When looks are no longer enough

The article is still bunk. AI is improving all the time. Look at the driver AI in Forza, for example. Everything about games is improving all the time. Some people seem to long for the good 'ol days when gameplay was king. Get over it. Gameplay is still king. People want to play Gears of War, because of the combination of gameplay and graphics (sawing your buddy in half with a chainsaw) that wasn't possible before. This interweaving is what makes a great game. People loved that you could ride around a huge city in GTA (technical leap) and kill people and take their money (gameplay). It's all evolving.

The thread title should be: "Looks have never been enough". It's not a new thing that gamers want improved AI, physics, gameplay etc... with their improved graphics. They always have.

 

Agreed - perhaps we are not all addressing the same issues. I think it's pretty obvious at this point the graphics have a long way to go. Just compare any fully computer generated image to the real world and you can see the entire field has a long way to go, much less RT graphics. The question is, are gaming budgets appropriately distributed at this point? Or to a finer point; what do we as gamers want in our games? When we can quantify that point to all aspects of gaming, developers/publishers can distribute their resources accordingly. I find new advancements in things which enhance the gaming experience far more exciting than the ability to render hair stuble which will only be appreciated the first time you turn it on and the first time you show it off to your friends etc. Things like the euphoria system which enhance the feel of the game world by enabling characters to more realisticly interact with their environments. These types of improvements which help to rid us of the "canned experience" are seemingly passed by the wayside of most games I've seen so far in the next gen.

 

Well an easy yardstick to use is Sound.

Sound hit it's peak in games last generation with 5.1 audio. While there are plenty of options available in sound design (to use an orchestra, how it impacts the game), the fundamental technologies are in place. Whether a console has a dedicated sound processor or not, is largely irrelevant.

In addition, it's also relatively easy to use sound assets from external sources (movie sound effects, popular music). The quality has also stabilized enough that 10 year old sound effects can also be reused without being inferior or "out of date".



Graphics aren't there yet. The technology isn't there yet, and costs are still too high.

The best use of graphics, like sound, is to enhance the game experience. Otherwise - it's just a gimick, like the physics acceleration in GRAW thanks to "the super dooper acceleration card!"

A character with facial hair is just a gimick.
A character who grows hair, gradually looses his hair from exposure to radiation, or simply has it changed by an antagonist during the course of a game adds personality to a character.

A game with lots of realistic blood flying around you kill is just a gimick. An old gimick at that.
Replacing the "health" bar in games, by making the main character show the state of injury/pain adds to the game. An example would be to have blood trickling somewhat from a character with "low health", or that they walk walk/run as if injured. Fight Night on the 360 is already does this.

 

Great post - (although I'd have to say game sound could use more attention from some devs)

You know the funny thing about that example you gave, Zelda windwaker had this effect in a not so detailed manor but it was there none the less. I think this speaks to yet another area which needs to be addressed and you yourself brought up in your post. Details which are integral to the immersion of the game that can be identified easily in more than just hypotheitical situations that bring life to small portions of the game. Even back on Sega Genesis, who doesn't remember the first time they brought Sonic to an edge and saw him losing his balance. These types of details that bring life to the gaming world I feel are more important to the experience than focusing so much on how well one character is rendered in screenshots.

My viewpoint: focus more broadly on many small gaming details instead of focusing heavy on only a few.

Sidenote - Speaking of unbalanced focus of resources, anyone seen/played Madden 2006?

 

And how would those directly relate to the gameplay? I don't want to play a game just to see battle scars "improve" over the course of fighting. It's like...watching paint dry.

Edit: And to add about the health indicator thing, I think I agree with some posters that it won't be obvious enough, especially (and particularly) when playing an FPS. Looking at the reflection of yourself in the lake just to see your health status? Isn't that a bit awkward?

 

Well in an FPS, you could have the following indicators of injury:

1) Injured player view gets dizzy and has trouble seeing clearly, and needs to retreat from the action, for the view to settle down.
2) Walking/Running has a limping effect. Even the occasional fall, where the player has to pick themselves up
3) Player has trouble holding up weapons, drops heavier weapons, fumbles with reloading.
4) Player hand models (the ones holding up the guns) could show various levels of pain like bleeding fingers.
4) Use sound for an exaggerated heartbeat (or rumble on a console)



How would it relate to gameplay? These would be your health indicators. Current battle scars mean nothing, because it's your health meter that tells you how the character really is. When health can be displayed without the use of a health bar, then it makes the game more cinematic and frees up room on the screen. For similar reasons, very few game screenshots show the in-game menu.


A simple example of how this would enhance games, would be if the players could have "in game injuries" :

A player participates in a major battle and instead of merely dying, they "badly injure" a shoulder, an arm, or a leg. Over some time in the game world that major injury would slowly heal, and until then - that player wouldn't be able to run as fast, or wield heavy weapons.

This doesn't have to be a particular major event of the game, just any random battle in a game, where for whatever reason the player performs poorly, or tries to kill everyone in a situation where they should use stealth.



