All this detail.. to what means? - by Scott Weiland
catbarf on 10/5/2010 at 23:28
That's a pretty minor quibble. Money spent hiring artists is money that can be spent hiring gameplay developers.
Zygoptera on 11/5/2010 at 00:16
Quote Posted by Scott Weiland
Maybe if developers didn't put so much work in to detail it wouldn't have taken them 4 (four!)
long years to make this game but instead one or two years. 20 years ago there were RPG games around too and was their gameplay worse? It wasn't! (at least so I hear from veteran gamers). There have to be boundaries to the level of detail and I think modern games far exceed it. It is expensive to make them, it takes long time and it tortures our rigs. Just look at Deus Ex, it's a huuge immersive fantastic atmospheric gameworld and there wasn't so much detail and quite a lot was left for our imagination and it still worked perfectly.
The Witcher took so long to make because they effectively rewrote the entire Aurora engine over the course of those four years and it underwent several large scale revisions as well, the art (per se) was not really- as I understand it- a primary cause for its long development. I'd actually argue that 20 years ago RPG gamesystems actually were worse (and this is from someone who doesn't particularly like the current 'epitomes' of 'RPG' like Mass Effect or Fallout 3) as they tended to be militantly opaque and mindnumbingly difficult. The golden age of RPG gamesystems probably stretches from Fallout 1 in 1997 to VTMB in 2004.
Having said that I think the general point is largely sound and that the spiraling cost of game development caused by the graphical arms race is a major problem. But while a good game is far better than a good looking game, a good looking game which is also a good game is better still- and art direction is probably more important in a good looking game than technicals like multiple shaders bump mapping normal mapping film grain bloom etc
june gloom on 11/5/2010 at 01:17
Quote Posted by Poetic thief
Are you referring to my nostalgia thread?
I had forgotten about that thread. I was actually referring to some other threads, but I can't find them.
Jason Moyer on 11/5/2010 at 01:33
Quote Posted by Zygoptera
The golden age of RPG gamesystems probably stretches from Fallout 1 in 1997 to VTMB in 2004.
I think part of the reason I like the current generation of action RPGs so much is because of how much I hated the isometric games of the late 90's. Fallout 1 was great, but I found that era of RPG to be way more clumsy and less immersive than the classic first person and top down RPG's of the 80's. I'll take Bard's Tale/Dragon Wars/Knights of Legend/Eye Of The Beholder over Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale/Diablo any day of the week.
On topic, I think the most important aspect of incidental detail is consistency throughout the game, which plays a large role in determining how believable a game's environments are.
june gloom on 11/5/2010 at 03:34
I somewhat agree. Some of my favourite games of the era, RPG or no, are isometric; likewise, some of the most unplayable bullshit that every dumbass who thinks they have taste likes? Isometric.
Scott Weiland on 11/5/2010 at 07:40
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Oh Christ thank you for another great "let's all go back to 1995" thread.
1995 no, but I would happily go back to early 2000s :D
Aja on 11/5/2010 at 08:14
Occasionally, when a game is detailed enough, there's a certain satisfaction to be had in *not* stopping to appreciate it all. During Uncharted 2 and Bioshock 2, beautiful as they both were, I sometimes ignored the peripheral scenery, and enjoyed knowing that the detail was there nonetheless. This is a hedonistic approach to gaming, I admit. The more detail added, the more I can ignore it and like it. But it somehow makes the gameworld seem richer and more alive when you're aware that things are happening (or simply existing) without your direct involvement.
Thirith on 11/5/2010 at 08:33
Detail, if done well, is essential to world-building. Take a game like Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, which had way more detail than either of its successors and as a result created a much more believable world that lived and breathed. One of the reasons why Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films were extremely good at (re-)creating Middle Earth was the density of detail: it's not in your face, but every statue, every inscription on a wall, every costume, every prop... they're all detailed, giving them a reality that basically makes the place, and the films to a large extent.
You can create a world in a more allusive, elliptic way, giving the player lots of blank spaces to project their own ideas onto, but a) it's amazingly difficult to do so well and b) it is even more difficult to mix it well with state-of-the-art visuals.
TBE on 11/5/2010 at 10:05
Did you check the bathtub?
She sleeps there sometimes......water cleanses, you know.
EvaUnit02 on 11/5/2010 at 10:51
Presentation and art design/direction is important to immersion and atmosphere.
For example as flawed a game that Assassin's Creed 1 was, I was thoroughly sucked into the experience. The attention to detail put into the world did play a large role in that for sure.
With Grand Theft Auto 4 the gameplay was heavily flawed, but the seemingly living world that Rockstar North had created was amazing. The detail that they had attributed to minute things made we want to see more of what they had done and put up with the grindfest gameplay (to a degree, GTA4's god awful sandbox is only bearable in short bursts; but I was fine with AC1's repetition).
Quote Posted by Scott Weiland
There have to be boundaries to the level of detail and I think modern games far exceed it. It is expensive to make them, it takes long time and it tortures our rigs. Just look at Deus Ex, it's a huuge immersive fantastic atmospheric gameworld and there wasn't so much detail and quite a lot was left for our imagination and it still worked perfectly.
Quote Posted by Zygoptera
Having said that I think the general point is largely sound and that the spiraling cost of game development caused by the graphical arms race is a major problem. But while a good game is far better than a good looking game, a good looking game which is also a good game is better still- and art direction is probably more important in a good looking game than technicals like multiple shaders bump mapping normal mapping film grain bloom etc
What graphical arms race? Consoles with dated hardware are largely the lead development platform for most games these days. Developers trying to one up themselves with new engine features (eg Id vs. Epic, Id vs. Valve, etc) has slowed to a crawl, it's not like how it was in late 90's to mid 2000's. As a result the improvements in engines of multi-platform game to game since 2005/2006 are largely minutely incremental at best (eg there's barely any visual difference between Call of Duty 2 and CoD6: Modern Warfare 2).
Consequently we can hang onto our PC's for longer. Eg a PC with a 8800GT, a mid-level dual core from 2007 and 2GB RAM will still play the majority of new and recent releases with little to no trouble.
EDIT: Let's not forget that the failure of the Vista launch and the inescapable stigma attached to it has also contributed to technological progress being slowed, not just consoles.
