Gameplay versus graphics

I like driving games... to a point. PGR2 on my (old?) xbox still does the bizness. Am i the only one that thinks next generation = more dosh for little reward.... or am i just getting old?

I'm a GTA4, PGR2, fable, NWN1 & 2, Age of Mythology/empires & ROme total war fan.

So, does the addage, all things come to those who wait still stand?

I think that they think eye candy is the selling point of the game. After all what usually attracts the casual gamer to a game.

Lately I haven't seen anything that is 100% original. It's the same old game types that get re-hashed and a face lift, probably because thats what sells.

I love eye candy, but it doesn't make up for weak gameplay. I loved PGR 1 & 2, but part of what I enjoyed was starting from the bare bones sporty hatch and working up. Starting with kick ass cars does nothing for me at all.

NWN2 was a huge disappointment, like disney made a Rpg and dumbed everything down. I'm looking forward to the next medieval game, with proper navy battles with cannon etc, and Fable 2 should be fun. I have to say there were some great Xbox games and I really hope that I get to play some of the next versions of those games when I finaly get a 360.

There is no original game anymore .It is the same old same old.Not since Worms on the Amiga,have i seen a new style of game play.The last original game i have seen lately is Portal.I have seen the videos for it,but never played it.(When i get some money)It looks like a very good game.Original,Diffrent.Eye candy means nothing to me.If the game play is there.I will buy it.

I like diffrent.

Um, Worms wasn't original. There were several games released way before that. 'Scorched Tanks', for one. 'Tanx', for another.

there has been a lot of game styles created after worms

I used to like Pole Position / Buggy Boy. I like good driving games, and today's driving games are quite a step ahead of Pole Position.

Check out the shots of this site:
http://emustatus.rainemu.com/editorial/timeline-01.htm

Sorry GfK you are right.Scorched Tanks was the original,worms just took it to a new level.:)

A driving game is a driving game.
A platform game is a platform game.
A fps is an fps.

The list goes on.

Nothing original.

How do you reconcile these two comments?

Regardless of the politics of it, surely GTA4 (as an example from your list) is regarded as technically excellent and an example of something that couldn't have been done (with the same level of scope and detail) on a "last generation" machine?

Eye candy is the selling point. It's the first thing that attracts us to the game. Even if it's not your game style, if it looks graphically fantastic it'll get more attention.

As we all know, graphics by themselves don't make a good game but being the visual creatures we are you can only go on looks from an advertising point of view.

To last more than a couple of goes, game play is the key thing. However I like the best of both worlds, top graphics and game play.

Yeah, there were some lesser known artillery games with many of the features of Worms, it's just that Worms was the first game of that type to go commercial and be in retail stores etc. Personally I didn't like the egotism and I thought it was quite cheezy, but it was certainly popular. I thought Scorched Tanks was totally cool on the Amiga, even written in Amos, and I still play Pocket Tanks (the sequal) from time to time on the Mac. Love those kind of games and will create one someday soon.

Originality is really to do with being convinced that something `new` is happening that has not happened before. Something you've never seen, something you didn't know was possible or existed, something in an unusual style, something unexpected or something non-mainstream. It's usually a fringe thing more than the usual mainstream since the mainstrain is usually made up of regurgitation of everything that came before.

I think also part of the problem is that most people believe that what they perceive in the world is their reference for what to copy or how to do things. Most people *re-act* to things rather than acting creatively. So they'll see what's `out there`, take it inside, change it just a little bit and spit it back out without much consideration for how or why it was done in the first place. So they become really lost and out of touch with the cause or the reason behind original creations. They don't HAVE the same creativity and they don't have the same mindset from which it came, all they can do is copy the end results of that creative process. So they really don't add anything useful to the mix. Then there are people who are creative, visionaries, imaginative, and who seek to influence what is `out there` and to `make it so`, rather than to just take it as given. Such people question boundaries, think laterally and find inspiration from within. That can lead to `originality` and genius which most other people will then copy. Copying is an unconscious attempt to create without really creating.

You have to be the originality that you're looking for. If you are looking for something original to come from someone outside of you then you yourself are just like all the people who regurgitate the same old stuff - you believe what you're handed on a plate and want to receive originality from an external source. You have to give originality.

Actually, I think the game was called "Scorched Earth."

Nope it was called Scorched tanks.

Hang on i maybe wrong here.