This situation also leads to deeper gameplay situations when NPCs are involved:

Imagine Half-Life 2 episode 1, where you had suffered an ingame major injury and had to depend on Alyx to protect you. There's a way of allowing a player to feel emotions for an NPC.

Or if Alyx could sustain an injury like that, if you didn't help her during fights.



Think of Half-Life 1, where the hero starts out as someone with very limited weapons experience.

In the beginning, firing a handgun should be similar to one's first time firing a handgun. Holding a heavy weapon should be difficult for him. Holding it steady should be a challenge, that over time goes away, as the character becomes stronger. Improved graphics and physics allow that to happen. The "evolution" of the main character from "average Joe in a bad circumstance" to hero is better realized this way.

 

Great ideas!

I'd say the injury theme you detailed would be perfect for a "Blade" based game. The main character (hero) would get specific gameplay affecting injuries, but heal relatively quickly because of their specific abilities. The typical "find a health pack" gameplay is somewhat silly but it has served it's purpose. The health system setup in "Lost Planet" is also interesting.

 

Return as in how much profit the publisher makes?

 

Return on investment financially would be profit. Return on investment graphicly is end result image with x dollars vs end result image with xx dollars.

The metric is somewhat personal opinion but I'm sure it's more than just one guy on the dev team saying "nah it's not worth it, lets dumb down the graphics". I'm pretty sure they did some focus groups to come to this conclusion internally. As for us on this forum all we have to go by is developers saying "costs are going through the roof - need to charge more - can't take risks" etc. while the end result image does not seem to be improving in parallel with these statements.

 

This is something I notice quite a bit whenever I do get the chance to play a game, specifically a fast-paced FPS. Characters running usually look like they're gliding. It doesn't look like the friction between shoe and ground is what is providing momentum to the model. I guess special ops agents wear roller skates in the field...

 

LOL - great one! Have you seen/played Lost planet? They did an exeptional job with footwork. Even went so far as to get rid of "the shuffle" normally associated with turning in place.

 

So what do you suppose the industry do? I'm quite eagered to hear what you have to say.

 

It's obvious that at some point (who knows when) the returns simply won't be worth the investment, they will have to spend exponentially greater amount of man hours to get increasingly smaller visual improvements. i.e. Why spend 6months working on something when 95% of gamers can't even notice the difference?

At that point, (which is probably quite a few generations away) there will have to be a shift to other game aspects. Probably with major focus on the storytelling, AI, freedom and other relatively untapped or under-developed components of video games.

 

I'm not sure that's true. If the tools and techniques don't improve, yeah that's the case. But next-(next)-gen we'll be looking at a huge visual quality increase with realtime GI techniques of sorts, perhaps advanced procedural texturing libraries and model-morphing, all very demanding of the hardware but which create noticeably richer world and don't need an astronomical amount of human content-creation effort. eg. Rather than modelling 100 different orc models, the techniques and resources will be there to model one or two and have the game create varieties on the fly. That's something we're just touching upon now, and as we go forwards the cost of content creation may even start to drop from this gen, if the tools grow accordingly.

 

Isn't this what Crysis is using?

Perhaps the specific angle which needs to be looked at is graphic budget trend. Where developers stood with graphics related costs 10 years ago on a year by year basis through to current games in development to get an idea where costs are projected to go from here and whether that rise is sustainable. Without having this specific data at hand, I can imagine it is a pretty steep curve upward and is not sustainable. Middleware will have to improve vastly and will have to be used to keep these costs in check while improving the quality of graphics in the same ramp we have come to expect.

I do anticipate a mucher more dificult sell come next gen when MS/Sony can't lean on improved resolution as a primary mover of their next gen systems. With games like GoW(2) and mgs4(5) coming up this gen, it will be difficult to demonstrate clear superiority of a next next gen system in 2010/2011. Much of the effects at that time I imagine will be possible to "fake" on this gens hardware like lighting etc and to the average joe I can see them passing for quite some time. Even with the jump this gen, when not viewing games in high-def, many didn't see the difference in 360 launch games over xbox.

They will have to be very careful when introducing these machines launch games and ensure they take full advantage of the hardware as simply porting a 360 game to 720 and upping the res won't work next time.

This could be a primary reason this gen does not follow the traditional 5 year cycle. This is of course assuming there will not be a revolutionary tech that "changes the game".

 

I think the new power is going to be used for more powerful simulation. While you now have to cheat while stuff are off screen you can let them work on a much larger area.

Why use the term AI when that actually can mean anything; heck the term basically means "movement of enemies".

 

Not necesarily - It can mean does the enemy shoot you in the head or is there a variable for accuracy? Does he use the environment to his advantage and shoot a barrel next to you if he cant hit you directly or does he keep shooting the back of the wooden box you're hiding behind?

Ai has a long way to go. Whether it is dynamic to the environment or run by thousands of scripts is irrelevant as long as the end result is the same to the user. ie: less distraction from the experiece and more immersive.