The graphics debate

TheMiscreant

I know many of you have been enamored by Oblivion's graphics, but I'd like to throw this into play.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/36/26

I agree generally with the FIRST article, the second one is kind of true too, but I think the general gist is that graphics disappear after a while with a great game. No one notices them anymore.

Drop a line.

Zelig

Graphics aren't a big selling point for me, they can make a great game even better though.

Then again, over half the games I currently have installed use primarily 2D engines, most of my favorites are turn-based strategy or RPG.

MiDri

I feel graphics are importent, because they add a greater vocabulary in which a story can be told in a game... I think a great example of this is how Oblivion overexposes everything (gives it lots of bloom) when you are a vampire out in daylight -- I actully feel like I am effected by the light, not just being told, "Oh.. light... ya, that hurts you when your in it... so stay out of it."

bobbytomorow

Graphics are not as important as people think. I mean I would choose to play old school Metroid on NES than Doom3 any day. Graphics of course add to the game, but they are just one ingredient. A great game is a great game regardless of its graphics. Mind you I'm probably a little biased towards older games, I still play on my NES, Jaguar,Virtual Boy,Genesis,Game Gear, SNES etc...

TheMiscreant

Yet, it has come too much into the focus of developers. Gameplay is left with the scraps, and still, gameplay is not as great as it COULD be. Story empowers a game with a whole lot. It adds life, and makes things flow, and keeps one's interest in the entire gist alive. Like the author of the article said, human nature thrives on narrative. Conversations consist of stories, history consists of stories, and our lives are stories. Why not let them into games, and let them fuel imagination to a new level?

atilover48

I think that graphics in these days is everything. I think that delevopers dont seem to care now about the story of a game or how you get involved in it obviously gameplay s the most important part of a game.

The best game i have ever played is Metal Gear Solid 3 it has the best story i have ever seen and that really helps making the game more intersting and fun to play.

Geminiwave

...uh...yeah MSG3 had a GREAT story </sarcasm>

i dunno graphics are great, but the better games dont seem to have super great graphics. Actually I did love fable and at the time the graphics were pretty darned good. Still I've been playing Vampire Bloodlines lately and that game has SHITTY graphics and HORRIBLE gameplay but the story is wonderful. I put up with the numberous bugs just for the story...sooo that definately influences me.

on the other hand, I whipped out Resident Evil 3 today for the first time. I was pumped to play a zombie shooter. I didnt last 5 minutes because of the shitty graphics. I was like "UHG THIS PAINS MY EYES! BLEHH!" and tossed it aside.

Sandok

Graphics = immersion

Thus they are important. Nobody will play the ultimate game with the best sound, gameplay, innovation and all if the graphics are like pong. They are important, though not essential.

Falstaff

Emmersion..

Sandok

Isn't it immersion?....

bananaman

I am seconding this (with an I not an E)

Al_Vampyre

Imagine the person who sits and reads a book, looks up in horror and shouts, "This word 'tree' looks nothing like a tree! It looks like some letters on a piece of paper!" and throws the book at the wall, disgusted. He's either a fool or reading a Dan Brown novel.

I loved that quote, its an interesting point of view, and something that came to my mind whilst I was reading a thread on here about Tomb Raider Legends, I remember playing TR when it first came out and somewhere quite close to the beginning I got attacked by an animal of some sort (iirc it was a tiger or soemthig of that nature) and I literally jumped because I didn't see it approach. My point is that I was so immersed (It is an 'I' incidentally) that my body reacted as if I was actually in physical danger but what kept me playing was the story. None of the succesive TR games kept me involved at all, even though the immersion provided by the game interface has improved over the years.

Its the same with movies, how many times has a fantastic movie been dumbed down by an interminable rash of sequels. Final Destination was a fantastic movie, the concept was new, it was inventive and fun and the premise that you couldn't cheat death was kept in the background for quite a long time in the movie, allowing the viewer to work out (and therefore become personally involved) that the victims were dying in the order they would have in the 'plane crash. FD2 was OK but you knew the premise which took away from my enjoyment of the movie and FD3 was fun but thats all, the deaths just became more gruesome in the third one because there was no shock value left. If, on the other hand FD2 had not been FD2 but had been the first in the series then it would have been every bit as good as the original, the same goes for FD3.

