Crytek Boss Says Visuals Are "60% of the Game"

[Snotnarok]

I think it does when someone is willing to rebuy the game at full price (for that device) that says that they're willing to spend the extra money for something that adds nothing to the game beyond visuals. There isn't anything wrong with that, but if visuals are important to someone like that then ...just say it vs in forums like this telling people theyre silly for taking visuals.

I think it's naive to paint it as the only reason. People will buy an unretouched rerelease just so they can play it again. See Final Fantasy VII.

Hell, I bought Skies of Arcadia Legends, a graphical DOWNGRADE. I know it didn't sell THAT well, but a lot of other people did too.

Zelda could be repackaged as-is and I doubt it would impact sales much, if any. It's ZELDA.

I wouldn't buy a FFVII remake because graphical improvement aside I know Square would screw it up and make Cloud emo like he is in all his latest iterations.

Look I'm not saying it's the ONLY reason but I have seen a lot of N owners who boasted graphics dont matter then they get their remake and say how happy just because it looks better. I know someone personally and I called him out, and he 'admitted it'.
I'm just saying a LOT of people claim graphics don't matter but something gets a touch up and they want it, it's not a bad thing I just think its silly to deny it when it is a driving force for those specific people.

Yes Zelda is 'fairly same-y' the only one I've liked enough to play was Twilight Princess <= this gets me insane amounts of hate for even suggesting this. Wind Waker was good but ehhhhh I can't get into it, good game though.

 

[Adon Cabre]

>snipped for oh so many reasons<

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Well speaking as one of those posters who scoffed at the Crytek boss it did kinda seem that I was one of those people your post was aimed at, and I'm sorry but 'hypocrite' has always been a hot-button insult for me.

I suppose the initial developer comment would have been slightly less inflamitory if it hadn't come from Crytek, who are (at least in my view) known for style over substance.

Thanks for the clarification, but I hope you can see your use of the term 'we' could be misconstrued to mean 'gamers' as a whole. That being said I'll hold my hand up to a confrontational reaction.

Gotta love Internet misunderstandings...

Oh it's perfectly fine. Crysis lives and breathes because of consoles [http://www.destructoid.com/crysis-2-huge-success-xbox-360-dominates-sales-197396.phtml]. PC users will find themselves counted out of the best that the industry has to offer as triple A publishers elect not to port them over [http://www.destructoid.com/and-you-wonder-why-developers-hate-pc-gamers--193957.phtml].

But I'm guessing the Smartphone market will pick up steam in about six years. Imagine 70 million smartphone users owning an iPhone 9 or Galaxy S7 with a 2.8 GHz ________ processor, virtually unlimited cloud servicing and other hardware goodies. As ludicrous as it is to exaggerate, it's even worse to underestimate the future. (Nintendo certainly did so.) And when this incremental shift happens, you can pretty much forget about consoles, or PC gaming.

 

[enriquetnt]

Graphics dont matter one bit, mario 3, pacman, tetris, final fantasy VI, and i could list you a hundred 8/16 bit era games that are above and beyond better than the boring and generic Crysis, sorry but is the true, we play with games NOT with graphics, ill take journey, okami, ni no kuni, odin sphere, any day before another grey-brown shooter no matter how "photorealistic" they think it looks

ill say 90% goes to gameplay, 10 percent EVERITHING else

sure some games "age" better than other, 8/16 bit can be played whit great fun and nostalgia, but 32/64bit tend to look ugly and "wonky" i believe the games from this generation are gonna be played 20 years from now whit the same fun and nostalgia cause gameplay caught up to graphics, and theres the issue of the "type" of game, every generation frees developers to do things that previously couldnt be done (GTA 3 on the PS2 comes to mind, thats a game that simply couldnt be done on previous generations, and still suffered greatly from trying to do to much whit the hardware but it was so insanely fun that you didnt care about the dire technical issues)

 

[Baresark]

