universe. I have found a few (admittedly very few) vistas in areas areas of Azeroth that are visually stunning when you view them from the right spot. I have heard that people would actually watch the sunsets in UltimaOnline. (though I have never played that one) I want more of this and I want it to change with time. More realism, not less; and better graphics engines that allow darkness and light to become a playable challenge in the game. Snow,wind and rain that are more than just cheesy random visual effects. Trees that look as good up close as they do from the air. An engine that can intelligently paint/scale a texture applied over a large surface so you don't see the repetitions so clearly. I love walking around the Blood-Elf areas in WoW because much more care was taken in that area than in the other areas. I guess it all depends on what you play the game for.
There are people who are incapable of self-directed play. There are many people who are incapable of imaginative play.
As a side-note, these abilities are becoming harder and harder to find in children because of adult-directed and supervised play time.
If the subject interests you, have a look at the Free Range Kids blog (and associated book) and some of her research.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I really enjoy Nethack.
I really enjoy watching things explode in Killzone 2.
I really enjoy convincing someone I didn't throw a fireball at them five seconds ago in Oblivion.
I really enjoy a good game of r/l Pinball too.
Fun and graphics are not orthogonal. They are however sometimes interrelated. Your argument made no sense.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
How nice for you. In case you haven't heard, not all human beings are the same as you.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Audio! Audio audio audio!
Good sound is much scarier than good graphics.
Proper use of 3D sound, with good samples and dynamic reflections to really mess with your head when judging directions ... now that's scary.
So few games put a real effort into sound (and I quite enjoy the ones that do).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
as someone that plays both sports and computer games I would say that both of them take you out of your current reality in some way. I can think of many times where my day was crappy but a track meet or a football game the concentration and effort required the act and react of the game or race made me forget about my day. Never once in the middle of a race do I remember thinking God that ass at the coffee shop this morning short changed me and didn't even get my order right. so I would say chess, poker, basketball football or anything the like does take you "beyond your current reality!"
However, in the same Genre, compare Super Mario 64 with Super Mario Galaxies. Both are 3D platformers. Now tell me the latter would be just as fun with the former's graphics.
Super Mario 64 was a horribly ugly looking game with terrible camera angles making it nearly impossible to play at good old Mario speeds.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Hell, I think Half-Life even supported colored lighting, although I can't remember for certain.
Correct. The HL engine supported RGB values. This is seen most prominently in the "Lambda Core" chapter, with yellow-based lighting, and in "Xen", with lots of different colored lights.
When they die, they fall down much more smoothly than anything I'd seen before.
By the later versions of Counterstrike, they included directionality in the death animations, which was considered the best possible solution without implementing ragdoll physics.
For a good look at the capabilities of the Half-Life engine, look at Counterstrike: Condition Zero. It came out in early 2004, and even though the engine looked dated even at the time, Turtle Rock did a good job of pushing the engine's limits.
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I know that "timeless" is a wonderful complement to give something that you really appreciate, but its incredibly unrealistic.
Films, Games and art in general are part of a/our culture, and much like language, culture evolves with the generations. More importantly, the baseline for your mental definition of what is 'good' or what you prefer, is set at childhood/adolescence.
For me that time was the early 80's and to be honest there are very films or TV shows from before that time that I would class as worth watching. 2001: a space odyssey is one of those few as it happens, but that is mainly due its very unusual nature - a lot of the factors that change within culture don't play a huge role in the film: there's very little speaking/acting in the first half, so the lower standards in acting ability and the changes in language that seem silly and break immersion aren't as noticeable. Technical quality also plays a part. Grainy flyover shots of some shitty grassland (older films really didn't seem to find very good sets btw) where a passing bird looks more like something from Conway's Game of Life don't enthrall me quite the same way they did the youth of that day, in fact they bore me. Higher tech means flyover shots now contain considerably more detail, they tend to show you something, rather than just being a 'cool technique' that we can roll the credits over.
THE most important single factor though is the techniques employed to tell the story. The interplay between the actors, the relationships they have, the actions they take and the motives that drive those actions. The amount of silence used in a build up, the kind and level of music played, the general pace of scenes and the film on a whole. How the story itself is told, straight line following one protagonist/group, flashbacks, starting with the ending and filling in the story that reaches that ending as you go, or the fractured unrelated story lines that cross paths and mingle as they progress. The amount of assumptions taken, how many things need explained, if its a current affairs kind of film, have they defined the current affairs so that future audiences can follow.
As factors of society and culture change over the years, the reflection of these factors in our entertainment changes with them. Things that are relevant to us now, may seem either trivial or unbelievably obvious to the future audience. Its ok for you to go back and watch something that was created within or just before your lifetime because you can still relate to the people/the issues/the environment etc. whereas it wouldn't mean half as much to someone half your age because they can't put themselves in the same mental place you can be, it's not possible for it to be relevant to them in the same way it is to you, even if they can still appreciate the film.
It takes a lot of things to be just right for a piece of art to be timeless, and its not about quality, its about writing it in a way that means it is completely detached from the culture of the day, or of any other day. It literally has to stand on its own. And to be honest, it pretty fucking difficult to create something that isn't immediately relevant to anyone, but it still enjoyable - not impossible, just takes a lot more than 'hard work'.
Bullshit. The Duke and Jessica were as married as feudal nobles ever really get.
