waste of time?
polycounter lvl 19
A few videos of games I've seen recently are really lush in the visuals department.
However just checking out a certain game's video on it's website and all these lush visuals are used for what? A dumb hack and slash with boring enemies and collision detection thats worse than a pensioner motorist.
Seriously, why waste artists time if the game is going to play like a lump of goo that has been rolling around collecting bits of dirt since the middle 90's. On said video I saw a monster being destroyed and the bits of him fell to the floor in a gravity weaker than the moons.
Maybe it's just me but I have a personal hate for games that have no brains in the interaction departemnt. If I hack something, I want to see that something affected. If something bashes me, I want my character to be affected accordingly. Not just stand there and do the same lame "hurt" anim.
Developers obviously lose sight of their own games whilst working on them. They end up with these lush looking "screenshot-tastic" bargin bin wastes of time.
However just checking out a certain game's video on it's website and all these lush visuals are used for what? A dumb hack and slash with boring enemies and collision detection thats worse than a pensioner motorist.
Seriously, why waste artists time if the game is going to play like a lump of goo that has been rolling around collecting bits of dirt since the middle 90's. On said video I saw a monster being destroyed and the bits of him fell to the floor in a gravity weaker than the moons.
Maybe it's just me but I have a personal hate for games that have no brains in the interaction departemnt. If I hack something, I want to see that something affected. If something bashes me, I want my character to be affected accordingly. Not just stand there and do the same lame "hurt" anim.
Developers obviously lose sight of their own games whilst working on them. They end up with these lush looking "screenshot-tastic" bargin bin wastes of time.
Replies
r.
There's hope. There is the PPU and check out the 'Realtime fluid simulation' thread.
If games suck then stop buying them. I did.
At the same time, I am looking forward to STALKER because of its supposed different game play. Also being published by a smaller developer to me signifies a distance from that staus quo game play idea a larger published will push (Hence why I also am sniffing around Prey).
Its all about finding that happy medium between "looks great" and "plays great".
So what if it's not as optimized or buggy in a few spots. Or the graphics arent as super high as most modern games. These simply are not as important in my book *which may explain why I feel like hawken and Sett do - because we dont fall into the hype of super graphics anymore. I think it would have become #1 if it had.
On the flip side of the argument, would you be willing to sit through a game made of 8-bit sprites and 320x240 rez even if the gameplay was amazing?
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Yes, and this is why I still play Mechwarrior and Tyrian 2000 :P
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Yes, and this is why I still play Mechwarrior and Tyrian 2000 :P
[/ QUOTE ]Know any way to get MechWarrior2 (Trials, Ghostbear AND Mercs - got all 3) running on WinXP?
Developers obviously lose sight of their own games whilst working on them.
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I dunno. I think that's too easy a statement to make from an outside perspective. At many big studios indvidual developers have little creative investment in the overall game. The grand vision and overall direction of the game often comes from the exec level. Most people actually making the thing are merely part of a production line process. Quite easily an extremely talented artist could be on a team with shit designers, or shit animators, or a shit 3D engine. Or vice versa, or any combo of the above. When it all comes together it's a beatiful thing, but the planets have to align in the right way, and team and tech simply doesn't always gel as a cohesive unit destined to make great things.
I find the activities you engage in, and they way they are treated & executed to be much more important. Control schemes are important. Pacing is important.
Bugs & sharp difficulty transitions are things that bother me. Boring gameplay is what bothers me. How many times have you played a game that has been sorta challenging, but not tough...only to encounter some jump puzzle, or some enemy that takes 20X more attempts than anything you've encountered so far. Thats poor design. I loved, but didnt finish Metroid Prime for this reason.
Thats whats so ironic to me about the whole Homebrew/PSP phenomenon.
People purchase this 300$ portable console with full 3D & Media capabilities, but because the games released for it completely suck...they play 10+ year old NES & arcade games...because they are still & always will be fun.
What game did I purchase last for my Xbox?
Midway arcade classics. Out of the current lineup of anime-robot-garbage & mind-numbing sports titles, I couldn't find one compelling title.
There is a lesson in this somewhere for all of us as game professionals.
Don't get me wrong I have nothing against graphics and I cheer on any improvement. But the other parts have some serious catching up to do. Gameplay and writing especially.