He would say that. When push comes to shove, Crysis games are a market evolution, not a market revolution. They literally offer nothing new at all to the games market, they only dial up the graphics to a whole new level. I often thinks their technology is amazing, it's too bad it's not in the hands of anyone who makes really good games. They MP offerings are just lousy, and their campaigns are mediocre. They would do much better to get out of the game business and just license their amazing engine. Always give credit where credit is due, but don't sit there and try to defend your shortcomings by saying what you do well is more important. Graphics are important, no one can deny that, though a great game transcends graphics. Graphics certainly can help to sell a game, but it can't make a bad game good. There are plenty of cases where a good looking game is actually a good game, but as an interactive medium, actual gameplay preempts everything else.

 

[Baresark]

You'd be silly and hypocritical to say otherwise about this male driven industry.

I get what you are saying, though I won't agree across the board because not all of us lap up those triple A titles, as you put it. I just don't understand what the above statement has to do with anything this article is talking about.

 

[grigjd3]

Must be why I played all the way through VVVVV, Mark of the Ninja and XCom while I quickly grew bored of Crysis.

 

[Laser Priest]

"DIDN'T SEE YOU THERE OVER THE SOUND OF HOW FAR I CAN SEE IN THIS VIDEO GAME"

But I am glad the members of the gaming industry are vocal about how terrible they are.

The "Pixels is emotion" crowd is currently one of my favourites, alongside the EA reps saying "Everybody hates us because we're just SO DAMN POPULAR".

 

[Adon Cabre]

You'd be silly and hypocritical to say otherwise about this male driven industry.

I get what you are saying, though I won't agree across the board because not all of us lap up those triple A titles, as you put it. I just don't understand what the above statement has to do with anything this article is talking about.

This is still a male driven industry, slowly changing, but far from equally representative, as are all slowly emerging industries. The gaming medium as a whole is still very young and will undergo incredible amounts of change within the next five years. It won't look anything like today, or certainly as sexist. Anyways, that statement was a small addition to explain the context above it.

And this argument was NOT made across the board. It is inferred that Cevat Yerli is talking about triple-A titles. Of course, indie games and smaller publishing companies aren't trying to be hyper realistic; they are going for an alternative/cheaper style.

 

[Kashrlyyk]

Got distracted from reading this article by the laughter of "Master of Magic", "Heroes of Might and Magic 3" and "Wizardry 8".

 

[Hyakunin Isshu]

Like I already said on the other thread:

A lot of people here are saying that graphics dont matter but they actually do. A lot of gameplay mechanics can only work if displayed correctly, imagine if Portal didnt let you see through the portals or if Alan Wake didnt had dinamic light. Kings Field is Dark Souls on the PS1 (by the same guys) and look how functional it is:

Not considering the visual beauty but the fact that visually the gameplay found in Dark Souls could never be possible to achieve with those graphics.

They matter if they can be used to improve a game, just because a 2D 8-bit game can be fun to play doesnt mean that every game can be fun even in 8-bit. Just dont go all over the place with stuff that doesnt matter all that much like "knowing that an enemy is coming by the way the grass moves", really? How about looking at the dude?

PS: The part about the grass is something that the Crytek guy also said, and that was kind of dumb of him

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I hate when people start attacking people like Crytek, then start calling them names. At least you get the idea. New powerful graphics will help make new gameplay, like having millions of bad guys or Massive Destruction.

 

[BoredAussieGamer]

Well, let me just say this: VISUALS are important. However, visuals=/=Graphical fidelity. Well, sorta.

If I'm going to be playing a game for a at least half a dozen hours, I better enjoy what I'm looking at.

Good visuals can range from incredible design, to neat art style, to yes, even graphical fidelity. However, graphical fidelity won't age well.

 

[duchaked]

I didn't enjoy the Crysis series because I found the gameplay uninteresting, not because I played it on the PC with low settings and/or consoles with lower graphics...

so no.

