How graphics ruined gaming...

[ThatZenoGuy]

I've been noticing a trend in games nowadays.

Back in the 1990's and early 2000's, games had pretty shitty graphics, but allowed for a HUGE amount of units to be on screen at any one time.

I can currently boot up doom, and spawn 1000 zombies/demons/etc.

I can boot up Homeworld and micromanage 200+ ships, all of which are guns which use physics, and their own stats.

Some modern games like Starcraft are nice, allowing unit counts of upwards 100.

But look at Homeworld 2, which reduced unit counts by a startling amount, all for the sake of 'shiney graphics'.

Fallout 1-2 were never about high unit counts, I'll admit.

Its level of realism dictated that an outnumbered character was usually a dead one, unless you have a severe gear/level advantage (or if you score a shitload of lucky crits).

But this is now 2016, and to my knowledge, we still have less than 20 units at any one time.

Where are the awesome 100 unit battles between a brotherhood army, and say, a supermutant base or something?

We have processors upwards of 4 gighertz nowadays, we should be making use of the bloody things!

Back to FPS's, apart from doom, and Serious sam (Oh Serious sam...I love you...), I cannot find many games which throws more than a handful of enemies at me.

Even the new doom is severely lacking in unit numbers.

This is in part that the enemies take three shotgun hits to bloody kill, when one did the job back in original doom.

Hell, the player moves slow as balls! What happened to Doomguy running like a fucking speedcar?

What are your opinions? Do you believe gameplay mechanics and such are being overidden by making grapihics and models nicer?

Do you think this is the right direction?

I play Dwarf Fortress, which has basically no graphics to speak of (barring tilesets and viewers), and that game allows me to have 200 unit clashes, with material values, body parts, joints, bones, etc all simulated.

And this game is made by literally one dude in his basement! Its unoptimised as shit, and only uses one core.

Imagine what an AAA dev could do, if they weren't lazy.

 

[aenemic]

Yes, because gaming is all about huge numbers of units on screen...

I can see how this is affecting a certain genre, or a niche player base in certain types of games. But saying that more advanced graphics have straight up ruined gaming is a leap and a stretch and an over-simplification.

I think there was a time when technology took precedence over content in a way that affected how games were created, but then it moved over to a more aesthetical mindset (ie, we have the technology to make pretty games that don't require super computers, so why the hell shouldn't we?) and now we're in an era where pretty much anything goes as long as the content is good.

AAA games are AAA games because of huge bloated budgets, because they're made to look great (for the most part). But we also have more and more indie and crowd-funded games coming out that look anything from utter shit to amazing, of which most focus on actual content and gameplay.

As for me personally, I think aesthetics are a very important part of gaming. Probably because I'm into art and graphics design. I just finished playing Borderlands and I think that's a perfect example of a high profile game that managed to both have great content, gameplay and graphics, that hold up really well to this day because of the distinct and well crafted art design. And it was never a graphics monster nor did it attempt to be.

 

[Walpknut]

The only thing that has ruined gaming is the philosophical change when it comes to design. I'll say Gaming becoming so big is what has dilluted it so much.

 

[SuAside]

<snip>amount of units

You still can if your engine is designed for it.
But more doesn't mean better. Is Serious Sam better than Half-Life 1? Oh, hell no.

<snip>Where are the awesome 100 unit battles between a brotherhood army, and say, a supermutant base or something?

Because it's extremely hard to do well? Either your player character is so godlike that he literally turns the tide of the battle & it's basically a masturbation challenge instead of a game. Or that game is hard as balls & every enemy has a legit chance of taking you out and that makes the game unable to find a market because the difficulty level is not something players are used to.

<snip>gigahurtz

Is meaningless. It's cores you should be worried about. Current games often run on poorly optimized code which is unable to take advantage of the available cores. Often this is due to being coded on legacy engines since studios hate reinventing the wheel.

<snip>damage

You whine about one shotgun blast not killing an enemy, but why isn't the reverse true as well? Since you tend to pillage your gear from your enemies, why can't they oneshot you? Why doesn't that bother you?

<snip>character speed

Character speed is limited both due to realism, limit abuse and obviously to ensure you cannot finish the game super fast.