"Its all about finding that happy medium between "looks great" and "plays great". "
I dont see why there can't be both.
I know what you mean, but I'm not sure I can share your outrage.
Last PC game I bought was HL2, before that Q3. There is yet to be a PC game that has impressed me beyond these.
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You didn't fancy any of the hundreds of PC games that were relased between those 2?
Are you looking right?
If you're only into PC shooters than there were at least a handfull of games which had original/innovative gameplay and graphics between 1999 and 2004.
You guys are all pretty intelligent. You have a good grasp of the way the internet works, a lot of you know how to use a 3D package. You pay attention to the games business and most of you like of the idea of playing something new. You're all smarter than the target audience. Seriously, go into your local EB, Wal-Mart, etc, and hang out in the games section. Watch which titles the customers pick up off the shelves. There's a pretty good chance that it's not the same titles you guys are interested in.
Pretty graphics sell titles, innovative gameplay confuses dumb gamers. The current focus of the games business is not to cater to the hardcore market. Maybe things will change, but I don't blame you guys for sticking with your emulators.
Last PC game I bought was HL2, before that Q3. There is yet to be a PC game that has impressed me beyond these.
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Personally I didn't find either Quake 3 or Half-Life 2 anything more than amusing side-tracks from my daily routine.
I beat both the day I got them too, and then whenever I replay just go online with them. From my perspective they are perfect examples of why the industry is stagnent, especially in terms of FPS games.
Sure you have the ability in Half-Life 2 to grab a radiator and fling it at people. At the same time, that's about all the game is about. Shooting your weapon before the enemy can fire at you.
You know the most inventive thing I ever heard an FPS doing, was scrapped from the game because it was felt it would make it too complicated. What was the game, and the feature?
Wolfenstien3D, and dragging bodies. Yes, the 1992 game that propelled iD into the world phenomenom they are today. At the time the dropped feature that is still commented out in the released Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 Source Code, would've changed a pretty new genre into something a little too complex.
At the same time, it was a very innovative feature. It ment that the game developers had thought about making it with some tactics. Now most games is a case of taking a well know franchise / license. Adding the lastest cool features (last year physics, this year hyper-realism), all wrapped in the blanket of a generic genre.
et voila your new million dollar game.
only problem is throughout all this nonvolution of games, and stifled creativity, the real masterpeices are often pushed to the back and forgotten about.
Fahrenheit for example, is a true masterpeice of a game. Yet I doubt it'll do well, just like thier last game Nomad Soul also was poorly recieved.
Very few people remember Oni, the game Bungie developed before the now critically acclaimed Halo. It had far more innovation in it, in terms of design and gameplay.
Often gamers seems to follow suit with what's cool.
Zelda and the Legend of The Wind Waker, to me was an absolutely stunning game that used some of the best visual respresentation to compliment the story. Yet people who never even played the game panned it because it was a)on the GameCube, b)Cartoony Zelda, etc.
As a result the GameCube as a console was marred with the whole 'childrens console' title. This in itself is a great shame because apart from the fact it is the most visually capable console of the currently available. Yes, sorry but you honestly believe a GeForce 3 @ 250MHz is capableof out-performing a Radeon 9700 @ 162MHz you've got to wake up and smell the Java (which incidentally is the next wave of Geforce Shaders... Scent Shaders. Now available to make developers lifes just that extra complicated!)
What I've often not understood is that many developers work on X-Box games but not GameCube. Why is that?
The official lines from the publishers is that the market is too small, but given current statics are something like 30million GC and 31million X-Box, I don't see how that really holds up.
Then you have the fact of the limitation on data by the 1.4GB disc. Seriously, last generation we could happily fit a 15-20hr game on a 650MB CD. What the hell changed in the past year between the consoles that means that now 1.4GB isn't enough for a reasonable size game.
Look at PC games. Doom 3 is 2 Discs (1.3GB), Half-Life 2 is 5 Discs (2.4GB), Prince of Persia The Warrior Within 2 Discs (1.1GB). (the last one is a good example because it fits some good graphics plus over 15hrs of gameplay onto a single Game Disc)
I mean the most unreasonable excuse I have ever heard was based on the above. "We can't ship Madden on the GameCube because those gamers would have to miss out on the several hours of footage from Maddem himself tutoring you through the game".
