Isn't also our (3D artists) fault for working for them?
Haha, I can see where you are coming from. Indeed - if I blame the public for being spineless, then I would have to blame the developers working on the games as well, as they are apparently not pushing their ideas across.
I do not want to do this, of course. I fully understand how much effort goes into this work and developing your skills. Developers have their families to feed; they can't afford getting fired for something as trivial as opposing the management over creativity.
Customers on the other hand don't lose anything by not buying a product. But with all this hype, reliance on multiplayer and co-op, it is really hard to avoid buying a popular game, especially when all your friends are playing it.
Games have become a hobby that is really easy to get into. Many people, who have recently picked it up, are still ignorant about the subject and are willing to ignore something as trivial as lack of dedicated servers, having to pay for content included on the DVD, single player campaigns that are much shorter than a couple of years ago, etc.
Apart from the big cats, reaping huge profits out of the annual sequels, I don't want blame anyone while shaking my fist at them. As much as I am annoyed, I am simply trying to find sources of problems. Even though Ive been disappointed with games during the past few years, I still love them as I did before.
I do believe that in a couple of years, once this new generation of gamers gets more experienced, they will demand better deals. Or at least I hope they will: p
I`d suppose that had the industry remained in it`s sub-mass appeal then we would have seen greater innovation across the board. Unfortunately that didn`t happen and we`re forced to dance to the fat boys drum. i.e get it in and out the door in 18 months max, whilst trying to make it look `cooler` than the last big seller. *There`s a lot less cross pollination across studio disciplines as we have only the same amount of time to produce X where as realistically it takes longer to produce X on account of market demand. Shit.
* I feel that this is specifically where gameplay has fallen on it`s arse of late.
Seems like not long ago i was itchin' for the original quake to come out, how time flies.
I'm in the same boat as a lot of you guys, the gameplay peaked for me a long time ago when tribes 2 came out I want to say. Since then games got ridiculously profitable and they had to adjust the focus audience to a less hardcore demographic.
I'm optimistic though, it's only a matter of time before SOMETHING comes out that's hot new stuff. And as long as blizzard and valve haven't completely jumped the shark i'll spend some portion of my life enjoying games.
I kinda like to think of making 3d art as a game in itself, constantly evolving and becoming more complicated with constant updates, remember when they released normal mapping, that patch was the sh*t.
We have way more polys, higher-res textures, and new ways to add detail (see: normal maps, PhysX, etc.). In addition, asset creation requires exponentially more time and money... and yet, it's questionable whether the technology improvements have resulted in better games.
Valve still uses "Worldcraft" for level design. I started using it for Half-Life 1 but I'm pretty sure it was designed for Quake 1.
It gets the job done, but in regards to putting the proper tools into the proper hands, this is a huge issue. I wouldn't be surprised if the next engine from Valve still used Hammer and motherfucking .qc files. That being said, Valve continues to make incredible games despite their shit tools.
I think people get caught up in making things realistic, and gameplay takes a backseat. I would much rather play Tribes than some disturbingly hyper-realistic war simulator.
I used to play quake 3 on two voodoo two's - the setup everyone had - and it was pretty dodgy at times.
I think games have come along nicely - hell I'm still impressed by HL2 and that's now 20 years old.
The stagnation comes from the better hardware. It takes longer to make better looking games. Q3 was basically a few blocks moving around inside a bigger block compared to games of today.
Here is the question to see if technology has advanced in the last 10 years. Could you remake any of the latest games in just the quake3 engine? I could see most of the stuff in Modern Warfare 2 being made 10 years ago.
There are some things that may have to be carefully implemented but I'm sure it could be done.
You know, I have the Quake 3 CD at home somewhere. Does anyone know if there is an exporter still floating around for this? I seem to remember having issues running it with newer versions of Max.
