How Much Detail Is Too Much For Games?

jones_supa writes "Gamasutra editor Eric Schwarz gives thought to the constantly increasing amount of graphical detail in computer games. He notes how the cues leading the player can be hindered too much if they drown in the surroundings, making it harder for the game to hint whether the player is making progress. Consistent visual language helps to categorize various objects, making their meaning more obvious. Paths through the game world can be difficult to read simply due to dense vegetation. For some cases 'obfuscation through detail' can also actually work really well. Schwarz challenges us to ponder how the amount of detail makes a game either more or less enjoyable."

Comments

I agree

[oakgrove]

I used to play a lot of games when I was younger and cut my teeth on titles like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, on up to Far Cry and Half-Life 2 where I kind of got away from the whole thing. Recently I made a Windows install and decided to see what state the industry was in these days. My God was I blown away by the lighting and effects in Crysis Warhead. But equally I came away puzzled that it just didn't seem like I could "see" anything. It all just looked the same to me. Enemies blended into the background and everything just seemed to be running together. I thought maybe I was getting old so its nice to see somebody else agrees with my sentiments.

Re:I agree

[X0563511]

Modern games, especially when camouflaging of some form is involved (which usually is in shooters) it's motion that will give them away, if your eyes are not adapted to spotting things.

So:
1. Pattern and antipattern detection/recognition (hey that grass looks diff... oh that's an enemy!)
2. Fine motion detection/recognition (something just moved in those trees)

These very same "skills" are trainable - the more you play, the better you get. This has actual real-world impact, especially in the realm of soldiers, hunters etc. Likewise if you've done a lot of that kind of thing, you'll find you pick up these games a bit easier since there's something to build on.

Here's another study, though this one's some news report with no links.

Re:I agree

[gman003]

Crysis does that deliberately, trying to make camouflage an important gameplay element. It somewhat succeeds - the AI gets confused by camouflage sometimes, and that's not including your magic invisibility thing. So if you play it right, you can turn it into a weapon for you, instead of against you.

Other games do it simply to look "cinematic". Doesn't work well.

If you read some of the developer's papers on Team Fortress 2, you'll note that they were obsessed with visual identification. Every class was identifiable by silhouette alone, they used special lighting algorithms to emphasis object edges, and they maintained consistent color schemes, with players and important items being both high-saturation and high-contrast compared to backgrounds.

That all went out the window somewhere around the time the first promo items were released, but it's still something more developers should learn from.

Can make for more fun games too

[Sycraft-fu]

A problem in games has always been one of stealth. When you talk low rez stuff, characters stand out from the environment real well. So stealth is always done through artificial means. Characters become invisible or the like.

Well, with detailed graphics that isn't necessary. Battlefield 3 does a great job of using visual camouflage. There's no "invisible button", no way to make your character magically disappear. However you can hide in shadows, crawl through the foliage, cove in debris. You can visually hide yourself from your opponents, because the engine has sufficient detail to make that a realistic possibility.

Now I'm not saying that is the only way to do things. I don't mind games that want to go for bright cartoony graphics (I loved TF2). However it is a cool thing that we can achieve now with better graphics. We can have a setting where you can hide in ways we do in real life.

Re:As ususal, the answer is...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

True. Unfortunately, 'looks right' lands you straight on the tender mercy of the whiny bastards who play your games...

As one such, something I've found myself running into is that sometimes more detail makes me more aware of the remaining missing details.

I've been bitten hard a couple of times by this while playing Skyrim lately. A couple of examples: Unlike Oblivion and earlier where all water was still, water now has a 'current' associated with it, so you behave more realistically if you try to cross a swift-flowing river or the like, or drop an object into one. Unfortunately, the 'current' value assignment isn't very granular, so you are constantly running into situations where your intuition expects the flow to change in response to an obstacle or bit of terrain and it just... doesn't. Having no current at all was even less realistic; but you got over it quickly. Now that you have current, every deviation from your intuitions about fluid dynamics just smacks you in the face.

The improved weapon animation detail seems to have suffered a similar fate. They are much more visceral and kinetic this time around; but that makes the fact that the animations for a given weapon type(eg. all one-handed swords, all warhammers, etc.) are the same, despite the in-game weights of items within a given type varying 50-300%. They are markedly less stiff and anemic than prior animations; but that just makes watching a character handle a weight '9' sword and a weight '16' sword exactly identically weirder(and let's not even start on how different sorts of targets should probably result in more and less elastic collisions...)