does good graphics lead to bad gameplay?

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

Animation, for me, is more important than graphics.


The textures are still awful and people are still block men, but everything moves like it should.

I just wish Half Life actually played like that

There are lots of games with pretty visuals, but some things just don't move like they should.

Character models in Mass Effect move terribly in cut scenes.

That. Was. Amazing...

I would gladly welcome a re-release of Half Life if it was animated like that.

 

[sextus the crazy]

I think that the term "good graphics" is somewhat misleading. A game can look and play well without to much expense; the real trouble comes when you try to make a game that pushes graphical fidelity. Trying to make the best textures and shaders (usually by making a new engine) take a ton of money that could be spent in gameplay. The best resolution will just make your shit sharper if you don't have good art direction, which is the most important visual aspect. Valve understands this; they don't waste time on a new engines because they know their games look good due to art direct and play well. Most people don't give a shit about high-end graphics anyway.

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

It's more of the fact they don't focus on what matters in the long run is how the game plays. There's a reason many games from over a decade ago are still being mentioned at all and it's not the graphics.

 

[NeutralDrow]

I immediately started thinking of the Guilty Gear, Arcana Heart, and Devil May Cry games, which got both better and better-looking as time went on.

I'd say no, not necessarily.

 

[kickyourass]

No, really the only time graphics has any impact on gameplay is if it's too muddy/pixal-y/other bad adjective-y to tell the difference between important objects.

 

[Pumpkin_Eater]

The focus on graphics and flashiness is the problem, not superior graphics themselves. For example, the last three Elder Scrolls games have looked progressively better, but general consensus is that overall game quality dipped with Oblivion and shot back up with Skyrim. The reason for this is the attention to detail, superior writing, and solid gameplay that went into Morrowind and Skyrim, but was comparatively lacking in Oblivion.

 

[Vault101]

yes, because

"GRAPHIX WHORES ARE RUINING GAMEZ AS ART!!MY WII HAS SUM OF DA BEST GAMES EVA STFU IF U THINK THERE "IMATURE""

.......sorry, its fun to be an ass somtimes

 

[Yopaz]

Animation, for me, is more important than graphics.


The textures are still awful and people are still block men, but everything moves like it should.

I just wish Half Life actually played like that

There are lots of games with pretty visuals, but some things just don't move like they should.

Character models in Mass Effect move terribly in cut scenes.

This is a very reasonable point. No matter how amazing a game look it's all a waste if movement looks unnatural.

However good gameplay and good graphics can go hand in hand. Batman Arkham City had great gameplay and pretty good graphics.
Bad graphics and bad gameplay can also join each other and often do. Really, stop blaming graphics for crappy games. Blame lack of creativity and fear of taking risks.

 

[Drop_D-Bombshell]

It's not that good graphics lead to bad games, i see it as how a developer uses those good graphics to further strengthen the gameplay. If the company is more focused on using graphics to make everything shiny and awesome backgrounds which you never get to see, then it's not a good use and most likely the gameplay'll be terrible. But if they use it to further puzzles, enemies and weapon mechanics, it can make a great game better.

It's all to do with where those good graphics are used and whether the balance of graphics and gameplay is good.

 

[Monsterfurby]

Technological* and gameplay quality seem to be negatively correlated these days, but correlation does not mean causation.

* - not necessarily graphical. A graphically high-quality game could be using very hand-drawn 2D or pixel graphics.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

yes, because

"GRAPHIX WHORES ARE RUINING GAMEZ AS ART!!MY WII HAS SUM OF DA BEST GAMES EVA STFU IF U THINK THERE "IMATURE""

.......sorry, its fun to be an ass somtimes

Puuuhlease.

You could never be an ass, Vault.

We've already had this discussion, remember?

 

[Vault101]

yes, because

"GRAPHIX WHORES ARE RUINING GAMEZ AS ART!!MY WII HAS SUM OF DA BEST GAMES EVA STFU IF U THINK THERE "IMATURE""

.......sorry, its fun to be an ass somtimes

Puuuhlease.

You could never be an ass, Vault.

We've already had this discussion, remember?

