new graphics, etc? who wants them?

Besides Fallout needs new graphics.
With our new and bigger\better monitors and graphic cards the game looks gritty. I've just played through fallout 2 and the graphc there hurt my eyes to look at. Don't get me wrong, I think the graphic should feel gritty, after all it is post the Apocalypse, but not be sow low resoluted that you cant see the grapichs because of all the pixsels.
 
Arquebus said:
Besides Fallout needs new graphics.
With our new and bigger\better monitors and graphic cards the game looks gritty. I've just played through fallout 2 and the graphc there hurt my eyes to look at. Don't get me wrong, I think the graphic should feel gritty, after all it is post the Apocalypse, but not be sow low resoluted that you cant see the grapichs because of all the pixsels.
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Uh, champ... One of my favoritest games of all time is Syndicate, which looks like absolute ASS nowadays, but to someone who has BEEN THERE, it still looks goddamn gorgeous. No one with any brain cells puts any stock in this graphics for the sake of graphics bullshit that is so carelessly bandied about these days.
 
Lazarus Plus said:
No one with any brain cells puts any stock in this graphics for the sake of graphics bullshit that is so carelessly bandied about these days.
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I'm sure most aesthetes would disagree. Advanced graphics coupled with quality artwork can greatly enhance the game experience.
 
Ratty said:
I'm sure most aesthetes would disagree. Advanced graphics coupled with quality artwork can greatly enhance the game experience.
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Not yet, really. Except for some interesting bits, like in-engine voice-acting I've never noticed graphics in any game for, say, more than five minutes. At a point, if the game is any good, you will stop caring about graphics because you're immersed in the gameplay. Only the things that are completely different will then stand out, like the little movies in Fallout and Planescape: Torment. Not even new and shiny games like Half-Life 2 have the 'Whoa, this looks great' factor for very long to all but the mindless drones who play the game because it looks so great.
 
Ratty said:
I'm sure most aesthetes would disagree. Advanced graphics coupled with quality artwork can greatly enhance the game experience.
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I consider myself an aesthete, and yet in terms of games I don't really care. I value performance in all things over (purposeless) beauty, when it comes to the utiliarianism of gameplay. If the artwork somehow compensated for something else being middling or poor, then so be it. I have never seen this to be the case. I don't care if the interface looks good, so long as it lets me do what needs doing. I don't care to have slow performance because some developer decided it didn't have enough shading in that corner, and I can't turn the setting off.
 
Graphic should be ut to todays standard in resolution and framerate. Otherwise it would just look bad, give us headaches and cause epeleptic fits.

I am not saying it needs fancy graphic, as everyone seem to thing when they say new, just more up to these days demand.
 
In my opinion two of the few games with graphics (with the s) that blew me away was Homeworld 1 and 2. The original was amazing for when it was released but now it'd be considered slightly outdated. However, i urge you to play the game and not tell me it fills you with a sense of majesty!
Homeworld 2 on the other hand was devilously hard! This was a sequel where the devs had looked at what was over balanced in the first game and improved it for the second. The improvements in theory made the game brilliant, but also gave it a huge learning curve which required patience, lots of it!
Back to the point ,however, the graphics were amazing! At super high res with all of the options on it was sex! But to be honest my system couldn't' handle 500+ ships of varying size and texture and run at a decent framerate. So i'd compromise and occasionally use even the untextured simple polygon models to speed it up. The game play was too fast for stickyness.

I'd like newer graphics. One of the few good things i could say about Tactics were it's artworks and graphics (i know some will complain they're too clean, but were to me dirty enough).
Still i don't want to have to spend loads on a new PC that will be obsolete in a matter of months just to play FO3. Its not fair to force us through that!
 
I must say I don't agree with either Sander or Lazarus. I, for one, notice and appreciate quality visuals all the time and consider them a vital part of the game experience. Westwood's Blade Runner wouldn't have been half as enjoyable without its detailed and perfectly modelled environments which very efficiently recreated the atmosphere and feel of the Ridley Scott's classic movie. The same holds true for almost every adventure game ever created, but this relevance of graphics is by no means exclusive to that particular genre. Mafia: City of Lost Heaven, for instance, makes excellent use of its sophisticated graphics engine and couples it with great artwork to create an unprecedented level of immersion that GTA games have not yet been able to achieve.

Those are just a few examples of games which employ exquisite and tasteful visuals to enhance the experience to the point where the game would be unimaginable without them, and I could name many, many more. I could also name a few examples of games which fail to immerse me because they are visually outdated and/or aesthetically repulsive. Bottom line - though I believe in quality games without quality graphics, I also believe that no amount of effort put into the visual aspect is wasted.
 
Ratty said:
I must say I don't agree with either Sander or Lazarus. I, for one, notice and appreciate quality visuals all the time and consider them a vital part of the game experience. Westwood's Blade Runner wouldn't have been half as enjoyable without its detailed and perfectly modelled environments which very efficiently recreated the atmosphere and feel of the Ridley Scott's classic movie. The same holds true for almost every adventure game ever created, but this relevance of graphics is by no means exclusive to that particular genre. Mafia: City of Lost Heaven, for instance, makes excellent use of its sophisticated graphics engine and couples it with great artwork to create an unprecedented level of immersion that GTA games have not yet been able to achieve.