I remember living in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1998. And in the boardwalk they had this pretty rad Arcade with a 3D game machine.. you know.. one of those crazy contraptions where you put on the gloves and the super heavy goggles and you go through some trippy and boring stuff. I was a naive 13 year old and thought THAT was the future of gaming...boy was a I wrong. well..if you wanna count the Virtual Boy.
We're rocking forward at a nice steady pace, kind. The growth may be within and outwards most the time and not so much forward. I think of it like pouring pancake mix, the larger it becomes, the slower it appears to be growing. We should have poured the pancake mix into cups and microwaved ... it .. holy shit I need to try that!
i would say its improved far more than motion pictures have in any 10 year jump. beneath the planet of the apes 1970
to say , empire strikes back 1980 sure empire was a vastly better looking and better made film. but nothing compaired to the jump in visuals between q3 and say uncharted2 or crisis
I would dare to say that narrative and characterisation hasn't improved at all since the NES era . Unless we are talking about point-and-click adventures, but then again they hardly belong to the mainstream gaming.
There's been some strong efforts in narrative and character development since '99; Deus Ex, VtM:Bloodlines and Mass Effect are the ones that spring to my mind first. Sadly all but Mass Effect have been largely ignored by the majority of the gaming public.
Valve have made probably the best emotive character system I've seen yet (or at least used one the most effectively - with VtM:Bloodlines coming in 2nd place... a lot of that is down to the script and voice acting of both games, however) yet Valve's games are still sadly very linear.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall and Psychonauts have done well in creating really great character/narritive driven games but again they're all straight linear stories, with the exception of Fahrenheit (which is really a "choose your own adventure" film, as opposed to an immersive game).
I think the main thing is that the big mindless action shooters sell well because they can get the idea across in an advert or screenshots with flashy graphics alone. There isn't an established method to advertise deeper games (non-action films get away with it because it's just a story, you can't interact with them... with games there's no succinct way of showing off multiple-choice narrative with character development). That, coupled with the ever-rising development cost of games, means that no one's willing to risk trying anything that isn't a guaranteed blockbuster title.
On a side note Final Fight turns 20. It seems like a greater improvement between 89 and 99 but I'm still satisfied with the last ten years' improvements. Integration of physics systems, facial animation and all this shaders/2d compositing stuff are nice additions to the gaming experience.
There's been some strong efforts in narrative and character development since '99; Deus Ex, VtM:Bloodlines and Mass Effect are the ones that spring to my mind first.
I'd like to point out that Deus Ex's release date is closer to the birth of the FPS genre (assuming it starts with Wolfenstein 3D) than it is to today. It and VtMB and a ton of other games that still have great gameplay are completely forgotten and stuff like BioShock can pass for a 'complex FPS-RPG' these days. Oblivion and Fallout pass for games with dialogue... bleh...
As far as graphics go, I'm rather disappointed that we still can't make curly hair, but otherwise, I've been satisfied for the last few years. Technology is overrated, TF2 looks better on a six-year old computer than Gears of War does on a 360, if you ask me. Still love Wind Waker too.
If you look back and think of how much games evolved between 1990-1999 and then look at what we've got between 2000 and 2009, you'll probably notice that games have somehow gotten stuck in 2006. Sure there's been advances in graphics and so forth, but to tell the truth the basic gameplay still feels the same. It tells something about how good some of these 1990s games were that if you can ignore the dated graphics they'll still kick the shit out of most of the games that are being offered today. There are true gems there like the System Shock series, early Thief games, original Baldour's Gate, original Fallouts... Like someone once said in a review "Bioshock is like System Shock 2 with easier gameplay and an underwater city instead of a spaceship". The only thing that's really advanced somewhere is graphics and even that area is being slowed down by the console demon that has been crippling PC gaming for over decade now.