If you asked me at any point in my life about graphics in video games, I would have always said that they didn't matter. I have to say, though, I did finally find an exception to that. I recently purchased Ghostbusters for the XBOX 360. The game itself is, at best, mediochre, but the story and graphics really brought it up several levels. In this fairly unique case, the visuals made the game.
I don't have much of a point to this post other than to say it's interesting to see the exception to the rule.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Even though the graphics are more modern, graphics have nothing to do with the scariest parts of Half-Life 2. For some people, the Fast Zombies make scary noises, and that's true. For me though, the scariest part of the game, or any game for that matter, are the sounds made by poison headcrabs. Their rattle and screech sends me into immediate "panic mode", and my priorities change immediately so that #1 on the list is killing them.
All that for an enemy that can't actually kill you.
The poison zombies also have an extremely haunting call, which brings about fear and trepidation rather than the sense of immediacy that the poison headcrabs give. They're scary as hell, so I always use an explosive on them right away.
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Could Star Wars have been created with 1950s movie tech?
Exactly as it was? No. (Most especially when the TIE fighters were attacking the M/F as it escaped.)
But... Remember that Lucas showed film of WW2 dog fights to help studio execs visualize what some scenes were like. Luke and Han shooting at TIE fighters was, in essence, Me 109s attacking a B-17, with waist gunners defending it.
So I'm sure that studio special effects people like Ray Harryhausen and the people who did /Forbidden Planet/ would have done just as well.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
they might as well stop playing games and start playing paintball.
Dude! Games should NOT lead to doing laundry!
So many people spend so much time making the graphics of a game gorgeous you end up with a game that lasts only 8 hours. At the risk of sounding old - I remember when games lasted 40 hours. All of them. Whats the point of having an ultimately gorgeous game if its done in a day? I'll tell you. NONE WHATSOEVER. Industry needs to pull their heads out of their asses.
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
Does a good movie look better with a higher quality camera and better film? Yes (in many cases).
Would Psycho or The Twilight Zone be any better in color? No.
Would Star Wars be any better with modern CGI? No.
Would North By Northwest be any better if "the blonde" was Xena The Warrior Princess and Roger O. Thornhill was a bumbling slacker? No.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Ah, the age-old question of graphics in video games. In my opinion, to answer this question, you need to address two points: context and evolution/adaptation.
Context: How central are graphics to the gaming experience? What genre is the game? On one end of the spectrum you have the first-person shooter (or, nowadays, RPG), which is arguably most directly linked to graphics. On the other end, you have text-based games, where graphics are non-existent. The end experience depends on the user, really. Someone could have as much fun in a text-based game as they could a first-person shooter. Fun/enjoyment/fulfillment is arguably the end of the day goal for most if not all games.
Back to first person shooters, though. Graphics in a first-person shooter are central to the overall experience. Is it not the latest first-person game that has pushed us every few years to upgrade our PC? Dynamic lighting, shadows, long-distance rendering, cell shading, skeletal animation, etc. etc. These technologies have marked the start of new eras in the timeline of gaming. Graphics in first-person shooters and other games have evolved over time, which leads us to...
Evolution/Adaptation: We adapt to our new visual experiences. How hard is it to play a game without anti-aliasing after spending countless hours on other games with anti-aliasing? How easily can you pick up a first-person shooter from ten years ago and fully enjoy the experience as much as you did when it was contemporary? I'd be willing to bet that it'd be pretty difficult, and I'd put my money on the idea that it's because you're used to the modern games which offer better graphics. Sure, it's fun to sit down an play old Nintendo games, but that's for other reasons, nostalgia being one of them. Since I've adapted to newer, better looking games, it's hard to turn back to the old games, much in the same way it's hard to get off the plane when I return to Michigan from California (ugh).
It's simple; more people spend more money purchasing flashy graphics games, therefore, corporations vomit out more flashy graphics. It's sort of like Hollywierds suicidal mad dash to mediocrity in entertainment. Just look at your typical extended Michel Bay MTV video... err movie. Mile wide, inch deep, tastes great, less filling...
Corporations can today market a gold rush then mine the goodness out of it just like big government can with your freedoms.
Welcome to the bassackwards post modern world of the future.
I don't think that kind of zoning out is what the OP meant. He used an appositive that clarified his use of "escapism" as "make believe". Getting in the zone, like you're talking about does not involve the imagination.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
it's just a different approach to gaming.
I'd call it a *mature* approach to gaming.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Geeze, I remember doing exactly this when it came out. Then at night while laying in bed I would be half expecting the room to start glowing red and have something spawn next to me. Never had a game do that me before; definitely was a great game for immersion.
Fallout 3 was a great game. Graphics were not the best. I think one of may favorite elements what the music which I would think is odd, but I think I felt the same about Bioshock. Done right it establishes the mood and the surroundings just as much as any graphics. Best part is you don't need a 500$ card to take advantage of it either!
So I'm sure that studio special effects people like Ray Harryhausen and the people who did /Forbidden Planet/ would have done just as well.
I totally disagree. While I enjoy Forbidden Planet for what it is, Star Wars was so appealing to me when I first watched it not in small part because it was a pioneer in special effects and really was fun to watch. I agree that the story holds its own, but can you imagine having the same kind of intensity if Luke's fighter was a cardboard flat grey "rocketship" firing super crappily animated lasers into a super obviously cardboard deathstar?
