Jaffe: Games Industry Needs to Get Over Itself

[Sakurazaki1023]

as long as a game is fun .. art/graphics aren't important....o.0

Agreed.

Double agreed

It always makes me really depressed when I look at game reviews and see that games lost points for not having photo-realistic graphics. I was looking at a forum topic about Crackdown 2 the other day and it was absolutely filled with people who refused to buy the game because the graphics looked outdated (aka more than 6 months old). Graphics should be the icing on the cake, nothing replaces good gameplay.

 

[gl1koz3]

If you want to play tetris on a monochrome monitor, go do it. But just get over the thought I'll like such a game too.

On a side note, yes, "artsy fartsy" might be a good term to describe the oopsy-daisy sh*t that's being produced today. Though, I kind of liked the first half an hour of Crysis and can't sit through two rounds of tetris.

 

[nik3daz]

as long as a game is fun .. art/graphics aren't important....o.0

Agreed.

Double agreed

Triple

To me, it's games like Braid that deserve the label of artistic when you look as the game as a whole. On the other hand, you can just have awesome artistic direction like Okami. As for photorealistic environments: art is about creativity and expression; not who has the best camera.

 

[JackRyan64]

Gameplay is the main, fundamental part of the video game. I don't know why you are looking down your nose at 80s games. They were restricted by technology but in terms of coming up with new gameplay and creating exciting game worlds the best ones were pretty amazing.

I'm not looking down my nose at 80s games. I'm looking down my nose at the more obnoxious 80s gamers that want everything to be stuck in 8-bit and say that "everything is terrible" after the NES.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I'm not looking down my nose at 80s games. I'm looking down my nose at the more obnoxious 80s gamers that want everything to be stuck in 8-bit and say that "everything is terrible" after the NES.

I very rarely hear people saying things like that but whatever it takes to get you through the day I guess.

 

[Jumplion]

Some people are reading too fast through the article, he's not saying he hates "artsy" games like ICO, Shadow of the Collosus, flOwer, ect...

He says that he hates games that claim to be of that sort and act like they're a masterpieces.

Most of the "poser" artsy games aren't supposed to be "artsy" at all. Gears of War, Halo, Resistance, Killzone, all of those games are just testosterone filled blood-baths, just because you say that they have "mature" themes and "emotion" with the characters does not make it true.

An example of this would be Gears of War 2, I remember hearing that Cliffy B said "We really wanted to make a more mature story with more emotion in the Gears of War franchise, really make the player feel with the characters" or some stupid thing like that. Guess what? It wasn't. Hell, I doubt most GeoW players even bothered with the single player, or if they did they barely bothered with the story.

Another example, as much as it pains me to say it, Heavy Rain at times did try to be a bit too pretentious for it's own good. And I don't think I even need to start on how much David Cage was (as Yahtzee put it) "wanking" off to his "interactive storytelling experience" (and keep in mind, I absolutely loved Heavy Rain, it was more mature than most other games out there.)

Jaffe is not saying that games should not try to be "artistic" or "mature" in theme, but he is saying that some game developers just need to get over themselves and just admit that they're not making an artistic masterpiece.

 

[Schwerganoik]

Here's a couple games that sacrificed gameplay for presentation

Oblivion: Yes, relative to other RPGs, it has a lot of freedom. However, relative to previous Elder Scrolls games, freedom has been scaled back. Morrowind may not be as pretty, but I still enjoy jump & levitation spells, picking every lock that I find (I consider the lockpick minigame to be a glitch in the company system, because I prefer to play an RPG, not Warioware), wearing a shirt underneath my armor, wearing an asymmetrical outfit, stealing stuff, becoming such a good salesman that I sell for more than what I pay (Warioware is a good game, but it's not my genre), and etcetras. With all of the 30,000 meticulously rendered items, Bethesda removed all of the combinations.

Wet: Oddly enough, this was also published by Bethesda (the people that made Oblivion, not the ones that made Daggerfall). This game was loaded with cinematic styles of presentation, but the actual game part of it was a similar amalgam of gameplay mechanics similarly stitched together by Igor instead of Dr.Frankenstein. And nobody likes Ruby, except probably herself.

 

[SmugFrog]

You know graphics aren't important to you when you're playing a recent release and find yourself asking why it's missing gameplay features that were included in a similar game type RELEASED IN 1996.

Galactic Civilizations II vs Master of Orion II.

I love so many things about GC2, but too many times while playing it I found myself wondering, "Why can't I do this? Why didn't they include this as an option? You could do this in Master of Orion II, but not here?"

While I love the ship building in GC2, that is the ONLY thing it has over Master of Orion II. Such a shame. No one these days will play Moo2 because of the graphics - but I still load it up regularly.