What ground breaking has happened in the past three years in gaming? If you look back in the nineties a lot of progress happened in a three year period. Nowadays everything's just slowed down... crippled... But then again gaming is no longer for just nerds and nerd minded and that's opened up new cash flows for the people who decide what gets done and what doesn't and this larger audience has a lot lower quality standards than the previous smaller hardcore gaming community and thus giving the people who decide things the opportunity to pour out more and more of the same shit in different packages and as long as this shit sells there's no need for gaming to evolve to anything else than easier more accessible and more shiny form...
If you managed to read this all, I thank you for your effort to others I apologize as I've had a couple of too many drinks this evening...
The last hard & fun game I played was Ninja Gaiden, it kinda took me back to when game actually had great bosses and where a challenge. Most games now seem to be FPS or easy RPGs.
if only we could make nice hair.... how many years is that going to take. Skin, no prob, shiny space marine armor, perfected, clothing, still has a ways to go. Hair.... well... poly cards only get you so far.
did you actually play any of the 90ies games lately that you had awesome in mind? well basicly most have the same idea behind it but come on the controls are so much more advanced and streamlined these days, compare age of empires 1 to III, try out xcom ufo enemy unkown, sim city 1, or any other game from these days, it almost hurts playing them. there are only a few gems that really are still as good as when you didn't know it better
I tried playing FF7 a year ago (never played it until then) I just couldn't get into it, I played for 2 hours and I was just "bleh" I don't see why this is a famous RPG.
not quite that simple, if you watch the Incredibles making of you will see that pattern making is very difficult. What they were doing was making the actual patterns and using some strange way of stitching them together with the cloth sim. worked wonderfully but they kept going on about how they needed to get in pattern makers to come in and show them how to do it.
if only we could make nice hair.... how many years is that going to take. Skin, no prob, shiny space marine armor, perfected, clothing, still has a ways to go. Hair.... well... poly cards only get you so far.
I agree..I was playing Assassin's Creed 2 (really awesome..beat it in 5 days..) but I just couldn't help but notice how...i dunno.. lacking the hair was. Haha.
But then I keep looking at screenshots for Final Fantasy XIII... and the hair in that game looks pretty damn good. At least to me.
did you actually play any of the 90ies games lately that you had awesome in mind? well basically most have the same idea behind it but come on the controls are so much more advanced and streamlined these days, compare age of empires 1 to III, try out xcom ufo enemy unkown, sim city 1, or any other game from these days, it almost hurts playing them. there are only a few gems that really are still as good as when you didn't know it better
Actually yes. I've recently played a lot of old games(Transport Tycoon, Sim City 2000, Fallout, Mechwarrior 2, etc.) and most of them still play great(although I must say that there are some exceptions). :poly124: And it was only a year ago that I last played Age of Empires II and Ufo Enemy Unknown(awesome game still, but feels hard after all these recent titles). But I see that you got my point that there hasn't been much progress from those gameplay mechanics, they've only been streamlined and some things that have been regarded as too hard have been dropped or made easier(like heat management in Mechwarrior games).
http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/lessons.html
this course here is really nice if you want to see the "big picture" on computer graphics progress. If you look at what some "simulators" could do graphics wise, it was also quite impressive 20-30 years ago. But well now we have things running on phones and whatnot.
I think the progress in the last 10 years was insane actually, but probably because I see things from the technical viewpoint. If you look at what hardware can deliver today... quite impressive. That we got so far to preview content for film Cg in almost real-time (with full lighting...) And btw offline-rendering was also always about cheating, no radiosity nor raytracing used by Pixar for a really long time as well.