Basically, I think that Star Wars story was kind of cheesy, but the effects legitimized parts it and made it feel somewhat feasible. It's the difference between having a scene where you get really into it and hear "Use the force Luke!", then react with a "hahaha" "yea right" when you see the crappy effect. And hearing "Use the force Luke!", and then getting the hairs on the back of your neck on end and reacting with an "ooohh!" "hell yea, nice!" after the semi-realistic effect.
that the only reason they focus on the optics, is that it is the only thing they got.
Try to keep an harmonic integrated balance of the four key elements, strengthening each other:
- Aesthetics
- Mechanics
- Story
- Technology
Do no prefer any single one of them. Let all of them support each other.
So logically, aesthetics should only exist, if there is a point to it. A point to the basic experience that you want to create.
And since abstract aesthetics show the world within, and realistic aesthetics show the world on the outside, sometimes, abstract graphics and simple shapes help the game more than any level of realism.
My fellow game designer, do whatever your heart tells you. Let the players feel the experience you can see in your head. How you do it does not matter. Even if you do it with basic black lines on a white background. And let others dive into it and follow you.
Then you will have a game that will truly be remembered.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Just like cover art can sell a book, even though you need to read the book to know if you like it, the graphics can sell a game.
You might have to play a game for 2 weeks to know if it really is a great game, but awesome graphics can push you into making that impulse buy so that you will find out.
You forgot mechanics. And that you have to separate graphics into technology and aesthetics. They all four have to balance each other out, be fully integrated, and support each other. With that one main goal of the ultimate experience.
Story is not everything for games, like it is for movies and other passive media.
Just as art is not everything.
Those things are just parts of the more general concept of the experience.
Unfortunately, those from the old media, who criticize games for an apparent lack of story, did not understand this.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Ah, so your not a fan of casablanca, or more likely since this is a /. crowd 2001: a space odyssey?
I'm sorry, but just because something is old does not by default make it crap. Quality is quality, if something was ever truly good it should be able to stand up on it's own regardless of graphics.
Yes & no. What's important, really, is that the graphics of the game don't call attention to themselves. Which sounds like a strange thing to say, but it is true, and it follows from the basic fact that when we engage in playing a game (or reading a book, or watching a film) we enter a mental state that's basically a form of flow, and thoughts that are unrelated to what we are doing can quite easily disturb that state -- thoughts about the implementation of the game (as revealed by bad graphics) are particularly problematic, as are scenes of films with bad acting, or logical inconsistencies in the story, etc.
So the suggestion I'd have is that there's a minimum quality of graphics that's required, which clearly varies from person to person depending on how good they are at maintaining flow. And also that standard is gradually increasing, because how we judge it is relative to what we've seen in other games. When I was playing Elite back in the 80s, black & white wireframe 3D graphics were good enough. I find it hard to immerse myself in that now.
For films, the technology isn't as important. It reached a point a long time ago where it was good enough, at least for most people. Some people find black and white films disruptive their ability to immerse themselves, and for those Casablanca is almost unwatchable. Few people object to 2001 on the basis of poor technology (although storytelling techniques have progressed since then, and I don't think anyone with any skill would make a film that was that _slow_ again), although the trippy effects at the end pull some people out of flow these days (although they were more likely to have the opposite effect when the film was first released). But go back and watch films like le Voyage dans la Lune and you'll probably find you simply _cannot_ enjoy them in the same way the first audiences to see them did, because it is so hard to focus on the story when the techniques that were used to film it draw attention to themselves so much.
An additional comment, I meant to include in my previous post, but forgot about before I clicked post:
Entering a state of flow is only one way of enjoying entertainment. Some people think it's the best way, but that's not universally true. Others enjoy thinking analytically about the experience, and some genres need it less than others. For an FPS game, I'd say it's pretty much crucial. RTS games, not quite so much but still helpful. Turn-based games it isn't important at all, because we can take the time to think about things and approach it from effectively the opposite direction. MMORPGs also don't need it as much; we can share the experience with other players and derive enjoyment from discussions about the game rather than playing the game itself. Think of it like watching a film with friends and joking about the bad acting, etc. It's a different way of approaching it that you enjoy for a different reason.
Graphics style is more important than graphics quality.
The easiest way to understand this to look at the Star Wars movies.
Episodes 4,5,6 changed movies and are treasures for what they did. These were 'made' in the 1970s.
Episodes 1,2,3 were made in the late 1990s and early 2000s using much better cinematic technology. These didn't go over so well.
It wasn't the 'eye candy' that made the movies (it helped), it was the story combined with the technology that made the movie. Someone posted here on slashdot once that the best movie for CG was "Forrest Gump", as you never knew what was CG and what was real. The CG allowed the story to be told, and didn't distract from the story.
Would Star Wars be any better with modern CGI? No.
If only George Lucas agreed with you....
That doesn't even make any fucking sense.
You can create an artistic style for your game that doesn't require high-end graphics, but if you're game has a realism based art style your graphics should match.
Exactly.
I've spent a while playing free-to-play MMOs recently, just to get an idea of what's out there. Most of them are graphically uninspiring, whether they're 2D or 3D. Sure, you can see somebody spent some real money on some of those 3D games, but one game I've played has, in my opinion, blown them all away: Travian. A browser-based game, with static graphics. But the graphics are well done, and really fit the game. Sure, they're cartoons, but they're good quality and represent what the game's about without calling attention to themselves. The design is clean and attractive, no unnecessary complication. It all fits together really well.
