Kpt._Rob said:
First off, the obvious affect on the industry of the high graphics that gamers demand is that games are more expensive and less innovative. Creating games with high end graphics costs an amount of money that would make Bill Gates blush. This means that developers have less room to develop new and creative ideas, because the investment required is too great a risk, so instead they create a copy of a game that was already successful with a few minor tweaks and try to pass that off as innovative.
Can I just remind you that a game developer is made of several teams dedicated to their own subject of expertise? Would you cast away the 3D modellers and Concept Artists (the people who actually make the assets you
need) and try to hire more designers and theorists instead? Since the modellers and artists are rendering the things that the game designers are making (and as you say: not innovating) that might be one other area you might want to fire flak towards.
If games didn't have to have top of the line graphics to sell, then companies could take bigger risks in the creation of the game part of the game, and because they didn't have to spend as much money making it, they could afford to sell it for less.
That sounds like complaining 'why is the sky blue'. Visuals are an advertisement in themselves, and impressive visuals are the first thing a potential customer will recognise, strong and unique visual styles in particular. And no, the developers wouldn't take bigger risks; thats either the developer failing to pitch an innovative idea (because it apparently won't sell) and the publisher telling them to make GeoW because it seems safe to the target audience. None of this has to do with how the engine renders polygons.
Secondly, the demands of high end graphics actually limit who can play, and require anyone who does want to play to pay ridiculous amounts of money. Now, granted, this argument doesn't apply so much to console gamers, but it does actually get to the core of one of the reasons for which I am a console gamer. That is, that the computer that I use, the one I need in order to be successful as a student, can't handle modern games because the demands that even the lowest graphical settings of many modern games make on my computer are too much. And if I want a computer that can play modern games, I'll have to spend a lot of money. And I won't just have to spend that money today, I'll have to spend it a couple years from now, upgrading my computer again, then again, and again. I would love to play the computer games that are hitting the market today, but because of the high costs of a machine that can handle modern graphics I simply can't afford to, which means that I'm stuck as a console gamer. Granted, tossing high end graphics out the window will not completely solve this problem, but it would certainly make it easier for me to run many of the modern games that I can't run right now.
That PC would have to be pretty damn low in specs, but theres another argument for that: Console Port. This means that the game engine has been optimised for (most likely) the 360's hardware. Because PC's are so varied, its very difficult to find an engine flexible enough to deal with very varied hardware combinations, save perhaps the Unreal Engine. Because the 360 is now the lowest common denominator, 'tossing high end graphics' would be rather silly; a backwards step for no reason.
Third, in many ways, high end graphics actually take away from the aesthetic beauty of a game. How many times have we heard someone complain (or perhaps complained ourselves) about how modern shooters are a sea of grays and browns? It is high end graphics that actually allow for this. Sure, there are exceptions, but back in the days of the N64, you really couldn't make a game that was mostly grays and browns, why? Because the machines lacked the graphical prowess to make objects stand out from one another without varying colors. High end graphics allow for the creation of a world that is a more accurate reflection of our own, but in creating an accurate reflection of our own world, we lose the beauty of the fantasy worlds that developers were at one time forced to create by graphical limitations.
That should probably be blamed on the publisher and art director. Its them who decided not to take advantage of the power they've been given. Instead of a low poly, N64 era Deus ex, why not have a well optimised, high poly Deus Ex 3 with the polish, the unique colour palette and professional look of a modern game. We haven't 'lost' that beauty, we just have to find a developer and publisher with the balls to actually go out and make us a new and better one.
That's a big loss, because the worlds that I played in on the N64 had such a wonderful sense of charm, and I hate that it's gone now. See, I'm actually an art major, and one of the things I've always wanted to capture was the beauty of some of the worlds I experienced as a kid playing on the N64. Take for instance the worlds in Super Mario 64, Zelda (Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask), hell, even Glover 64 had some incredibly beautiful worlds. Now, that's not to say that these worlds couldn't have been created with high end graphics, but I feel like if developers at the time had had access to high end graphics, these worlds might have been drastically different. That thought makes me sad, that some day when I have kids, they may not get to experience the whimsical worlds that enchanted me when I was a kid.
Well lets assume we're at this stage in developing Majora's Mask: Concept art done, characters done, now all we need is to thrust it all to our modellers. Fast forward to the era when Nintendo realise what a fucking normal map is and the game (given these circumstances) should turn out exactly the same. More expensive to produce maybe, but your concept doesn't suddenly get eaten up and spat out.
My point with that is that if you're seeing a bland world of forgetful, the problem is lying with the concepts, the area where we're deciding colours, form silhouette, and whatnot, all by human hand. This has nothing to do with the games engine rendering polygons, its some faulted concept pieces.
Now, that's not to say that high end graphics don't give us anything in return, I'm not saying that. Trust me, I was amazed at the world of Bioshock, the fact that they had an entire art team just devoted to the water. That's something you can't do with low end graphics. When used well high end graphics certainly have the ability to create artistic visions with even more charm, beauty, and all sorts of other wonderful adjectives, than low end graphics.
Nice to see some optimism here. Bioshock is the example of astounding art direction and graphical ingenuity. The beginning when you see a woman hushing her 'baby' would never work without dynamic shadows in real time.
My problem is that because we demand high end graphics, we lose a lot. Shamus Young recently wrote an excellent article (which you can find here http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/8194-Experienced-Points-Mine-all-Minecraft) in which he calls Minecraft "a hadoken-style rebuke to the absurd things the rest of the industry has been doing." Minecraft, I feel, is an excellent example of how a brilliant game can be created that doesn't treat the lack of high end graphics as a weakness, but instead as a strength. I'd love to see more games like Minecraft, but until people like the guy I saw posting earlier get past the idea that high end graphics are a necessity, I feel like the design philosophy behind Minecraft will be an exception, instead of a rule.
See, I think Minecrafts weaker visuals are more as a result of allowing those with weak GPU's to play the game, rather than the creator embracing it with love or something. I feel it was a decision with this almost business logic, that a massive number of people have pretty crap graphics cards and so that became their target audience. That, and he's one guy, and can't render professional quality visuals by himself. Its not some kind of revelation of 'OMG the enemy is the fucking Unreal Engine and all of its well optimised handling of polygons and shadows!', he just saw a problem with a massive audience and worked around it.
I don't think we're going to benefit by suddenly deciding we're going back to the Gamecube era. It'd be stupid to limit yourself when you could stand out. Yes, many games are going the road of 'copy this guy, despite the greys and browns it'll sell', but the occasional spark will come along, only for sheepish pubs and devs to copy that too.
Can we not try to fight our game visuals, this one or the other the gamer collective has decided we discriminate games by? I already posted in another topic about how this Graphics versus Gameplay war is retarded, what poor graphics would actually be like (by my definition, Minecrafts visuals are actually good) and why games and visuals should work harmoniously. Backwards is not a good direction, our game engines aren't at fault at all (in fact, because they're so well optimised they're actually benefiting us more) and its mostly the publisher who screws you over.
This post was far far too long.