But I totally agree that animation is the one thing that is weakest (uncanny valley and us humans being just soo trained at watching things move). And well some stuff is simply "hard" (hair...). And compared to film games simply cannot have every moment uniquely animated by professionals (unless some rail-shooters hehe).
to me quake2 was more moving than q3, q2 had some really sweet moments with colored lightmaps, lightmap blending... more stuff going on. q3 was so pure (just love the game so). q3 stands for speed like nothing else so (and the mohaa games and whatnot surely made good use of the tech). It was the time when hardware rendering really took off back then.
when it comes to other milestones in games, I really loved Syndicate, moving around in a big city... really cool, later GTA3 managed to sell that in 3d really well. Eventhough it was all about cheating and simplifying, and that still applies today, as that is what all real-time work is all about.
just step back a bit and you will see the technological progress... as for the narrative and "gameplay", I am not sure what you guys expect in progress at all, as in what should progress here?? I had plenty of fun with the NES, and even simpler stuff before, it's all about play or not? Imo some want to make games more than they are. That said I have fond memories of the first two "Gothic" games for delivering both in narration and gameplay. But for my own need, I wouldn't need that type of game all the time.
not quite that simple, if you watch the Incredibles making of you will see that pattern making is very difficult. What they were doing was making the actual patterns and using some strange way of stitching them together with the cloth sim. worked wonderfully but they kept going on about how they needed to get in pattern makers to come in and show them how to do it.
well thats how i actually do the clothing right now already, learn from real cloth and how cuts etc work, of course you'll have to work from real patterns or working ones to make it believable its not that different these days, you could do it just random but most times it looks just better if you know what you do with the fabric
TWilson even if agree that the mind's googles can make one nostalgic of games now visually laughable, you're being a bit unfair here.
Your q3 :
Real q3 :
So yeah it holds up pretty well. I think Indie games could still use it and pull out great stuff if done correctly.
Regarding visual evolution, what really got me excited recently is the idea of games being run on a server, and streamed as video feedback to the player meaning that any gamer can enjoy the most striking experience regardless of computer spec, as long as the internet connection is fast enough to send the player input in a timely manner. I think it really is a big step and can't wait to try it, especially since the most demanding games in terms of fast user input can already been played online today (Third Strike over peer to peer network GGPO. The server even include some kind of smart input guess or something.)
Also it's funny to see that the increase of visual tech can actually bring quality down. I was playing MDK recently and after the halo jump, the character is represented by a 2D sprite inside a full 3D environment. It has a fantastic, controlled quality to it (being rendered from a raytraced scene) and shows fantastic self/cast shadows that I find really striking. I don't remember seing something like that in a recent 'fully realtime' release!
Then a few months/years later everything was full 3D (think PS1 style 3D) and it looked like poo.
Another example is the overly busy Necris in UT3 (beautifully crafted source highpoly, but a failed bake in my opinion) compared to say, the clean FFXII characters running on a tech that was seven years younger.
As a matter of fact I wouldn't mind tech being 'frozen' for a certain time, to let everyone push it as far as possible. No wonder why the most visually acclaimed games often run on licensed or reworked engines! Arkham Asylum and TF2 come to mind!
Seeing the graphics of games today even from the perspective of myself around 2002 or 2003 would be mind blowing. I still marvel at how good the resident evil remakes on the gamecube look.
I think graphical improvements will have less and less impact as things evolve based on the principle of diminishing returns. Not much has become amazingly better in the last two or three years and the only real difference is games take a lot longer to make then they used to and now they're pretty much all clones of each other suffering from some graphical (and gameplay come to think of it) equivalent of "feature creep".
I think games have lost a lot of the charm they used to have. As we approach realism on the graphical spectrum things just get boring and become mundane and everyday (because there's no other way too feel about something that you see non-stop of every moment of your existance).
I know it's not really on topic but, if I had to make a guess using art periods as an analogy to what will eventually become of what game artists create in the future (with their amazing future graphics engines and mapping types etc.); we'll hit modernism and things will become stipped back down and simplified.
Pior nailed it on the head here. If what's "stale" right now looks awesome, then by all means PLEASE further the awesome. I feel like the industry is moving further and further away from style as it moves closer and closer to "photo realistic". As an artist, "photo realistic" is fucking boring.
Yeah, I prefer the stylized realism stuff myself. These games above, even Forza3 is somewhat stylized.
