Myron Rolle said:
*shrug* I'm glad to see a heavy recycling of models. I don't really want Obsidian to try and create a new game in their limited timespan. They just don't have the elbow room for it, so let them just reuse the crappy engine and graphics, at least that way they can focus on the story.
I don't agree with that. Graphics are the support of the story, and more importantly, of immersion in the story.
If you make rough and undetailed graphics, you let the player imagination do the work for you, and that's fine with me. That was the case of Fallout 1/2.
If you add more detailed parts conforming to a wider and strong artistic vision, like the talking heads or cinematics in fallout 1/2, that's fine with me, because you are strengthening the story.
If I see a NPC looking like this :
I immediatly imagine great and epic things surrounding the background of this character, and
want to know more about him.
But if I see a NPC looking like this...
... and there are dozens of identical characters obstructing my vision, I just get bored and want to
quit the game immediately, because I can't imagine a NPC designed - with very much attention to details - as the boring regular Joe will have
anything interesting to tell me.
If you fill up your world with ugly over-detailed shit, and make the game first person so all this shit literally fill up the entire field of view, you just force your ugly and boring world into the head of the player, with a hammer.
The result is, as a player I don't even want to be a part of this world, because it's a f*ing mess.
You could transpose the whole Fallout 2 cities and quests into this world, I wouldn't even want to put a foot in it, because their vision of how a post-apocalyptic world would look is so damn boring.
Why should we jerk off on more detailed graphics if these graphics have strictly nothing to tell ? Why offer a detailed world if these details do the exact opposite thing we ask them to do, i.e. put an emphasis on
important and interesting points of the story ?