I CAN be an ass ....its just here Im usally not

Spoiler: Vault101 being an ass

seriously this whole "graphics whore" thing?...when did it become a fucking crime to enjoy nice viuuals..runiing gaming? thats SO 2007, I mean those peopel with their fucking Wii's and their fucking "art" games ohhhh FORVE ME for being a "graphics whore" becuae obviously its all inferior to your "ohhh! ohh! tis game has an asthetic that looks like its a crayon drawig by a blind 3 year old ITS SO ARTY!!!!!"

speaking of which..the Wii...what a peice of crap...no really its a horrible casual peaice of crap thats going to soon die. the xbox and PS3...no in fact a red ring of death xbox is better than a Wii...and dont get mew started on anime crap, those freaks at TV tropes have made me LOATHE all that is anime (except decnt 90's stuff and films liek AKIRA nad Perfect blue)

and you what else I hate? haters....haters who hate games wjile talking about artistic intrgrity...I made a threade before where some pretentious fuck dismissed a whole bucnh of great games at trash....fucking pretentious ass

oh and artisitic intigrity? THATS BULLSHIT theres no artistic integrity, not with ME3, its a fucking copout, thinka bout it....they dont change the ending and "preserve" this imanginary buzz word and what does it do? NOTHING 10 years time it'll be like "I hear the mass effect series is pretty good"

"yeah, except the ednings seriously shit"

"oh really? may as well not bother then"

and lets not get started on Bioware hate....seriously I dont give a fuck about EA, I liek biowares games, people just hate on them because theyre loke "ohhh I wont but an AAA game" yeah thats right you pretentious asshat you ont because YOU WONT BE HAVING ANY FUN because belive it or not I....I....

I.....think I need to calm down

ahhh...that felt good (please excuse ranting)

 

[Bostur]

I don't think there's any real correlation between graphics quality and game quality. I think what happens is this:

Good Graphics + Good Gameplay: Most praise focuses on the gameplay, the quality graphics are an afterthought.

Bad Graphics + Good Gameplay: All praise focuses on the gameplay, the poor graphics are an afterthought. Anyone griping about the graphics gets shouted down for failing to appreciate the gameplay.

Good Graphics + Bad Gameplay: People buy it because of the amazing visuals, realize the gameplay is terrible, ponder aloud whether there is a correlation between good graphics and bad gameplay.

Bad Graphics + Bad Gameplay: Hardly anyone ends up buying or playing these, as they're disasters.

Realistically speaking, designers who care enough to lovingly craft quality gameplay will often also craft quality visuals. At least artistically pleasing, if the budget isn't there to make them bleeding edge.

We probably notice the third case more, causing some kind of confirmation bias.

I think there's a few other factors at play though.

Certain techniques of aesthetics limits interactivity, making good gameplay harder to design. One of the most common culprits lately is the use of voice acting. Voice acting makes it harder for authors to tweak the script if it doesn't work quite right, and doesn't allow for as much player agency.
Similar effects happen with graphics sometimes. In the 1980's and 1990's it was almost considered a fact that 'cinematic games' had less gameplay. People were ok with that because it was seen as a limitation of the medium. This limitation has been removed somewhat because of technological advances but not completely. What did change was that cinematic games used to be a quaint exception, while it's almost an industry standard now.
There is another effect unique to most 3D games. When the controller is locked to crosshairs it can't be used as a pointing device for the UI. This severely limits what the player can do with the game. Some games tried to have several modes where the player could switch between UI mode and 3D mode, Deus Ex, System Shock 2 and even Minecraft are notable examples. This can be a little cumbersome or even outright nauseating, so I think a lot of developers simply chose to limit interactivity.

In action games I see a trend of pretty games being more shallow. In tactical and strategic games I see almost the opposite effect. New games are prettier, generally deeper and much more complex. So maybe it's more of a divide between genres than a general trend.

 

[Racecarlock]

This is just something I was thinking about this morning, on the way into work...

I've played games since I was very small, starting at around 7 or so. As I get older, and look forward to new iterations of my favorite games, what I see is a lot of attention paid to aesthetics and less and less all the time to innovative game mechanics. As CG has evolved, we've become obsessed with the idea of making the games look as 'real' as possible. The issue is... things look very real now, but fail to feel any different in spite of that.

I think the best examples of this are Mario and Halo/CoD. If you come over to someone's house expecting to play Mario, and he hands you Super Mario Bros. 2 instead of the New Super Mario Bros for Wii, you probably aren't going to freak out about it, because it's pretty much the same thing. It is similar, I find, with many FPS games.