Perhaps more interactive physics would help a lot more than graphics, even though in one sense they could be considered 'graphics'.
Stunt Car Racer for me is still one of the most thrilling, fun and scary games ever, despite its jerky frame rate (15 fps), and primitive vector graphics.
Changing topic, I suppose the detail in 2D games makes the graphics look better in one way than many 3D games anyway. It's harder to create decent 3D graphics because of the extra dimension artists need to play with.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Please, Silent Hill 1 was a lot more scarier than 4, and the graphics sucked!
Gameplay sucked, graphics sucked, but music, sound and story made it scary.
4 - A robot may not masturbate, except where such action would conflict with the Second Law.
That doesn't even make any fucking sense.
Your response speaks more than you realize.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Games are not Movies. The emotions and catharsis one gets from movies
can only come from that source. The film maker waives the magic for
two hours or so. But the game maker has to come up with a fun, enjoyable
interactive 'experience' which runs on hardware. I fear all these
improvements in graphic power are turning many games into movie-like
experiences which are missing on the essential nature of what a game is.
(Toru Iwatani, creator of PacMan)
Perhaps some people have an easier time becoming immersed in a game. I've played a number of games that allowed me to become immersed in them (mostly RPGs, and a few from other genres), and essentially identify myself with the main character.
They don't necessarily need great graphics, or sound for that matter. They need storyline and character development. They need relatively smooth gameplay, with very few and short delays. The control scheme needs to be such that after a while it becomes transparent... almost a reflex. If you have to think about how you need to use the controller to do a specific task even after hours of gameplay, I'd say the developer failed on the controls. Removing external distraction helps in becoming immersed as well.
You should try to feel like a character in a game. It may enhance the experience for you. Yes, we know you is where your consciousness lives, but wouldn't it be nice to let it visit another time and place once in a while? If not, why are you playing the game when you're life is obviously more exciting than it?
I don't consider "being the character" to be the totality of immersive gaming. It's simply the level at which you get focused on the game.
By that definition, Tetris is very immersive for some people.
For me, the Descent series was highly immersive. To this day I'll play it and catch myself leaning in my chair trying to look around corners and such. To a lesser extent many FPSes I've played have at least some quality of immersion in that respect.
Although I don't find RPGs immersive at all, and I can't recall every being engaged with any game's dialog to the degree that I identify with the characters.
So really I think it's more than just feeling involved in the story - just feeling involved at all is enough.
=Smidge=
I also liked HoMM IV better than III. Three was a lot of fun, but I thought IV was a definite improvement to the way it played. I tried the demo of V, but between it being a retread of III and running slowly on my old hardware it didn't interest me at all.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Which brings us back to graphical consistency.
I remember when I was playing Oblivion, I came around a corner and there was big stretches of oblivion soup everywhere. (read: blurry textures)
As you get closer, they suddenly snap into detailed mode - or they don't. Sometimes you're walking on detailed ground, and other times it's a blurry mess. The repeating textures which stretch into the distance also get very annoying. Overall, I thought it looked worse than Fable 1.
I was playing Crysis a while back(when it was released), and noted that AntiAliasing misbehaves on anything older than a GeForce 8. It's not actually applied while motion blur is, which gives massive jaggies all across the screen.
Talk about ruining the immersion!
I'm pretty sure that Carmageddon looked better if you had a 3dfx card. I have a memory of seeing it loaded normally and then seeing it on a 3dfx machine and it was a BIG difference in the smoothness of the graphics.
It has been an age, so I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure the 3dfx technology made a big difference with that game.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
I never liked it on a small screen. Then I saw it in a proper theater. It makes a huge difference! It's a completely different movie. To appreciate it, you really need the immersion that a dark room, huge screen, and a good sound system can provide.
To bring it back to video games, normally I don't think eye-popping graphics are necessary for a good game. If 2001 was a video game, however, it would be an otherwise pretty lame game that was absolutely brilliant on a high-end system. It would be one of those rare games in which the excellent graphics and sound actually do make up for the crummy game mechanics.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I absolutely would, thanks for asking.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
No, it's not a mature approach to gaming. Being completely unable to appreciate graphics for what they make a game is more or less a slap in the face to the developers who put all that elbow grease into making the game pretty and immersible.
Now, granted, the opposite view, that graphics make a game, can be just as much a slap in the face, and is definitely an immature way to judge games, but that doesn't really raise it's counterpart into the realm of legitimate views, it just means that the ideal, mature way to judge games is somewhere in the middle.
Graphics are important for many games - they add a sense of realism. Far Cry 2, for instance, was a decent game. It had a barely average plot, absolutely painful voice acting on all characters, and the vehicle mechanics were awful. At the same time, though, I could spend hours just playing with the fire mechanics, something that wouldn't be possible with, say, 2004-level graphics.
That's not to say that graphics make a game - many games are, in fact, good without good graphical presentation, but just as good game play or a good story can save a game, so can good use of graphics and special effects.
You get sniped and knifed in the back a lot, eh? Sorry, buddy.
Top-end graphics are usually a significant disadvantage as companies like EA always use it as a lame replacement for actual gameplay. Its got to a point where I purposely avoid games that have high-end graphics as its a sure indicator that the game itself will suck.