Whoopdy-freaking-do. We miss out on some retard spouting off what he feels is the best for the NHL, I mean who, the heck cares?!
When did games change from playing to making sure you have enough video on there?
The focus is all screwed up. Personally while I've found many many good games the past few months. It's become increasingly clear by the fact my GameCube collection keeps growing exponencially that yeah games today are getting more boring. Graphics can only take a play so far before gameplay has to hit in. (I'm looking at you Doom 3!)
Maybe it's just me but I have a personal hate for games that have no brains in the interaction departemnt. If I hack something, I want to see that something affected. If something bashes me, I want my character to be affected accordingly. Not just stand there and do the same lame "hurt" anim.
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You have to look at the scope of the game itself and what you think could improve it. It's easy to come up with ides on how to improve on what's already there. But at the end of the day, if you don't have the time or man-hours to get thos improvements in... you're not going to have them.
Let's take something simple... like say... destructable environments. If you hit a wall with a weapon you want something to happen, right?
Exactly what do you want to happen?
It has to be consistent throughout the whole game, or it fails.
How much time will it take to create the necessary assets to implement destructable environments?
THe base model needs to be created, then different variations of damage states, then animations if they are needed.
Would it be easier to create a tool that would automate destructable envorinements? Or at least have parts of it taken care of? How much time would you save from creating a tool as opposed to "cheating" it?
How many more triangles will you have load onto the screen to achieve this effect? Is there budget for it? If not, are there places in the game that can be sacrificed to achieve the desired effect?
Let's say you took care of all that. You have destructable environments in the game and they're working well.
Destructable environements mean that things can be smashed "open". Okay... so that means a certain amount of the insides need to be built also. Let's say you have a cottage you can destroy the walls on. You'll have to build the interior because it would look utterly stupid if it there was nothing there. Then ofcourse you're going to want some kind of interactive objects inside for the player to have fun with. These will have to be destructable as well, right? Because we want consistency. What's the point of blasting walls when you can't destroy simple obects like chairs or tables?
All that adds up to more "useless" assets that need to be created to keep a certain feature consistent.
Another aspect destructable environments bring into the equation is... how do you prevent the player from cutting through the level layout? What's the point of following the set path(s) if the player can simply blast his way through walls?
It isn't easy to implement these things into a game w/o having something else break. Sure you can limit it's use. But then you're just inviting complaints from your players. "Well gee, I can do this here, but I can't here? WTF?"
Even something simple like doing different version of the hurt anim poses problems.
Obviously you're taking more time to create different variations of essentially the same item... a hurt animation. Then you also have to factor in if you have the animation budget to have those variations. How will they work? What triggers them? What sets of anims can they/can't they blend into? If the hero has different hurt animations, should we do the same for enemies?
Technology often restricts what can and can't be done in a game. THere are tons of ideas that go around work... most of them getting shut down because they either create too many problems or we simply do not have the budget for them to be in the game.
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Developers obviously lose sight of their own games whilst working on them. They end up with these lush looking "screenshot-tastic" bargin bin wastes of time.
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True... but like I said above.. there are restrictions you have to work with. And to repeat what DaZ said, it often times isn't down the the designers themselves what goes into the game. There will always be an upper management exec that will want his idea/design/feature be put into the game. Do be so critical... it's isn't exactly easy to design a game that can please everyone.
You either like it or you don't. And it's best left at that.
I beat both the day I got them too
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I'm really sorry raven but I stopped reading your post right there. j/k
I'd say my 3 favorite games of all time come from the same studio, UGA, which are no more. The dreamcast saw some awsome titles, however playing them now is boring. Games have moved on when it comes to 3d. There needs to be this wonderfull balance again: games meet their graphical challenge and then the innovation starts.
I worked in the same office where Stalker was being tested. I've heard that it's been put back for a year (looked finiahed to me) and by that time, it'll look shit.
Soul: you can keep your destructable environments then
Developers can make all the excuses they like about why the game is lacking or why this went wrong or why they don't have enough time to do so and so. Just excuses though eh? Masters of worthwhile ground breaking games, I bet they make excuses right? "like we can't do it because I'm waiting for an email from the programmer whos on holiday till X" / "I can't make it work because the artists are only allowed to make 5 objects not 10"
Whats the point of digging up a dead horse, painting it with pretty colours and then tring to ride it?