What are your opinions? Do you believe gameplay mechanics and such are being overidden by making grapihics and models nicer?

No, I don't think so. The fact models are nicer and thus more resource intensive is certainly not the reason why we have seen a gameplay mechanics change.

 

[joevonzombie]

The industry's focus at aiming their games at the lowest common denominator to maximize their profits is what has ruined gaming. That has nothing to do with graphics.

 

[Jogre]

I'd say that this post is along the right lines, but too focused on one area.

The thing that's killing gaming IMO, is a focus on the games being neat, as opposed to being practical

Like you said, the focus on graphics instead of more content, but there are many other areas in which games value neatness over practicality.

For example, this whole "Every character needs to have a voice actor" meme, which is incredibly impractical, when you think about how once they've recorded all the lines of dialogue, they can't go back and rewrite it if it doesn't sound good, or how much money they'd have to spend on a single line of dialogue, when they could write tons more for cheaper(Not to mention all the re-using of voice actors, and having to use crap ones to fill in the gaps that brings with it)

Or how games nowadays focus excessively on balance, to such a degree that you never get the joy of finding an utterly overpowered item.

Or this excessive focus on "Immersion" to such a degree that there are no longer fun-little fourth wall breaking moments, and even Obsidian give special warnings before they include Easter eggs.

This to me, is all trying to make games look neat, to such a degree that it's killing what makes them good.

 

[MutantScalper]

I remember playing games already back in the early/mid 80's. Yea the graphics has sort of taken the focus in game design.

 

[BigGuyCIA]

The industry's focus at aiming their games at the lowest common denominator to maximize their profits is what has ruined gaming. That has nothing to do with graphics.

Partially true.

Every time a new generation of consoles come out you hear the same song and dance: "1080p, better graphics, higher visual fidelity," etc. E3 just compounds on it further by showing visuals that aren't representative of the final product.

So, you've basically got a generation of gamers stuck in a rut of "we want better graphics" because the industry perpetuated and marketed the everliving hell out of graphics. It's a vicious cycle.

What's this mean? Graphics > Gameplay. And here we are...games that look nice but don't play so well, or games that look somewhat muddy but still play nice but are tarred and feathered because they don't look like the E3 demos. I guess this is a chicken or the egg scenario.

 

[joevonzombie]

Partially true.

Every time a new generation of consoles come out you hear the same song and dance: "1080p, better graphics, higher visual fidelity," etc. E3 just compounds on it further by showing visuals that aren't representative of the final product.

So, you've basically got a generation of gamers stuck in a rut of "we want better graphics" because the industry perpetuated and marketed the everliving hell out of graphics. It's a vicious cycle.

What's this mean? Graphics > Gameplay. And here we are...games that look nice but don't play so well, or games that look somewhat muddy but still play nice but are tarred and feathered because they don't look like the E3 demos. I guess this is a chicken or the egg scenario.

What you and the OP have described are symptoms of the problem I have outlined.

 

[Millim]

I'm not in the camp that is completely against Graphics or them being improved in games and such.
I've always felt Square have done the best job with their Final Fantasy Games, they tend to mostly remake their games with better graphics/sprites and also update the music and gameplay. In some cases, they add in new features that weren't otherwise present in the game.

In fact, I'm probably the only person here who is looking forward to the Final Fantasy XII remaster and also hoping that they release 1-9 and XIII on PS4 (if only because it means I get all the titles on one Console as opposed to having them across five others).
I'm also not opposed to remasters like they did with Metal Gear Solid.

What I am against however is when games try to improve their graphics with little in the way of gameplay or they simply dumb it down to the point where the game may as well not exist.

COD and Assassin's Creed are probably the worst contenders for just redoing the same game over again with little in the way of progress.
And we can talk forever on how Bethesda will continue to dumb down their games until they release a two-hour movie which costs £50 and still manages to crush every 10 minutes.

Witcher 3 to me was the perfect example of how a game could have both good graphics and good gameplay. I'll even say that MGSV was another good example. We are getting better in terms of both, I doubt the quality of games will ever reach the point it was in the late 90's, but it's still in a pretty good position.