IIRC, "Scorched Tanks" was an Amiga game, and "Scorched Earth" was a PC game. Same concept, though executed differently.

And now I'll go do some research to see how wrong I am.

Yep, pretty sure Scorched Earth came first though.

You're right scorched earth came before scorched tanks but the author of scorched tanks had never seen scorched earth, only heard about it second-hand. Also scorched earth was certainly not the first of its kind either. Take gorilla's, for instance, with was not even the first either.

Yeah, well depends how far you want to go back and how basic you can get and still consider it essentially the same game. I mean Artillery goes back to the early 80's, if you count that.

PONG.

The ones which I enjoyed the most were Schorched Earth (1991) and the older but excellent Tank Wars (1990). IMO both were superior to Pocket Tanks in the crazy pyrotechnic arsenal and gameplay modes, and surely a lot more entertaining than Worms for that matter.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(computer_game)

Edit: mmh... it looks like the forum doesn't accept parenthesis in a link... bug?

Nor does it accept ';' e.g. http://files.filefront.com/dappzip/;10147690;/fileinfo.html

The Daddie was Artillery Duel, 1983.

http://www.lemon64.com/?game_id=156

Not the first artillery game, but the first to feature wind speed and random scenery. Great little game.

..I vote for gameplay..if i ever want to see something real, its real world out there not bunch of pixels...game=fun, quality fun=gameplay not eye candy..

I can't be bothered to play a game if it doesn't offer the best of both worlds. Been playing games too long to put up with poor graphics or weak gameplay.

I'm a gameplay guy. Thats why I'm still playing games that were made in 1998 or earlier. They're cheap, and I enjoy them. And since the advent of the 16 bit game console, I've never really had to say "what the heck is that" like I do when I play Atari or some NES games.

As long as I can tell what's going on, the graphics are fine. So yes, I do think the next generation= more dosh for little reward.

Plus I can't stand FPS.

Eye candy is always the biggest selling point, that's why a week after release the shelves are stacked in game stores with second hand copies the kids got bored with as the gameplay was dull.

One enhances the appreciation of the other.

I'm a gameplay guy all the way. Heck, I'm still playing Nethack!

In my current game project I'm putting all the effort on gameplay and pretty much nothing on the graphics department, but after all, the game's free, so who could complain? ;)

No one. But then again, who'll want to play it? Decent graphics have always been important and appealing - even in the rose-tinted "good old days".

But it's all relative.

WEC Le Mans was a cracking game for its time. Now, alongside modern racing games, it looks like a big piece of poop.

For example, watch this video of The Amiga's debut on BBC's Micro Live. Fap-tastic at the time, I'm sure you'll agree. But now I can't help but think "is that what we had to put up with?".

Games are all about entertainment. If someone is entertained by attractive visuals then that's important (and dare I say it even more important) than gameplay to that person. The same is true of gameplay, or sound. It all comes down to what it is that entertains people, and there are factors which change that... such as personality type or what society is like at that time.

I would prefer to see more games with an acceptable game play / buck ratio instead of the eye candy with no game play / buck ratio like most current generation games sadly are made.

If a game costs 20 million in production and 17mio+ went out for Visuals, then the game will most likely suck as there wasn't enough left to hire competent story writters, AI programmers etc.
At worst it will suck and run dead slow on regular machines, still without offering gameplay, so in the end, the game offers nothing but asks for a car load of cash (75-90 USD for new pc games here, console at 90-120 USD)

A lot of the development budget is blown on needless stuff. For example, developers who take trips to exotic places for reference photos (A free trip to Japan? Let me get my camera!), ridiculous PR schemes (let's rent a hot air balloon with the game logo on it, hire a bunch of female models to thrust out their chests and stroll around with fake guns, and invite a bunch of journalists along!), company theme tunes ("Infogrames Rocks My World", anyone?),"funny" in-house videos, unproductive overtime, etc.

It's also amazing how much money is wasted on stuff like physical models of game characters or replica weapons/costumes that all end up gathering dust on some dev's desk or in a neglected office corner. Also, it hardly costs much to hire a decent writer (the problem is that anyone who knows their way around a keyboard and has thought up a "good idea" thinks that they can write). As for gameplay, well, I don't think that there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between "monetary investment" and "fun".

Well if the same amount of effort and money was put into research on "fun" and "what people want" at HotairArts (known as EA normally), as they invest in visual research and how to make games even slower on current machines, and if they especially would invest the same amount of time into good technology as a whole (not only good eye candy technology but technology that gives a believable game experience, something less and less EA games feature today), games would definitely be more interesting and fascinating to play today.