My point is that if you take the originality or the quality of the movie/game/book away then the quality of the immersion is irrelevant. Personaly I rarely, if ever, play a storyline based game more than once, I know how it ends, and the continuation of the storyline is my driving factor to keep playing. I want to stay up for one more hour because I want to see what happens next, not because what happens is beautifully rendered, the only things I play repeatedly are things that are different every time I play, like Civilization.

Yes its nice to have something approaching photo-realism in a game but it should never be the driving factor.

A calf skin bound, gilt lettered, first edition of 'Riders' is still just a Jilly Cooper novel...

Al_Vampyre

I've only one thing to say...Tetris!

niceguyrichy

amen.

I still play monkey island and magic carpet, it's all about the game play imo

bananaman

AL Vamp you make some interesting points and I can see where you are coming from, but the flip side is that, although great graphics won't make a game, they can add another layer to an already great experience. Where as books rely on the minds eye, games and movies rely very much on visual input as one of the main means to portray what is happening around you. Lets take HL2, it is a great game but the graphics added whole new levels, which up until that point had been unheard of. You may be wondering what I mean, I dont mean the explosions, the zombies or anything along those lines but mainly the faces of the characters - the graphics allowed emotion to be portrayed to an extent where you were immersed into the story as the "people" that you were interacting with seemed to actually exist! This would not have been possible with awful graphics to the same extent, yes a well written story is key but the graphics are like the icing on the cake, they aren't going to make a rotten cake nice, but they make a good cake all the sweeter. And following that analogy you don't just want a bowl of icing either, you need substance behind it.

I realise that it also very much depends on what style the games are going for, games like Monkey Island had great characters but it was not aiming at a realistic portrayel of the world, where as other games that aim for a realistic view of the world rely much more on graphics to push the "suspension of disbelief".

And also to mention films, I think a good example of something that couldn't be done and what really benefits from graphics are the LOTR films where they add to the "immersion", but as we know the new Star Wars filmed relied on graphics to the extent where the story suffered. This comes back to graphics being important as long as they are used upon as solid foundation of story/gameplay.

So to summarise - i like cake...

Falstaff

how many pixels did it take to make donkey Kong or Dig Dug...
ah the irony...
tis the law of diminishing returns...the more pixels you can squish into a game the less intersting it sometimes becomes......
I agree "Bananerman"

Callandor

The hinge of the matter is this; people with less better imaginations require lot better graphics. If you haven't got quite a good imagination, you will prefer to play games that have stunning graphics and video sequences but if you have got a good imagination you won't mind the turn based strategy and 2D RPG titles like me and Zelig, I personally detest a game which doesen't have any thought put into it and at still at the end of the day delivers great graphics. As a person who's been gaming for many years, I believe in storyline as well as graphic intensity but I don't believe graphics are truly everything.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis for example, was quoted in here by Gemini, and in fact is a BRILLIANT game, one whic I'm remorseful I did not finish(not by choice ofcourse) but it was a great game, one which I played only a few years ago, in fact, I think it is barely 2 years since I took up that game and slapped it into my CD ROM drive played it with the ePSXe emulator, FF8 too, played it around then and became immensly enthralled by it's complexities and depth and didn't finish it coz I didn't have a working NTSC disc 4 but anyway, I enjoyed these games which were as pixelated as anything on PS1 that's come out for the platform could be regardless.

Graphics are everything to those that do not have or have not learned to have a good imagination about the game they're playing or the book their reading, I think most peeps who started gaming on old platforms like the game gear (huge thing bobbytommorow, I don't think that thing could have been or even now can be called portable at all lol ) appreciate and know how to enjoy games that are lacking in graphic quality but are rich in complexity and good story as far as the gameplay of the game in the firing line goes.