Either way, it doesn't matter what the artists want. If the consumer doesn't like something, they don't buy it. So games tend to learn toward whatever is popular =\
On the other hand and just to nitpick, only the SC2 screenshot above in undoctored All the rest is promo material or scenes rendered with game assets but with better lighting/res and less texture compression, or scened compositions (proof ? the Borderlands and Brink are both the exact same composition 101) :P
On the other hand and just to nitpick, only the SC2 screenshot above in undoctored All the rest is promo material or scenes rendered with game assets but with better lighting/res and less texture compression, or scened compositions (proof ? the Borderlands and Brink are both the exact same composition 101) :P
Replies
Yes things have advanced as I expected. Everything takes so much longer now
Haha, I can see where you are coming from. Indeed - if I blame the public for being spineless, then I would have to blame the developers working on the games as well, as they are apparently not pushing their ideas across.
I do not want to do this, of course. I fully understand how much effort goes into this work and developing your skills. Developers have their families to feed; they can't afford getting fired for something as trivial as opposing the management over creativity.
Customers on the other hand don't lose anything by not buying a product. But with all this hype, reliance on multiplayer and co-op, it is really hard to avoid buying a popular game, especially when all your friends are playing it.
Games have become a hobby that is really easy to get into. Many people, who have recently picked it up, are still ignorant about the subject and are willing to ignore something as trivial as lack of dedicated servers, having to pay for content included on the DVD, single player campaigns that are much shorter than a couple of years ago, etc.
Apart from the big cats, reaping huge profits out of the annual sequels, I don't want blame anyone while shaking my fist at them. As much as I am annoyed, I am simply trying to find sources of problems. Even though Ive been disappointed with games during the past few years, I still love them as I did before.
I do believe that in a couple of years, once this new generation of gamers gets more experienced, they will demand better deals. Or at least I hope they will: p
* I feel that this is specifically where gameplay has fallen on it`s arse of late.
oh 1999?
great, its when console not dominated by FPS like today
( i love FPS so much, but i need some variation on my console blu-ray collection)
also when PS1 tomb raider look better than PC software render tomb raider
( and then when 3dfx came, pc tomb raider look super kickass)
I'm in the same boat as a lot of you guys, the gameplay peaked for me a long time ago when tribes 2 came out I want to say. Since then games got ridiculously profitable and they had to adjust the focus audience to a less hardcore demographic.
I'm optimistic though, it's only a matter of time before SOMETHING comes out that's hot new stuff. And as long as blizzard and valve haven't completely jumped the shark i'll spend some portion of my life enjoying games.
I kinda like to think of making 3d art as a game in itself, constantly evolving and becoming more complicated with constant updates, remember when they released normal mapping, that patch was the sh*t.
It gets the job done, but in regards to putting the proper tools into the proper hands, this is a huge issue. I wouldn't be surprised if the next engine from Valve still used Hammer and motherfucking .qc files. That being said, Valve continues to make incredible games despite their shit tools.
I think people get caught up in making things realistic, and gameplay takes a backseat. I would much rather play Tribes than some disturbingly hyper-realistic war simulator.
I think games have come along nicely - hell I'm still impressed by HL2 and that's now 20 years old.
The stagnation comes from the better hardware. It takes longer to make better looking games. Q3 was basically a few blocks moving around inside a bigger block compared to games of today.
There are some things that may have to be carefully implemented but I'm sure it could be done.
You know, I have the Quake 3 CD at home somewhere. Does anyone know if there is an exporter still floating around for this? I seem to remember having issues running it with newer versions of Max.
plus we need to work more and more in game art. The work is heavier than before! and the level is very high
at the moment our games mostly seem to be techdemos
i wouldn't have imagined to play games i paid money for, to play for free in my browser. but then again it just didnt cross my mind
to say , empire strikes back 1980
Valve have made probably the best emotive character system I've seen yet (or at least used one the most effectively - with VtM:Bloodlines coming in 2nd place... a lot of that is down to the script and voice acting of both games, however) yet Valve's games are still sadly very linear.
Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall and Psychonauts have done well in creating really great character/narritive driven games but again they're all straight linear stories, with the exception of Fahrenheit (which is really a "choose your own adventure" film, as opposed to an immersive game).
I think the main thing is that the big mindless action shooters sell well because they can get the idea across in an advert or screenshots with flashy graphics alone. There isn't an established method to advertise deeper games (non-action films get away with it because it's just a story, you can't interact with them... with games there's no succinct way of showing off multiple-choice narrative with character development). That, coupled with the ever-rising development cost of games, means that no one's willing to risk trying anything that isn't a guaranteed blockbuster title.
[ame]
As far as graphics go, I'm rather disappointed that we still can't make curly hair, but otherwise, I've been satisfied for the last few years. Technology is overrated, TF2 looks better on a six-year old computer than Gears of War does on a 360, if you ask me. Still love Wind Waker too.
*crawls back into grumpy hole*
MW2 is a modified version of the q3 engine :P
I guess it's ok.
What ground breaking has happened in the past three years in gaming? If you look back in the nineties a lot of progress happened in a three year period. Nowadays everything's just slowed down... crippled... But then again gaming is no longer for just nerds and nerd minded and that's opened up new cash flows for the people who decide what gets done and what doesn't and this larger audience has a lot lower quality standards than the previous smaller hardcore gaming community and thus giving the people who decide things the opportunity to pour out more and more of the same shit in different packages and as long as this shit sells there's no need for gaming to evolve to anything else than easier more accessible and more shiny form...
If you managed to read this all, I thank you for your effort to others I apologize as I've had a couple of too many drinks this evening...
Yeah, but someone's got the lightmaps turned off and their gamma cranked...
If you posted the flat textures from a lot of the Q3 stuff even today it's jaw-droppingly good.
did you actually play any of the 90ies games lately that you had awesome in mind? well basicly most have the same idea behind it but come on the controls are so much more advanced and streamlined these days, compare age of empires 1 to III, try out xcom ufo enemy unkown, sim city 1, or any other game from these days, it almost hurts playing them. there are only a few gems that really are still as good as when you didn't know it better
I agree..I was playing Assassin's Creed 2 (really awesome..beat it in 5 days..) but I just couldn't help but notice how...i dunno.. lacking the hair was. Haha.
But then I keep looking at screenshots for Final Fantasy XIII... and the hair in that game looks pretty damn good. At least to me.
Actually yes. I've recently played a lot of old games(Transport Tycoon, Sim City 2000, Fallout, Mechwarrior 2, etc.) and most of them still play great(although I must say that there are some exceptions). :poly124: And it was only a year ago that I last played Age of Empires II and Ufo Enemy Unknown(awesome game still, but feels hard after all these recent titles). But I see that you got my point that there hasn't been much progress from those gameplay mechanics, they've only been streamlined and some things that have been regarded as too hard have been dropped or made easier(like heat management in Mechwarrior games).
Now where did I put my Magic Carpet 2 CD...
this course here is really nice if you want to see the "big picture" on computer graphics progress. If you look at what some "simulators" could do graphics wise, it was also quite impressive 20-30 years ago. But well now we have things running on phones and whatnot.
I think the progress in the last 10 years was insane actually, but probably because I see things from the technical viewpoint. If you look at what hardware can deliver today... quite impressive. That we got so far to preview content for film Cg in almost real-time (with full lighting...) And btw offline-rendering was also always about cheating, no radiosity nor raytracing used by Pixar for a really long time as well.