Further, I'm not even sure that developers are succeeding at their goal of realism in focusing on the way a game looks. Honestly, Manny from Grim Fandango feels much more real to me than [insert modern character name... see? i can't even think of one] in spite of his blocky pixels. I think it's the fact that your goal in the game is to navigate the underworld beaurocracy, the fact that he as a person is a novel idea. Again, it's the gameplay and the writing, not how many blades of grass are on the ground.

It is my hope that we'll eventually reach a plateau of visual realism, at which point developers will have to start thinking about other things again.

What do you guys think?

GTA IV, Driver San Francisco, Red Dead Redemption, Portal 2, Iron Brigade, From Dust, Test Drive Unlimited, Elder Scrolls V Skyrim, Mass Effect, Ace Combat 6, and Just Cause 2. Those are all of the games that I personally own that have great graphics and yet still have good gameplay. So no, good graphics does not lead to bad gameplay.

 

[DiamanteGeeza]

It usually does end in a bad game, but that's only because modern studios aren't willing to put in the effort to make it look good, make it run like butter on a toaster oven, AND make it good as a game. They usually just pick one of the three.

This is the most naive and clueless thing I've read for a while. On day one of a project, we don't all sit down in a meeting and say "right then, what are we going to do... make it look good or make it play well?"

No developer ever sets out to make a game look bad, or play badly, and to suggest that any developer "isn't willing to put in the effort" is astonishingly insulting. Developers work their asses off, quite often working 13, 14, 15 hour days towards the end, not seeing their families for months and having no life - you call that not putting in effort? A tremendous amount of (unappreciated) effort goes into every game, regardless of how the end result turns out.

Lack of effort is not the reason that a game doesn't end up playing well.

 

[DiamanteGeeza]

It usually does end in a bad game, but that's only because modern studios aren't willing to put in the effort to make it look good, make it run like butter on a toaster oven, AND make it good as a game. They usually just pick one of the three.

This is the most naive and clueless thing I've read for a while. On day one of a project, we don't all sit down in a meeting and say "right then, what are we going to do... make it look good or make it play well?"

No developer ever sets out to make a game look bad, or play badly, and to suggest that any developer "isn't willing to put in the effort" is astonishingly insulting. Developers work their asses off, quite often working 13, 14, 15 hour days towards the end, not seeing their families for months and having no life - you call that not putting in effort? A tremendous amount of (unappreciated) effort goes into every game, regardless of how the end result turns out.

Lack of effort is not the reason that a game doesn't end up playing well.

It is you who is naive, not me. A lack of effort is 100% why we can't have nice things. Publishers don't want to pay for the effort to make a game look good, run good, and be good. They're only willing to fund one, or maybe two, of those things. Most often it's graphics, because shiny graphics sell pre-orders.

No disagreement about publishers being addicted to shiny graphics (see my previous post in this thread).

What you are totally and utterly wrong about is a lack of effort - I can tell you've never worked in the industry, which is why you haven't got a clue what you're talking about and have just insulted thousands of very hard working people.

As for publishers funding certain aspects of the code base... what on earth are you going on about? A game budget pays a team to do a game; a publisher doesn't say to a developer "we don't want good gameplay so don't spend any money on that - instead spend it on graphics!" The developer gives the publisher a quote to get a particular type of game done in a certain amount of time. The publisher, on the other hand, wants the game look, run, and play as good as it possibly can in the time available. Trust me... I do this for a living, you don't.

 

[Colodomoko]

It depends, I have played games where all they had were good graphics and nothing else. I also played games where the graphics really complimented the world and made the experience better. At the end of the day though I prefer game play and story over graphics.

 

[Woodsey]

No. Pretty games are just seen to 'flunk' harder because people assume unprecedented visuals will equal unprecedented gameplay. (Which is stupid.)

You could argue that teams that demonstrate ridiculous technical-expertise are somewhat lacking in actual creative-expertise, but I don't think that quite fits the idea that 'good graphics lead to bad gameplay'.

Similarly, you could argue that the number of ready-made pretty engines (UE3, for instance) simply means that more shite games are looking half-way decent.

Jim Sterling actually wrote a nice article [http://www.destructoid.com/why-xenoblade-chronicles-had-to-look-like-shit-226518.phtml] on Xenoblades touching on this.

Good graphics don't lead to bad gameplay. But good graphics do impose limits on other parts of the game.

Though I'm probably not the best one to talk to about graphics. Since I think everything these days looks absolutely fantastic. Even games that apparently look like shit. I can't really tell. It all looks great to me.

All that masturbating's ruined your eye-sight.