 

[Colt47]

Kind of wondered if he was talking about Aesthetics when he mentions graphics, but then he was also mentioning Crysis. The world has people who are interested in making good game engines and the world has people who are interested in making really great games, but I guess the two don't always go hand in hand.

Regardless of what Cevat Yhirli has to say about video games, his company still has a really good alternative to the Unreal Engine for developers to license. I like the Frostbite engine simply for the fact it doesn't make things quite as ridiculously "shiny" as the Unreal Engines. Now if only we could get a Eastern Developer to create a game engine that can be licensed out that has their kind of take on Aesthetics. At the very least it would give developers three options for what to build a game around without having to spend crazy amounts of time building an engine from scratch.

Edit: Also as someone has said earlier, the graphics do matter when building a game. However, the way that Crytek inferred graphical importance was not pointing directly at historical relevance to the industry.

 

[faspxina]

Well, let me just say this: VISUALS are important. However, visuals=/=Graphical fidelity. Well, sorta.

If I'm going to be playing a game for a at least half a dozen hours, I better enjoy what I'm looking at.

Good visuals can range from incredible design, to neat art style, to yes, even graphical fidelity. However, graphical fidelity won't age well.

Exactly. It's called "VIDEOgame" for a reason.It's a very visual medium, so it counts alot.

This doesn't mean though that high production values = good design, like this guy is boasting about.
I'd say good design = good design.

 

[CyanideSandwich]

Thomas Was Alone and Limbo had me more emotionally invested than Crysis 3 did. Graphics definitely have a place in modern gaming, but it's nowhere near 60%.

 

[Knight Templar]

Mass Effect 2 shows a bad habit of squandering momentum in exchange for that freedom of travel. It's a problem that most open world games have,...

Mass Effect 2 is not even an open world game.

Mass Effect is a culmination of a lot of good ideas, and that should have been organized in a linear story;.

I see nothing to support that statement.

Why is there a main-mission choice if you have to play all their main-missions at some point?

Because they do not play the same way every time no matter the order.
Even if they did not giving the player a feeling of choice and letting them feel they are interacting with the world on their terms is very important for any RPG.

All that this does is make the plot more vague in exchange for flexibility in travel

How does it make the plot more vague?

and that's the beside the unaccounted loss of momentum with each completed mission.

Any loss of momentum is entirely the players choice.

Mass Effect has at it's core a strong narrative, where characterization is crucial to understanding this universe, but Mass Effect hold's itself back because of a design decision, and which, unfortunately, helped ruin it's ending in the third installment.

Its ruin in the third game was discarding player choice and its focus on characterisation. Furthermore having player choice helped the game with characterisation, allowing you to have a conversation, rather than watch one.
You seem to fundamentally fail to understand what it is that makes games special, and not just odd to watch movies. No wonder you think visuals are all that matter, you're not looking at games as games. Which actually helps prove my point.

This is one narrative, and it should only have one ending.

Except it isn't one narrative, at no point was it supposed to be.

Mass Effect brings nothing revolutionary, but finds the same pitfalls of every other game trying to balance both the linearity and sandbox genres.

Except its not doing that at all.


So other than this being a strange way of you letting me know you don't understand video games, or mass effect, what's the point of this nonsense?

 

[Adon Cabre]

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I'm really the wrong person that you should be talking to. You're argument is directed at Mass Effect's Creative Director Casey Hudson. My reasons are spelled out in a perfectly assembled paragraph; there's nothing more I could possibly add to show you the pitfalls of Mass Effect.

And now you're just being a contrarian for the sake of it.

 

[Knight Templar]

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I'm really the wrong person that you should be talking to. You're argument is directed at Mass Effect's Creative Director Casey Hudson. My reasons are spelled out in a perfectly assembled paragraph; there's nothing more I could possibly add to show you the pitfalls of Mass Effect.

And now you're just being a contrarian for the sake of it.

I take it you have utterly forgotten what the actual point of the discussion was? Ok, having you talk at me sure was bloody fruitful.