I mean look at Crysis. Other than being fairly pretty, its really just a predictable and yawn-worthy 'shoot everything' game that plays like its on rails. BioShock is even worse. Its basically a movie. There's no way you're not eventually going down that preset path.
With both games, after you've killed the final boss there is nothing to do but replay exactly the same game. Consequently those games for me had a total installed time of about 2 weeks and their CDs are now just mouldering away on my bookshelf beacuse I have a total lack of desire to waste time replaying exactly the same experience. I already know what every part of it would be like.
$45 * 2 spent for a total of 2 weeks play doesn't represent good value to me. Honestly I'd rather go and play Tetris or Sudoku. I'm still playing those after years.
For that matter, it's probably true to an extent of all those old, old games with 8 and 16 bit graphics. I mean, I can remember being just as enthralled playing Doomdark's Revenge on the Spectrum as ever I've been playing Oblivion. It's not as if you take the pictures on the monitor for actual reality: the graphics just provide the outline of a scene: the player's imagination fleshes out the details.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that, in my opinion. This generation of gamers can get by with it easily, due to the fact that they've played those games before, and they're comfortable with that level of graphical presentation. Newer gamers, however, don't really have that advantage and probably wouldn't be able to sit through NES or SNES generation games for more than a few minutes before getting bored, unless they're clued in to the quality behind the games before hand.
I, for instance, was raised on the NES and the Genesis, but I pretty much skipped over the N64 generation. As a result, I have difficulties taking any game put out around 2000 seriously, with a few exceptions, despite the fact that I love a large number of sprite-based games, as well as everything on this side of the graphical divide.
X-Com is great. I managed to get a hold of a copy that runs on my Windows Mobile phone. Not 100% the same, there are a few changes to it, but still, same overall impact. Still play it on my old PC as well. Still, NOTHING beats landing at a terror site, then realizing 2 turns in you're up against a pack of ethereals.....*shudder*
Captain's log, stardate 41358.2. I am nailed to the hull.
What I gather from your post is that mature is whatever you say it is so you can belittle people who disagree with you.
That an aesthetic theory might mean someone wasted their time does not render it moot, nor does that make it immature.
And you still can't mate. But that has nothing to do with a suppression field.
I just watched the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari last night, so yes probably. Want to know what I won't be watching though? Transformers 2. Want to know what makes the former better than the latter?
Behind the 'log in' button.
This is one of the few posts that makes me want to not post as an AC. This is actually the most concise and correct answer I've ever seen regarding the issue of how important graphics are right down to making the point that high quality graphics doesn't mean high end.
It's not that the graphics being better make the game better, but that better graphics allow the developer to portray things in a more detailed way which increases the options for variety
I never confused any of the bosses or team members from Final Fantasy.
Better graphics don't allow a developer to do anything better, other than have better graphics. Those graphics are a technique than can be used, and it can be used well or poorly. What it cannot do, ever, is replicate the effect of other techniques--such as mechanics or story. It can work with them such that given equal mechanics and story graphics can improve the game, but graphics can never make the game. A game is, by definition, the mechanics. Graphics (and story for that matter) are secondary flourishes. What defines a game, what makes Pictionary different from Trivial Pursuit, from World of Warcraft, is the mechanics.
Indeed, the chess game in the first Harry Potter film (never read the book) was unsettling precisely because it broke down the wall between the game and reality for the characters.
While this is true to a point, I think we need to look at the flip side of this coin. How many games have you played in the past few years that this sentence could be your review? "The game was pretty but the gameplay, controls, and AI all sucked". I know that I have played WAY too damned many games lately where it seems the graphics are there to be a giant epeen to show off on a box while the AI and gameplay sadly could be stomped by Half Life 1 or even Soldier of Fortune 1.
The problem I think is that graphics, just like CPUs have passed 'good enough" awhile back. I know firing something up like Butcher Bay I am still impressed by how nice it looks and that was what? 5 years ago? But now it seems as more and more companies go for the graphics and ONLY the graphics. Now seriously, what good are graphics if the gameplay, the story, and the AI all suck the big wet titty? And don't even get me started on the new physics epeen, like I care if every shard of building falls in the correct direction when I blow something up, or calling games "multiplatform" when they are just a bad Xbox or PS3 port.
The nice thing about those "plateaus" like when everyone was using a Quake (1,2,3) engine based on Unreal engine based, was that to separate yourself from the crowd you had to do something different BESIDES graphics. Soldier of Fortune had GHOUL body physics, Deus Ex had a mix of FPS and RPG, Rainbow Six went for realism, etc. Now everyone just tries to show their graphical and physics epeen is bigger than the other guy while the bad guys all line up to be mowed down because they are too fucking stupid to find decent cover. And if you crank up the difficulty on newer games they just do EA style cheating where no matter how good a cover position you are in a giant invisible arrow points to you saying "He is right here!" and the grunts pull of head shots from 200+ yards away with a crappy rifle while taking more shots than the terminator.
So in conclusion graphics advances were just fine when we were jumping from P2 to P4, and from Geforce 2 and Rage with tiny amounts of regular RAM to 7600s and x1950 with uber fast Graphics RAM, now we seem to be at a point were companies without any good ideas simply go "throw more graphics at it!" instead of taking the time to actually make a good game. I for one would be quite happy with games having 2004 era graphics if they have a decent story and AI that doesn't feel like Forest Gump. All these Crysis style epeen graphics and physics seem to do is limit the user base while adding nothing worth caring about. After all, how much am I gonna care about graphics if I am too busy yelling "DUCK YOU DUMMY!" to the bad guys?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think you'll find Squibs Arcade demonstrates how modern games would handle, without their super cool graphics.
