Too true — graphics vs. story
I like the guys at Cracked.com. While I’m not a fan of some of the gross-out, overtly sexual humour, I do generally appreciate the insight they often display in their articles. Yes, they’re intended to be funny…but often, the underlying truth is quite compelling.
The Seven Commandments All Video Games Should Obey- #1 – Better graphics do not equal innovation and/or creativity.
…guys like Epic games president Mike Capps are out there making stupid-ass statements about how they would never lower themselves to develop for the [Nintendo Wii] because that would be “going backward.”
This is epidemic in an industry that defines “innovation” purely by graphical horsepower and nothing else. Guys like him are utterly baffled that anyone could ever want a Wii, just because it, you know, offers a completely new playing experience.
Somehow these guys have gotten it in their heads that nothing counts for innovation except bump mapping and pixel shaders. “However can any human enjoy these outdated graphics without literally vomiting with disgust?”
Well, if these people would bother having a conversation with someone outside their own offices, they’d realize that the entire concept of “outdated” graphics is meaningless to 80 percent of gamers.
Want proof? Nintendo DS games look like this:
(blocky screenshot from Mario Kart)
They’ve sold more than 60 million of them. Tell you what, Mike. The next time you see some casual gamer tapping away at their Nintendo DS, show them a screenshot of Gears of War…Don’t be shocked if they point out your game seems made up of three colors (brown, gray, and muzzle flash). Sure, hard-core gamers know the difference, they know the game is a marvel of technology. The rest of us just want to have fun, or be told a good story.
It gets hard, some days, not to punch people right in the mind who complain that the Ultima games are “outdated” and that they have “terrible graphics.” [tags]Cracked.com[/tags]
I was thinking the same thing last week when I read some of those comments that idiot at epic made. It’s companies like his that will be the crash of modern gaming.
It’s a common complaint, one that has even been leveled at the Ultima series in the past (for example, U9). But it does ring true.
Of course, every so often, a great game combines both story and graphics…but such things are becoming increasingly rare. There seems to be a glut of very technically sophisticated, but otherwise empty, games on the market at present.
And people wonder why I prefer to play with a game (NWN) released nearly a decade ago.
What really gets me is how something like Bioshock is considered great story now. All Bioshock did was water down System Shock’s story and add more first person shooter.Now we will get to see a decade of sequels which will become less and less interesting then the last…
same thing goes for roguelikes
damn addictive games with no graphics/sound…
Very much so.
To be completely fair, every so often a game comes along that bucks the trend. And to be equally fair, Ultima 7 was, in its day, a pretty intensely graphical game — certainly cutting-edge, and difficult to run well on a “run of the mill” system at that time.
It wasn’t quite the Crysis of its day, of course, but…well, if you ever spent hours trying to find a mouse driver that used two less K of memory because you needed every damn byte you could get, you know what I’m getting at.
I think the real point of the article is how the visuals have replaced all the things that really make a game compelling — i.e. the story, the plotting, the immersion. It is possible to have great graphics alongside all these things, but to do so means an investment of time that most companies aren’t willing to spring for anymore; why spend $50 million making one game over five years when you can spend $20 million per game to produce three games in the same span of time? Yeah, they might not be as good…but as long as they sell, and sell in good volume, how many companies are going to care about that?
I suspect the market for high-quality games hasn’t changed much in the past 20-30 years, and that it is only a the “new” game market – catering to graphics-driven, overly-hyped rehash that is expanding significantly. But that’s where all the money is and video gaming isn’t the only industry to undergo such changes.
While it might appear that there are fewer and fewer truly good games being released, it’s probably only related to the amount of mediocre, at best, games being released. Fortunately, with online games at least, you can get one game that costs $50-100 (Orange Box, Ultima Online) and spend litterally hundreds of hours playing.
Give me one game as good as Ultima Online or Team Fortress 2 every 5-10 years and I don’t mind how many Gears of War or Assassin’s Creed they make.