A study was actually done by Blizzard entertainment, I can't remember when and since I don't have any proof you can choose not to believe me but this was on another forum on which we discussed the study lightly, and they found that if graphic quality kept on going up and up and up eventually it would reach an intensity at which it was not a game like setting anymore and it would loose it's quality as a "game" as it would loose the 'it's not real it's only a game' property and the mind would percieve it in a totally different way, it would be taken as realistically instead of fun and fictional in the end of it all. Blizzard did this study because at the time, I'm not sure if now, they had the best CGI graphics in their game and they were wondering how far they could push it until the effect they were desiring to effect in the user was comprimised and it was in fact "too much" for the person to take it as a good thing, as you know the saying too much of anything is bad, well, that's what they were trying to test.

I'm no graphics expert or anything but I personally believe you don't need graphics to make a good game, I mean look at GTA.

My take exactly. In fact, I never play -any- game again after I've finished it once because there are many other games to play anycase and they're pretty damn good too if you take the time to like them. A good place where this can be seen is in games like Freelancer or the GTA series. GTA SA sucked to me because the storyline did. To me, that's all, not to you, if you liked it, feel free to move on.

And as for movies, The Matrix, you either watched it and enjoyed it becaue of the great special effects, or the story-which few people even remotely understood mind you. If you understood the story the effects were just a special treat and you enjoyed the movies many times more than you would have if you were just watching it to witness the special moves. I tell you, learn to witness the story and you learn to enslave the full power of the art piece and make it your own.

And I end this by adding a quote by bananaman:

One game that did make graphics look all the important however was Black and White. I loved that game. Still do in fact. Dropped a tear when it finished.

Callandor

bananaman

Another point that I have just thought about is how important graphics are to online multiplayer games. With my love of the mod Insurgency ( http://www.insmod.net/ ) I suddenly realised that MP games are an example where graphics can, coming back to a previous point, create a "suspension of disbelief".

For example in Ins the first release will be set in Iraq, and it will use HL2 engine to really set the scene as close to reality as is possible at present. And I think this is where Sun Walka's point, using Blizzard research, is fascinating - will we see a divergence of gaming to "games" and to "reality simulators"? Part of my excitement regarding Ins is that, never having been in combat and never wanting to, I would still like to experience it in the comfort of my own home, but to do this I need as much help as I can get to feel as If I am there (maybe this is my lack of imagination), but graphics will be key to this, as will sound etc.

I am just rambling really but maybe it is getting close to a split in gaming, or maybe it is just the difference between a feature film that is animated and one that is filmed against blue screen, both are able to portray a wide range of emotions, thoughts, and ideas, but one may be more suited to some situations than others (can you imagine south park with real people, would they get away with what they do/say?)

Sandok

For the TIME, the graphics of tetris were amazing... You have to stay in context. For the time, HL was amazing. Doom was oustanding. Graphics can't be ignored and your compairson to a book is just uselessly stupid. A game must immerse you into the game.

PERFECT example, play oblivion on lowest graphical quality and then highest. The gameplay, sound and all will be the same but the immersion is gone and a lot of the appeal of the game too... Come on, somebody who think graphics aren't THAT important is either blind or really not thinking that hard.

GeneralClaymore

Gameplay is important to me the most then the next comes sound and graphics. I would play a game that looks butt ugly.

Sandok

Of course gameplay is important but trust me, play a GOOD looking game with max graphics and then with minimum. It looses alot of it's appeal usually.

Falstaff

Yeah...but the action has to be there as well. I played IL 2 Sturmovik because it had a steep learning curve....and oh yeah....
it had good graphics
doh

the big Firefly

sandok....man you have a answer for everything.

ill say this gameplay and the story(in game where there is a story) is first then to improve those 2 the graphics comes in. i think those a the elements of a game and if one lack in performing then the hole game suffer under it....

Sandok

It all depends on the game for me.... For example, Civ 4 doesn't have to look that good to be appealing but Oblivion does... It all depends on the genre for me.

Falstaff

what about the games that dont necessarily rely on realism to be enjoyed, there are many

bananaman