X-COM still has the distinction of being the only game that has ever caused me to jump out of my chair. If you don't think you can get scared by 640x480 graphics or whatever that was...try it.
For me, still the only game to have achieved that was Rescue on Fractalus -- the shock you get when you refuse to pick up a pilot who turns out to be an alien agent. And IIRC on an Atari 800XL that was only 160x192!
Yeah, I have to agree with you here. Normally unless a game is first person I simply cannot be scared by it. But playing the UFO/XCOM games, I could seriously creep myself out, and leave myself on edge for ages. Those games really did do something amazing given you are looking down on an isometric battlefield at small figures of the men in your team (not even a representation of yourself), and still be holding your breath during the aliens turn in the fear that one will appear around the corner.
The rear half of a mutant rat, with a nice green-brown mold for extra flavour. Delicious. Unfortunately breakfast was interrupted by the other blokes digging a pit under our position and I lost it in the ensuing fight.
Now, with that out of the way, I too dislike feeling like I'm a pretend character, essentially because I tend to get too sucked in if I allow it. I like my life, I don't want to feel like I need to be someone else to enjoy myself. But I play games to explore other peoples' minds - the minds of the game designers and developers.
Different people have different reasons for playing (or reading or watching). There is no one true way, and I reject any attempt to impose your preferences on my enjoyment.
first is the nintendo generation. They rely on gameplay simply because their systems can't support bleeding edge graphics.
The other camp is the one that can have both.
It's more than just about gameplay.
One example: Mirror's edge.
The real version has great graphics and amazing gameplay.
The 2d platform version has fun gameplay and stylized kitschy graphics.
Both are fun. Only the real version is what the designer intended. Anything else is a watered down version to run on inferior hardware.
The whole argument is just moot anyway. Yes, you can have both.
That's not what the question is though. The question is a business one. It demands you ask what the largest return will be. What platform has the greatest audience/customer base? Then develop for that platform. Graphics are important. Gameplay is important. These days, one without the other won't do well.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Neither is as important as stability and playability. If a game crashes every 5 minutes it doesn't matter how fun it is to play (are you listening Bethedsa).Second comes playability, this includes things like the UI, game play mechanics, physics and level of realism (if applicable), the UI should responsive and easy to figure out, game play mechanics, the rules that govern the game world needs to be consistent, well designed designed and make sense.
After all that story and graphics become important, I place story slightly above graphics as I prefer a fame with a good story but some games can not have a story and still be great fun to play.(Team Fortress 2 for example). That being said, I do like to see decent graphics but I will happily trade eye melting graphics to make the engine more stable. Good graphics make a good game excellent, good graphics will not make a bad game good, graphics add to a good game experience, but they don't define it so as you said, they shouldn't be the primary reason for any game. But above all else a game needs to be stable and the mechanics make sense.
Take two recent examples on the PC, Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2, both had eyeball melting graphics and good stories but both suffered from either stability or game play issues, Fallout 3 had the game mechanics down pat but suffered from horrible crashes and technical glitches that made the game unplayable until it was re-installed (or windows was re-installed), Far Cry 2 on the other hand gave me no problems on either of the two gaming rig's I've played it on but the rules of the game world frustrated me to tears, combat mechanics were great but I the fact I had to stop every 15 seconds to shoot something the game world had created just to give me something to do (I do not have ADHD and can go for longer then 30 seconds without shooting something) making travelling to a mission so frustrating that I haven't been able to finish the game yet and it's not that long.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If you made this reply to 95% of the posts on this article, I would call it a proper response.
For example, while the water in some games may not look as good as in Crysis, I can still tell it's water. What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics?
I prefer cartoony and abstract graphics, but I'm not a hardcore gamer. I play games to escape, so they don't need to mimic real life.
So, with regard to water: It doesn't have to look like real water, but it should look COOL and/or FUN. You can define what COOL and/or FUN is, but I should enjoy looking at it and it should have some artistic merit.
Heck, for all I care, you could make a fun 2-D platform game using scans of crayon or marker drawings, as long as they are interesting and fun to look at. On the other hand, realistic but robotic / cold graphics are an immediate turn-off to me.
No, I will not work for your startup
You claimed without any reasoning or evidence that people who get immersed in games are immature. That itself is immature (and doesn't make any fucking sense). You might as well have posted "if you get immersed in games, go fuck yourself!"
Also, protip: swearing has nothing to do with maturity or the lack of it.
I think this is the point here. A "certain level" of graphics is required, but after that its gameplay all the way. storyline, plot, immersion. all of these things are far more important, but will not be fully realised without appropriate graphics.
personally i prefer an arcade feel rather than full realism, because my theory is that if i wanted realism, i wouldn't be sitting at a computer. My taste in computer games does vary from day-to-day however...
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Yes, but the picture draws nothing from you...it is what it is. A word picture: "The executioner inserts his fingers through your eye sockets and pulls your face off. You lay dead and bleeding on the ground" is simple, yet evokes images from your imagination far greater than any picture could be. Your imagination dresses the skeleton of the words in images more detailed and vivid than any graphic.
