Poll: cinematic or innovation

[slypizza]

Apart for mother companies claiming games need to be more like gears of war , before they wanted to try and make games more cinematic and I think thats become too much of a main focus, yes I like great graphics as well but I fear some games are losing its gameplay innovations because they focus so much on making the game look as pretty as they can.

you think thats why there bring out so many first person shooter army games lately, because the concept is so simple they can focus on making the graphics more like a movie since the concept is just " go here and shoot this"

note: I'm going to take "Halo" and "gears of war" out of the topic because those games have actual depth to them

 

[Rawne1980]

I agree with Skully on the graphics.

Remember some of us have been gaming for around 30 years. We had shitty blocky graphics back then and I wouldn't want to go back to it. And that is the reason I don't like a lot of Indie games ... they look like games I played many moons ago and it's an era I don't need to go back to spankyou very muchly.

I like a games to look good or i'm not going to buy it, to put it bluntly.

But graphics aren't what is holding innovation back. They could make a game look good and still move it in a different direction than other games by "taking a risk"....

And that's what innovation is in this industry, a bloody risk.

It either goes well and will sell a bucket load or it's a flop and loses them money.

We, the gamer, are the reason the industry has stale patches. Publishers want to see a profit and in order to do that they need to sell games so they have their developers churn out games that they know will sell.

If Sims 75 and CoD 9954 aren't going to sell then they won't get made. But they will sell so that's what gets made.

Nothing wrong with the games themselves, obviously, millions of people love them. But while games like that are the top sellers then why would a company risk moving away from that?

 

[xDarc]

I'm trying to find the critical articles about FMV Full Motion Video I remember reading circa 1993-1996. To me, FMV and cinematic gameplay are the same thing. It is something that everyone moved away from once better technology came along. Now that the average desktop is skynet hardware compared to 1996, I don't really see why they have come back to this type of game; where so much of it is just... watched.

Spoiler: Wow, this takes me back.

MegaRace March, 1994. The FMV wasn't interactive with "quick time" events like some other FMV games that came out later. This and Mad Dog McCree were really the first of these type that I played.

 

[Netrigan]

Innovation is tough and always getting tougher. It's not just the cost of producing games these days, as the Wii (with a novel control scheme and graphics on par with the previous Nintendo) didn't manage to score much in the way of innovation.

The app market has returned video games to their cheap-to-produce roots... and we're seeing pretty much the same thing we saw in the early 80s. A handful of people come up with a few novel ideas (thanks to motion and touch controls), then other developers flood the market with knock-offs.

As with other mature mediums, presentation is becoming more and more important. Cinematics is one way to do it, but one of the side-effects of video games becoming a mature medium is that there's lots of tools in the tool box. There's always going to be certain band wagons everyone is jumping on (whether it be sandbox games or competitive multi-player), but plenty of room for devs to say "you know what we haven't seen for a while" and bring back some game play element that we haven't seen for a while.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I think the drive to make games "more cinematic" has only succeeded in making certain games more like shitty movies with too many fight scenes. Games make terrible movies, just like movies make terrible games, books make terrible movies, movies make terrible books, and so on. Each medium lends itself particularly well to its own forms of expression, and shouldn't try to unthinkingly ape other media.

 

[Zhukov]

a) I don't see how they are mutually exclusive.

b) Cinematic ≠ graphics.

c) There is a distinction to be made between graphical fidelity and visual aesthetic design.

 

[Wayneguard]

This thread title is not even remotely related to the poll...

And before answering any kind of blanket statement like "which is more important...", you first have to decide what type of game you're talking about. A game like unreal tournament, which is heavily centered around arena combat twitch shooting, obviously has gameplay on a pedestal. UT99 is NOT representative of the entire market or even the majority of it. Some types of games benefit from tight, well-tuned gameplay and some benefit more from the immersion created by the melding of graphics and sound.