Those are just a few examples of games which employ exquisite and tasteful visuals to enhance the experience to the point where the game would be unimaginable without them, and I could name many, many more. I could also name a few examples of games which fail to immerse me because they are visually outdated and/or aesthetically repulsive. Bottom line - though I believe in quality games without quality graphics, I also believe that no amount of effort put into the visual aspect is wasted.
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I have to really disagree here, though. Graphics are meant to do two things: convey the visual environment, and immerse the player, be it through atmosphere or quality visuals.
Take, for instance, Fallout or Planescape: Torment, the graphics were far from great, yet they painted a really great atmosphere that immersed you. The same can be said for many visually much more demanding and impressive games, such as Vampire: Bloodlines or Call of Duty (which I feel did one thing great, and that was convey an atmosphere), but I don't feel that a great graphical engine means this will be the case. I never got immersed in Half-Life 2, even though the graphics were great, and I love the old Lucasarts adventures with rather sucky graphics.
It's all about atmosphere, and I firmly believe that if you do not establish a consistent and compelling atmosphere in your visuals no amount of shiny graphics will help, and that if you do establish an atmosphere that can distract a lot from the shiny graphics.
 
Sander said:
I have to really disagree here, though. Graphics are meant to do two things: convey the visual environment, and immerse the player, be it through atmosphere or quality visuals.
Take, for instance, Fallout or Planescape: Torment, the graphics were far from great, yet they painted a really great atmosphere that immersed you. The same can be said for many visually much more demanding and impressive games, such as Vampire: Bloodlines or Call of Duty (which I feel did one thing great, and that was convey an atmosphere), but I don't feel that a great graphical engine means this will be the case. I never got immersed in Half-Life 2, even though the graphics were great, and I love the old Lucasarts adventures with rather sucky graphics.
It's all about atmosphere, and I firmly believe that if you do not establish a consistent and compelling atmosphere in your visuals no amount of shiny graphics will help, and that if you do establish an atmosphere that can distract a lot from the shiny graphics.
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It appears there may have been some miscommunication. When I say "quality visuals", I don't mean "technically most advanced visuals". Sometimes those terms are mutually exclusive, such as in pioneer years of real-time 3D graphics, when 3D games looked quite crude and bland compared to their 2D counterparts, despite using all the latest bells and whistles of 3Dfx and nVidia graphics hardware. Strong technical foundation should be a means of raising the bar in terms of aesthetic appearance (which directly serves to enhance immersion), not stuffing the game with gratuitous eye-candy for its own sake (as is usually the case with id Software titles).

Moreover, I must disagree with you on Fallout and Torment. Those games were the best looking 2D isometric RPGs of their time - especially Torment, with its color depth, animation and some pretty advanced features of the engine features such as the ability to use a single image in conjuction with property masks for background rather than dozens of repetitive tiles. Arguably, BIS could have gone with a novel 3D engine like the one Darkstone used only a year or two later, but there is no way the visual style, character appearance, environments and architecture of Fallout or PS:T could ever be adequately represented in real-time 3D graphics with technology available at that time.
 
Ratty said:
It appears there may have been some miscommunication. When I say "quality visuals", I don't mean "technically most advanced visuals". Sometimes those terms are mutually exclusive, such as in pioneer years of real-time 3D graphics, when 3D games looked quite crude and bland compared to their 2D counterparts, despite using all the latest bells and whistles of 3Dfx and nVidia graphics hardware. Strong technical foundation should be a means of raising the bar in terms of aesthetic appearance (which directly serves to enhance immersion), not stuffing the game with gratuitous eye-candy for its own sake (as is usually the case with id Software titles).
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Of course, yet I maintain that quality visuals are far from necessary. Take a look at Need For Speed Underground: 2. Whether I see it on the X-Box 360, on my own mid-end PC which can crank out most of the visuals, or on the PC of one of my housemates, after a minute I stop paying attention to graphics (unless something spectacular happens) and start paying attention to gameplay, mainly because there is no need whatsoever for quality visuals there, since there is barely any need for immersion in a quick pick-up-and-play game like NFS. In that case, the graphics only serve to convey an image.

Ratty said:
Moreover, I must disagree with you on Fallout and Torment. Those games were the best looking 2D isometric RPGs of their time - especially Torment, with its color depth, animation and some pretty advanced features of the engine features such as the ability to use a single image in conjuction with property masks for background rather than dozens of repetitive tiles. Arguably, BIS could have gone with a novel 3D engine like the one Darkstone used only a year or two later, but there is no way the visual style, character appearance, environments and architecture of Fallout or PS:T could ever be adequately represented in real-time 3D graphics with technology available at that time.
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What? They were far from anything even remotely new in the industry when they appeared. Fallout's engine wasn't a monstrosity, obviously, but it wasn't anywhere near the technological best of its time either. It was, more or less, just a 2d engine with nothing fancy in it.
And Torment's engine was already several years old when used for Torment. Using a huge fucking bitmap with a second map over it for properties was far from revolutionary (or technologically sound), since it had been in use since at least Baldur's Gate.
However, despite not using anywhere near the latest technologies, they managed to convey an atmosphere regardless of the engine. If those games had been developed for a 16-bit platform, probably the same atmosphere had been present, and that's what important. New technology can be used to provide more pleasing aesthetics, but it's the artwork that makes it all work, and that does not require the engine to be very sophisticated, especially not with a top-down RPG where certain....liberties can be taken with regards to graphics, as long as the atmosphere is maintained.
 