When you're hammered everything looks like it needs nailed....
Case Study #2: Lemmings 2 vs. Lemmings 3D
For pretty much the same reasons.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I prefer 2D games, actually. In most cases anyways. Basically, RPG's started out 2D (sort of). Some series work better in 3D (for instance, Legend of Zelda). Some *might* not, if I'd played more 3D RPG's which had their roots on 2D consoles. Then Nintendo introduced Mario 64 and that probably proved that while 3D Mario is good in its own way, it worked better in 2D. In my opinion, the graphics must be tolerable to look at, and be recognizable. Except on games like Pokemon, where they are recognizable after you've seen the creature (in this example, a Pokemon) and know what it is. I mean, of course one wouldn't recognize something they'd never seen or heard a description of before. I think my favorite console era for graphics was 16 bit. However, I admit that some games wouldn't be as good without the graphics they have. SPORE, for instance, kinda needs 3D or the game just would have no way of working well (although on low settings some textures look like they could be displayed better by an NES, but...)
I worked in the games industry, at a company that transitioned from desktop to console games. I believe wholeheartedly that graphics get so much love because, relative to other features, they have extremely high financial ROI.
You claimed without any reasoning or evidence that people who get immersed in games are immature.
If by "immersed", you mean "starting to think that you are the character you play" and getting too wrapped up in the game (or the TV show, for that matter...), then yes I do think that is socially immature. And maladjusted. Possibly (probably?) with an addictive personality.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
That's just the thing. 3Dfx didn't do a thing for Carmageddon. It was the same thing with Descent, I seem to recall; really hard to pick out a non-moving object in the mid-to-far distance.
You may be thinking of Carmageddon II, which did, evidently, support hardware acceleration.
"Good news, everyone!"
Without graphics, it's no longer a video game but a text adventure instead. (Or perhaps an inbetween if you consider a game featuring ASCII sprites. I remember that feature of some ol' hacky appearing games of the 8-bit era.) Not to knock text adventures (some people enjoy them), but I find the experience more immersive if suitable images and animation are provided. (Not to mention it feels less like dealing with DOS and more like playing a game.)
It's not so much the realism or effect in the graphics, but whether or not they're of a consistent quality and fitting to the gameplay. Some games lend themselves better to 2D and others 3D. Then it's a matter of figuring out the theme, the mood, and overall ambience (which may tie into a game's backstory if it has one) and then making the graphics fit into that. Also don't forget that graphics don't trump gameplay. There are some 8-bit games that I'd still play because they are fun. Now if you can make them look prettier while maintaining all their other redeeming properties, then more power to you. Think of it this way. For a game, you should have a really good package put together. The graphics are the wrapper that helps sell that package. Also don't forget - if you want to reach a broader audience, being able to downgrade the graphics or disable some features that the game was originally designed to use and to do so while still maintaining playability doesn't hurt. Not everybody has the newest hardware.
I can relate to that. Going back to the film analogy, if I'm channel surfing and there's a B&W movie playing, I tend to click right past. But there's a load of really good black and white films out there, and there's a number of them that I'll watch every chance I get.
Of course, there's also a lot of rubbish shot in B&W too. So maybe I shouldn't have said "all" those old games. But the graphics element still isn't a necessity for immersion - but it does lower the barrier to entry somewhat.
Exactly. Although I do wonder if the fact that computer games were a new medium plays a role in that as well. Maybe game designers have grown better at their task, and maybe there just weren't as many games from that era that will stand the test of time.
Still, it makes me wonder how the current generation of games will fare in 20 years time. Will there be a generation of gamers that refuse to look at Half-Life 2 because it has two-dimensional graphics and wasn't written for a telepathic interface? I suppose it's never easy to tell the classics in a field until after some time has passed.
Excuse my rambling on here. It's just a subject that interests me.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
You can also get immersed in a novel - because the printed page has a much higher dpi than today's displays.
Properly done, yes. :)
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Personally I think that's why games that have a cartoony look but realistic special effects and lighting are much more convincing. Call of Duty never attempted to look like reality but had a definite style (it has an almost soft focus and painted look to it compared to Crysis which definitely tried to render every leaf).
The Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider games were designed to be more stylish than real (sigh, real Lara), but the effects were supposed to behave as realistically as possible (wind, water, smoke, fire etc).
By doing away with total realism at the start, many games make you accept it's all just pixels but keep the immersion going by making things behave realistically. I never felt as immersed in Crysis as I did in CoD but then maybe that's because I wasn't playing it on a Quad-Core SLI boosted supercomputer.
why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games?
You're looking at the wrong games. The realistic stuff is in the bulk market - which is composed of previous generations but with extra bells and whistles.
The actual current generation of games, IMO, are things like Braid, weird Flash games, Dwarf Fortress, Scribblenauts, Wii games. Where the innovation is. These don't have realistic graphics.
Except maybe Dwarf Fortress, which has very realistic, very low-resolution graphics.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
CIV I had 256 colours on the PC too... It supported MCGA (320x200@8bit)
I'm not saying you don't have a point, just that you're factually incorrect.
My thoughts exactly. Turn the sound off in games and see just how much you lose your sense of immersion.
I would rank good sound above good graphics in a game (note: I still recognise a need for functional graphics, I'm just very flexible as to what I think they are).
