Life or Landscape?

[SunoffaBeach]

I came across some reviews which said that L4D just doesn't look as good as Crysis or Farcry2.

Don't they just ignore the fact that there are alot more enemies running around on screen at the same time? This needs hardware power as well.

Crysis with hundreds of enemies running at you is just impossible on today's hardware.

Imo, L4D looks just as good as Crysis. Instead of (beautiful) landscapes you have hordes of (ugly) zombies. Compared to L4D, Crysis almost feels "empty".

Take a look at Oblivion: Of course the environments look great. But all the cities are empty. There's no life. For some games (like Fallout 3) this actually makes sense, but in Oblivion it was killing the immersion for me. There's a big market with all kinds of shops, but I'm pretty much the only person there. A crowded street packed with busy citizens would have been more impressive than highly detailed architecture. It's also more realistic in a way and certainly more immersive.
Imagine a Morrowind-level engine with a Daggerfall-level NPC count. Something like that.

Personally, I would love to see more games with a slightly dated engine but full of life.
I don't say it's better. It's just a different approach in game design.

I even have some older games like "NASCAR Racing" where rendering 40 cars on the track still needs my modern hardware.


Your opinion?
Are there some games I missed?

 

[Count_de_Monet]

I'd love to see it but I doubt you will unless it's a player made mod. Making a truly immersive, diverse, and populated world in a game would take extra time that just isn't in the budget for most games (or at least I assume it isn't because it never seems to happen). Left 4 Dead gives you action around every turn because you don't have to interact with any of the NPC's just shoot them and the whole idea is for the game to not be scripted.

I think a game like Oblivion could benefit from a little random NPC placement like you see in Left 4 Dead. Maybe there is a reserve of 1000 different people who don't hand out quests but just appear at random in cities, on roads, etc, and you can have a quick conversation or maybe not even interact with them at all. Not every character in a game needs to talk to you, how many people would talk to you if you walked up to them on the street and started jabbering in their face?

 

[SunoffaBeach]

Making a truly immersive, diverse, and populated world in a game...

I just realized that MMOs do exactly that.

Problem is, that's pretty much the only thing I like about today's MMOs.

 

[Xvito]

I know a game that has both... it's called Assassins Creed.

 

[Count_de_Monet]

I don't know, I've played a few MMO's and there seems to be a definite straying from creating a truly populated and diverse world with personal interaction. My first MMO experience was Everquest and there were only three classes that could truly solo in that game and even then many weren't that efficient at it until later levels. There was truly no comparison between solo exp and grouped exp plus the benefits of extra loot, a better chance of surviving mistakes, and so on.

Even my first MMOFPS, Planetside, was highly social compared to any other online FPS I've played since then. Most games like Counter Strike, Battlefield (any of them), and Call of Duty will reward teamwork but it is by no means a necessity and sometimes it's downright impossible to organize. My few months of Planetside were made more fun by coordinated clan attacks, fighting off groups of enemies you began to recognize after a while, and tailoring your points so a group of 4 or 6 specialized people covered every angle instead of having 4 or 6 jack-of-all-trades with missing pieces.

World of Warcraft really screwed with the teamwork mold, in my opinion. When I started playing my trial subscription the game felt huge and empty and I couldn't even find a group to kill bad guys with if I wanted to. There were a few main problems with WoW when I got to it: it was too easy to level up so low level zones were ghost towns, the game was huge and zones were enormous and there just weren't enough people to populate any of them, and you can get way too far on collection quests and solo experience so there is no incentive to group.

Everquest 2 had the same issues when I tried it out. There weren't any low level dungeons where I started, what groups of monsters there were could be picked off one or two at a time, collection quests were like programmed power leveling, and city zones were empty.

Then there is EVE... I really didn't try that hard but the only people I ran into wanted to blow me up and the chat rooms were annoying. The few corps I tried to get in to required like 5mil experience and I could advance just as fast offline as I could playing the actual game. I never even got close to figuring out the social aspect of that game but I know it is there it just isn't easy to break into.

 

[crimsondynamics]

It's not so much a different approach to designing games, as examples exist. Developers simply accommodate the technology to fit the game design and vision.

Take GTA III onwards, for example. The graphics are nothing to write home about, and there are noticeable graphical glitches especially if you are on foot, but because the game's sandbox nature just allows you to do so much, all those glitches can be forgiven.

Another example is the Katamari series. Every location had literally hundreds of items to pick up but more than that the locations were flooded with movement, from floating fish to drunk "sararimen". Me and My Katamari on the PSP suffers from horrific frame rates and pop-in. Most items were very blocky in nature and poorly animated as well. But making the game run at a steady 30fps, no noticeable pop-in, and highly-detailed and animated items would equate to much less items to pick up, resulting in - well, I don't know what game it would turn out to be, but it wouldn't be Katamari Damacy.

 

[Anarchemitis]

What can developers say? Having dozensif-not-hundreds-strong AI each individual and interpolating each other is much more computationally demanding than crazy-good graphics.