Sander said:
What? They were far from anything even remotely new in the industry when they appeared. Fallout's engine wasn't a monstrosity, obviously, but it wasn't anywhere near the technological best of its time either. It was, more or less, just a 2d engine with nothing fancy in it.
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True, it wasn't technologically ahead of its time, but it was by no means behind, either. If someone had asked me in 1997 to grade Fallout's graphics, I would have given it 4.5 / 5. It looked as good as Diablo (though the latter animated better) and - in my opinion - better than Origin games (such as the Crusader series).

And Torment's engine was already several years old when used for Torment. Using a huge fucking bitmap with a second map over it for properties was far from revolutionary (or technologically sound), since it had been in use since at least Baldur's Gate.
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The Infinity Engine premiered in Baldur's Gate (1998). Torment came out in 1999. The engine was still fairly fresh then, and still one of the most advanced 2D engines of its time (purely in terms of visuals - shitty pathfinding, combat system and interface paint a slightly different picture). Regarding the background image with property map technique, I don't recall seeing it in any CRPGs before BG and PS:T.
 
I would like to point out that strictly speaking, the lack of visuals that someone is willing to put up with is limited, in degree, by their imagination.

Hence the continued existence (albeit with reduced, siginificantly, popularity) of text based games such as MUDs.

Visuals are great, but gameplay that triggers the imagination is better.
 
Ratty said:
True, it wasn't technologically ahead of its time, but it was by no means behind, either. If someone had asked me in 1997 to grade Fallout's graphics, I would have given it 4.5 / 5. It looked as good as Diablo (though the latter animated better) and - in my opinion - better than Origin games (such as the Crusader series).
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Nah, there were much more advanced, mainly 3D, games around. But few with Fallout's atmosphere.
Really, the first tech demo was from 1993, if I recall correctly.

Ratty said:
The Infinity Engine premiered in Baldur's Gate (1998). Torment came out in 1999. The engine was still fairly fresh then, and still one of the most advanced 2D engines of its time (purely in terms of visuals - shitty pathfinding, combat system and interface paint a slightly different picture). Regarding the background image with property map technique, I don't recall seeing it in any CRPGs before BG and PS:T.
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Not in RPGs, but many adventures had utilized a lot before that. Mainly the Lucasarts adventures of olde.
 
Sander said:
Nah, there were much more advanced, mainly 3D, games around.
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True dat, but I didn't consider 3D games to be more advanced than 2D games. If anything, real-time 3D was pretty ugly back then and developers were still in the phase of inane fascination with MIP-mapping, alpha blending and shiny explosions. 2D, on the other hand, was in a mature, evolved stage, which showed in artistic quality of 2D games.

Really, the first tech demo was from 1993, if I recall correctly.
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1994.

Good times.
 
Ratty said:
True dat, but I didn't consider 3D games to be more advanced than 2D games. If anything, real-time 3D was pretty ugly back then and developers were still in the phase of inane fascination with MIP-mapping, alpha blending and shiny explosions. 2D, on the other hand, was in a mature, evolved stage, which showed in artistic quality of 2D games.
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I can name Half-Life, which was released in the same year as Fallout 2, as one of the 3d games that really had a great atmosphere, and was a lot more advanced than Fallout's engine. Final Fantasy VII, partially pre-rendered, had a decent atmosphere (from what I hear and could discern from the three minutes of playing I did) and Goldeneye, again a great 3d game which had a good atmosphere, were also released in the year Fallout was released.
 
Sander said:
I can name Half-Life, which was released in the same year as Fallout 2, as one of the 3d games that really had a great atmosphere, and was a lot more advanced than Fallout's engine. Final Fantasy VII, partially pre-rendered, had a decent atmosphere (from what I hear and could discern from the three minutes of playing I did) and Goldeneye, again a great 3d game which had a good atmosphere, were also released in the year Fallout was released.
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Agreed on Half Life. Though, I must point out that HL was ahead of its time, for its highly dynamic environments, interactive scripted scenes, lip-synch and a number of other advanced features.

I thought graphics in FFVII detracted from the atmosphere, because of the low polygon count on characters and the way they were in stark contrast with prerendered environments. It would have been better if SquareSoft opted for sprite characters, if you ask me.
 
I personally found FF7 graphics fine, but it belongs up there with Fallout as a game I'm unable to find fault with.
There probably are a fair few in both, I'm just blind to them.
 
i hope they keep that sort of dark harshness in the graphics..
basically not to make it all vibrantly colourful and cartoony - i really hate that.
even oblivion looks too cartoony for me - anyone agree or even understand what im trying to say??
 
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