But the fact is that only a handfull of games each year (so of tousands) are not mainstream clone trash ...
The only good games that are made today funnily are often done by those designers that already did good games back in the old days like Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto and others.

But most others focus their game design around the visuals instead of focus on the game design first and build the visuals around that as it is meant to happen in software development (first have the software, then the looks, not the looks and no software). If most game devs were to do regular software, they would all be out of business as nobody buys overpriced applications with substandard functionality.

It's amazing how much gets spent wooing the media and game reviewers. Especially for previews specials in top magazines. One of our publishers was talking about a trip on an Aircraft carrier and passenger on jet fighters for a millitary game I worked on, whatever they did in the end worked. Crap game dogs bollocks preview.

Funny thing is they didn't even get to play it, our producer played if for them lol.
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Games have always had great graphics, and there werent so many great games in the past. People just forget all the rubbish ones and remember their favourites with rose tinted spectacles. Old games that we harp on about as having great gameplay often did have great graphics for the day we just forget and take modern graphics for granted because its what we expect.

Most of the games I loved as a kid were rubbish when I went back to play them again. Whether it was Elite, speedball 2, settlers 2, Lotus turbo challenge. None of those games stand out as being all that great today.

hey settlers 2 is great ... I still like to play Settlers 2 the next generation :)

My main problem is that I do not have the same amount of time anymore so I won't sit in front of the pc to play hours of hours just for one mission as back then ...

yeah thats what I found when I last played settlers. Plus I liked it best split screen 2 player with 2 mice on the amiga. Sometimes played settlers 6-8 hours at a time with my best mate as a kid.

I would say gameplay is the most important as graphics are only impressive for "5 minutes". However, a game with great playability will still wow years after its graphics are considered crap.

It depends on the gamer I guess. I rarely play a game twice no matter how good it was. There are plenty of good games released in recent years that have great graphics and gameplay. One problem I find is that games are like movies. I rarely watch a film twice because when you know what happens there is no point. I happen to like games with a good story, but after playing them once theres no reason to go back and play them again.

Kotor, Splinter cell, fable, Oblivion, Witcher, Jade empire, gothic, Riddick, fear, HL etc. Even if some of them have alternate endings, and plot paths there is little incentive to play them again because the time invested going through the same story elements just isn't fun.

One of the reasons I never liked console games was that you often had simple gameplay and had to restart entire sections of gameplay over and over till you beat them. I like progression and being able to save and drop a game at any point to try again later.

For me I guess I like to experience a game and get drawn into it and pulled along by the story, but once its done, its done forever.

I totally agree.

The only exceptions have been a handful of 2d point'n'click adventure games - Monkey Island 2 and the Quest for Glory games spring to mind - and this is has mainly been to explore different dialogue options or (in the case of the Quest for Glory games) alternative routes to completion.

I wouldn't dream of replaying most of the games that I would call my favourites.

Well... I agree with Reactor: games are all about entertainment.

As far as personal fun, I like high-end graphics, but they still don't make up for a crappy game. A lot of companies now are just relying solely on graphics, and quite frankly, I think Portal has been the only really original game by a large developer for some time now. It's the small, privately-developed (indie? not sure about that term) games that tend to have the real originality these days.

Honestly, I spend as much time playing modern (well, PS2 modern) games as I do playing Phantasy Star IV or Super Hang-On on my Genesis. They're pixelated, they're 16-bit color, they're quite obviously dated, yet they're still plain and simply FUN.

yep me too..



Ermm, I may have been a little inebriated... (;-)

Gameplay vs. Graphics -- They kind of go hand in hand...

But you can overcome bad graphics with good gameplay, but can't overcome bad gameplay with good graphics.

In the end, gameplay is the most important, but you 'need' the graphics to get enough exposure in the first place. If a game looks like it fell out of the 1980's, few reviewers/magazines/people will be willing to invest the time to find out whether or not the gameplay is any good.
If it looks great but plays like a turd, people might pick it up, but it would be bound to get bad reviews, bad word-of-mouth advertisement and fizzle out quickly.

so... Graphics need to be good enough for people not to just skip it over sight unseen, but gameplay needs to be good enough to keep them interested afte trying it.