I just spent over 1'400$ on a PC and I expect my new games to look better than old one (for example BF3 > BF2, CSS > CS), but of course for casual gaming I don't care, but these games aren't the one I spent 3-4hours a day for the past year on.
All I can say that if there had been anything beyond Zork when my son was in collage, he would probably still be there. He got me hooked too - his version was pirated and had no manual so we shared stratigies on the phone - the day I got the dragon to follow me to the ice wall by kicking him was a real "break-through"! The graphichs that began (for him) with Wolfenstein, were incredable to us - those really were the days!
What's the importance of having eyes on a Human Being?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Playing the original HL now is a little disappointing - we've seen what can be done. I think that's what drives these guys:
http://www.blackmesasource.com/
Summary: voluntary effort to remake the original HL but using the source engine and shiny new, graphically more appealing design.
Check out the video, it's very impressive - I can't wait to have a play when they're done.
The human condition is one of striving - we will never be happy with what we have; we will always look for the next greatest thing. And if that doesn't make you proud to be a human, then you're not an engineer.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I have been playing games for a real long time in fact the first game I rocked at was asteroids though I was young and really dint care about what it looked like all that mattered was I was better than my step dad.. I to this day still love FF3 (US) the story in that game was moving I played for three days straight while only sleeping when my eyes refused to work. I also use DosBox to play some of the oldies for the pure feel good game play and old stories lines. So for me the story or char development is a big one for me. Donâ(TM)t get me wrong I do love the eye candy that games are now achieving but what I find is that a lot of the time the game play and story line suffer because a lot of money was dumped into the looks. SO to the point I like where the looks of the games are heading as long game play and story line are just as strong!!
Many great Quake players played at lowest resolution... it's much easier to shoot a pixel from across the map :-)
Dosbox FTW!
http://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=239&letter=X
Honestly, somebody mentioned star wars and how it could not have existed with the technology from the 1950's cinematics.
If done properly, better graphics can improve the gameplay.
Here is an example. The original star wars arcade vs. the jump to lightspeed expansion for star wars galaxies (screw the main game, I am not talking about that travesty here).
Now, both of them were space flight shooters. With the improved graphics also came the ability to highten the collision detection. Instead of just a hit of miss like in the original 80's vector machine, you can skim the ship and do less damage, do full damage on a specific ship component, target specific ship components.
Now a game built on graphics is not always better. Prototype did not get perfect reviews because its graphics were not as good, and not the fact that it was a next gen clone of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.
Graphics only matter if they improve gameplay. If I am playing a FPS, it will not enhance the gameplay if I accidently shoot a wall and a chunk breaks off and uses physics, but does not damage to anything, it just uses physics. That is a waste of graphics.
Last I remembered, I liked when games like Super Mario Bros relied on putting you in a fantasy world that didn't try too hard to be "real." Sure, there were some real elements [human beings], but the baddies were strange, powerups were stranger [kanooki suit anyone?], and the game was a blast.
I like the "realism" of some games, but often I will go back and play an older game just because it's more fun. I'd rather fire up NHL 96 on PC than NHL 09 [notice I wasn't talking about Xbox 360 or PS3 here, but still, I prefer 96 to those in terms of gameplay]. I'd rather play the original UT to the dreck they're putting out now. It's not like the first game in every series is the best, but sometimes they find the right formula and butcher it in sequels. Rose-colored glasses or not, graphics are not everything. Look at games that stood the test of time such as Tetris. Most people would rather play the original than it's derivatives [including other puzzle games].
That being said, I'm super stoked for the new Monkey Island series. Graphically, not that impressive, but if the humour is good, it'll justify the purchase.
[/getoffmylawn]
Do you seriously think this is what people mean when they talk about immersion?
Yes, but the picture draws nothing from you...
That depends entirely on the picture.
Bow-ties are cool.
I AM THOGULUS WARRIOR OF THE UNDEAD. I EAT YOUR LIVER TO REGAIN HEALTH.
I *am* Thogulus Warrior of the Undead, you insensitive clod. Sheesh, people think I go about eating livers all the time. I don't.
I'll save yours for later on, when I'm a bit hungrier.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You failed at fundamental logic in those arguments, since none of your examples are examples of what I stated at all.
Better quality film & camera is completely orthogonal to colour vs. b&w and even CGI.
That aside, even if you'd made a relevant point, which you didn't, I covered that with 'in most cases' which I'm pretty sure precludes any subset of two or three movies you'd prefer on lower quality film, filmed with lower quality cameras. Think home-video.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Think home-video.
Oh.
Well shit... Nobody disagrees with that.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Some people liked the Blair Witch Project, for example, which is the reason I included my exception in the first place.
There are video games out there that look worse than home movies shot by amateurs -- camera angles facing the wrong people, video quality that makes things hard to see, bad focus, etc.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Blair Witch Project
Good point. But it's the exception that proves the rule.
camera angles ...
While technically orthogonal to "quality of game engine", I wouldn't be surprised if games that "look worse than home movies shot by amateurs" suffer from poor implementation in other areas, like the game engine.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What, you never felt the thrill of winning a race? Never had the rush as you deliver that last blow to the nasty end of level baddie?
Never breathed a sigh of relief as you finally got through that really tough level after trying for hours upon hours?
To me that's immersion.
Immersion is you being the character. Getting "into" the game.