The game I'm talking about originally, I guess I better not mention it because a polycounter is working on it.
It all boils down to budget.
The DOA system is smart, but again, even though ragdoll is readily available it doesn't always get used. I think we tried to incorporate some kind of ragdoll system on one of the games I worked on... it never saw the light of day because it came too late in the project and would have taken too much time to implement properly.
Alex
You know the most inventive thing I ever heard an FPS doing, was scrapped from the game because it was felt it would make it too complicated. What was the game, and the feature?
Wolfenstien3D, and dragging bodies. Yes, the 1992 game that propelled iD into the world phenomenom they are today. At the time the dropped feature that is still commented out in the released Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 Source Code, would've changed a pretty new genre into something a little too complex.
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You have never played Thief??
If you havnt, pick up Thief 2 (its better than 1 and 3).
That screenshot smells good too!
I guess it's because I resigned from my role as an Art Director for a games company some 4 months ago and have done little since, that I am questioning the very motive of staff and companies alike. It's not exactly cheap to make games anymore, but time after time we see the games with good gameplay becoming insanely popular on the internet... now good gameplay doesn't always equal complex gameplay.
Good gameplay can be based on visual effects. This combination isn't hard, though not obvious, it's often something that makes games feel "complete". Desruction for example, is the prime "feel good" factor in games. Destruction is a ballanced combination of spectacular graphics and complex thoughtfull programming, all tied up with game design that tighter than a gnats chuff.
So when one of these aspect is missing, the game sucks. Hack and slash games are only fun when you can see desruction to the hords of goblins attacking you. If they all dissapear in the same death anim, combined with your stock 3 sword swings, then we haven't progressed from the very worst of 16bit side scrolling beat-em-ups.
The question of time is a good one. Why don't developers ballance the now astronomical amount of time they have to put into graphics? To be honest, all I can see is bigger budgets and less returns for polished turds.
my point was, take a good movie made 60 years ago, now take one that was made last year.. the special effects were better, the film quality was better.. but i dont think you could say the newer movie was any better..
now to address your question directly.. look at ILM.. why did they waste their time working on van helsing? what a pile of crap.. i would think if i wanted to have a reputation in the film industry i would only want to work on movies that dont suck.. but me personally as an artist, i dont care.. why should i care if the end result is good? i am not a game developer. i am an artist.. just like the guy that modeled or animated any of the monsters in van helsing.. i am sure all they were conserned about was how good what they were assigned turned out.. i doubt they cared about bad dialog and shitty acting, or plot holes... its not their job to care.. i understand that working on a great game can motavate you, but less good games come out a year than i have fingers so really its pointless .. the truth is 95 percent of us polish turds.. thats our job.. so people will pick up the box and buy the dumb game..i just dont really mind it.. i like to make art.. its fun.. i get paid for having fun.. when i am done with my art you can go wipe your ass with it for all i care.. the fun was making it.. after i make a piece its pretty much useless to me, almost like after you beat one of those bargin bin games with good grapics and nothing else going for it..
"I am questioning the very motive of staff and companies alike."
Who's wasting time? You're being way too idealistic. What so you expect everyone in this world to have a job that makes them feel they've been part of something of exceptional quality? Face reality. Money makes the world go round. It's that simple.
Arsh hit the nail on the head. I make 3D character Art, I love doing it, I get paid very well. Much that I'd love to, on a team of 100 people I can't control the overall quality of the game beyond that sorry. I do care passionately about the quality of the stuff that is my concern, but If the story or gameplay truly sucks, what am I meant to do? Petition the lead designer, the exec producer? It doesn't work like that. There's this little thing called politics.
Now, I could run around the globe starting a new job every 3 months desperately trying to get on a team that is making something exceptional, only to find out that it sucks and move on to the next gig? C'mon man, get real. Like I said in an earlier post, the chances of team and tech gelling to make something truly great do not have good odds. You're basically suggesting that all of us not working on the Half Life 2's are wasting our time.
To suggest that making an incredible game should be our sole motivation as games artists is hopelessly naiive to be quite frank. It's a noble ideal, and I'm sure we all had it when we first started out ( I still live in hope ) but it's a bit of a fairytale I'm afraid. There is rent and bills to be paid.
I'm sure we all do.