I think part of the problem is that people don't know how to deliberately focus on gameplay. Back when the graphics could NOT be achievable due to the hardware being unable to provide performance, you HAD to focus on gameplay because the area of graphic representation was so limited. This forced people to think about how to expand the game in non-graphical ways, producing better gameplay and more structure and more original ways to do things.

Then the hardware got better and better meaning nobody has to care about whether the hardware can do the graphics, so then there's this explosion of graphics which chases after the limits of the hardware and absolutely no restraint or discipline or deliberate focus on expanding the gameplay. If you could take a game on a current level of hardware, and strap some serious restraints onto the graphics so that you are forced to overcome limitations creatively, there would be better games. So it seems as though great games are born from overcoming limitations in creative ways and channeling creative energies into other aspects of the game besides appearances, rather than just having an ever increasing ceiling of what the hardware can do. In a way all this `hardware freedom` is leaving people flailing all over the play on auto-pilot rather than ask themselves why they are doing what they're doing. In a way, as the hardware performance increases it's almost as if the `challenge` which promotes genuine creativity is totally lost.

Graphics are not bad or wrong. It's more a matter of how you use them and for what. If you use them to entertain the ego and focus on appearances then it's going to be empty and shallow. If you use them as a tool to represent a deeper core of experiences and fun then it stops being an end unto itself. You certainly don't need millions of texture-mapped-lit polygons in order to provide gameplay, but if gameplay was BEHIND those polygons, informing their use, then that certainly would be a nice mix. Maybe what we're really missing in these empty copy-cat games is a sense of deeper meaning. The more you focus on appearances the more unconscious you become and you then lost the ability to see the bigger purpose or meaning behind it. The more we have to focus on the stupid specific x number of polygons per second ratings or how many sound effects play simultaneously or how many colors or what framerate, which is all shallow bull, the less we can appreciate that there's anything to it other than just a fake emptiness. What these games are missing is depth.

Consider the early use of real-time graphics to create visual presentations (the demo scene). It was hardly creative to display a rotating cube or show that you can put 10,000 particles on the screen. But when it started to to be *used* to tell a story or to be part of something bigger than itself, then it started to become an art form, was more interesting, conveyed more meaning and was more enjoyable. It's the same with games. If you only focus on the technical visual appearance and not what it means then all you're doing is playing with eye candy.

One problem is publishers put a lot of constraints on gameplay these days. There's so much money hedging on a titles success that they often want to get the game playable by kids of 4 years through to retired and insist on everything being dumbed down to meet the requirements for the lowest.

Thats been my experience in the past, working on commercial games that weren't bleeding edge AAA

..i see new days games same as newdays movies..bunch of visuals with no story to tell at all..

Big business really focusses on how much profit they're going to make and how to make that happen, and if that means identifying what people will `buy into` then it's not really their fault. I mean, they know that to shift units off the shelves their game has to appeal to the customer's ego, which focusses on appearances and not on reality. The more yarn they can spin and the more they can convince the customer that they're buying something that is amazing the more sales they'll have, regardless of whether this approach honestly reflects the actual content of the game.

There is a lot of manipulation, dishonesty, distortion, misrepresentation and deceit in the way a lot of businesses sell stuff. They're not even really selling you a game, they're selling you an impression of a game, or a dream of what it might be - just some fanciful fantasy image of what it really is, far removed from what you actually discover to be there once you take a harder look at it. And that's where the problem is - if a game's `body of work` is really just a support structure for false impressions and deluding appearances, then once you see what the game is really made of you seeononly this junk holding up a fake illusion of something appealing. You see through the illusion to the crap buried underneath and find that the whole thing is empty.

A good game is one where the emphasis is on the main body of the game itself and not on the appearance of it. If the appearance happens to be great at the same time, super. But appearances are secondary side effects. If someone gives you a fancy picture frame which looks all gold and shiny and appealing to `doll up` some crappy picture that it contains, you could be so enamored with the frame that you don't really see that the picture is garbage. But take the frame away and you are left with junk. A genuinely good picture doesn't need a frame.

I think it all started with that gorilla game on the BBC (or acorn?) with 2 gorillas throwing bananas at each other, taking in to account windspeed, distance, angle, power. Anyone remember that?

Yupp had that gorilla game on my original 286 in QBasic as source or the like.

And Worms was original. Sure it used that basic concept but what made and makes worms original is its black humor and the masses of sick weapons it has.

mmh... that's already in scorched earth...

Worms 2 was both very polished and playable, but the first one...