But I totally agree that animation is the one thing that is weakest (uncanny valley and us humans being just soo trained at watching things move). And well some stuff is simply "hard" (hair...). And compared to film games simply cannot have every moment uniquely animated by professionals (unless some rail-shooters hehe).
to me quake2 was more moving than q3, q2 had some really sweet moments with colored lightmaps, lightmap blending... more stuff going on. q3 was so pure (just love the game so). q3 stands for speed like nothing else so (and the mohaa games and whatnot surely made good use of the tech). It was the time when hardware rendering really took off back then.
when it comes to other milestones in games, I really loved Syndicate, moving around in a big city... really cool, later GTA3 managed to sell that in 3d really well. Eventhough it was all about cheating and simplifying, and that still applies today, as that is what all real-time work is all about.
just step back a bit and you will see the technological progress... as for the narrative and "gameplay", I am not sure what you guys expect in progress at all, as in what should progress here?? I had plenty of fun with the NES, and even simpler stuff before, it's all about play or not? Imo some want to make games more than they are. That said I have fond memories of the first two "Gothic" games for delivering both in narration and gameplay. But for my own need, I wouldn't need that type of game all the time.
well thats how i actually do the clothing right now already, learn from real cloth and how cuts etc work, of course you'll have to work from real patterns or working ones to make it believable its not that different these days, you could do it just random but most times it looks just better if you know what you do with the fabric
Absolutely agree. I think it was Ken Scott unless I'm mistaken. Great art doesn't age.
Your q3 :
Real q3 :
So yeah it holds up pretty well. I think Indie games could still use it and pull out great stuff if done correctly.
Regarding visual evolution, what really got me excited recently is the idea of games being run on a server, and streamed as video feedback to the player meaning that any gamer can enjoy the most striking experience regardless of computer spec, as long as the internet connection is fast enough to send the player input in a timely manner. I think it really is a big step and can't wait to try it, especially since the most demanding games in terms of fast user input can already been played online today (Third Strike over peer to peer network GGPO. The server even include some kind of smart input guess or something.)
Also it's funny to see that the increase of visual tech can actually bring quality down. I was playing MDK recently and after the halo jump, the character is represented by a 2D sprite inside a full 3D environment. It has a fantastic, controlled quality to it (being rendered from a raytraced scene) and shows fantastic self/cast shadows that I find really striking. I don't remember seing something like that in a recent 'fully realtime' release!
[ame]
Then a few months/years later everything was full 3D (think PS1 style 3D) and it looked like poo.
Another example is the overly busy Necris in UT3 (beautifully crafted source highpoly, but a failed bake in my opinion) compared to say, the clean FFXII characters running on a tech that was seven years younger.
As a matter of fact I wouldn't mind tech being 'frozen' for a certain time, to let everyone push it as far as possible. No wonder why the most visually acclaimed games often run on licensed or reworked engines! Arkham Asylum and TF2 come to mind!
I think graphical improvements will have less and less impact as things evolve based on the principle of diminishing returns. Not much has become amazingly better in the last two or three years and the only real difference is games take a lot longer to make then they used to and now they're pretty much all clones of each other suffering from some graphical (and gameplay come to think of it) equivalent of "feature creep".
I think games have lost a lot of the charm they used to have. As we approach realism on the graphical spectrum things just get boring and become mundane and everyday (because there's no other way too feel about something that you see non-stop of every moment of your existance).
I know it's not really on topic but, if I had to make a guess using art periods as an analogy to what will eventually become of what game artists create in the future (with their amazing future graphics engines and mapping types etc.); we'll hit modernism and things will become stipped back down and simplified.
That was an awful lot of quotes.
Um, most of the games I'm looking forward too...^ Not photo-realistic.
Either way, it doesn't matter what the artists want. If the consumer doesn't like something, they don't buy it. So games tend to learn toward whatever is popular =\
Weird, right? As an environment artist, even in stylized newness I see bullshit CGTextures boring textures used and slightly painted over.
I am young yet I am coming across like a bitter fuck. Excuse me.
and one's a painting
nowdays fixing up renders is settings up the right scene and mood, takes too much time to make new content just for PR