ion flux said:
This is a really excellent comparison you've made here. Morrowind is a beautiful game that I've never been able to finish because the gameplay sucks. I don't give a crap about art direction if this ZRPG thing isn't fun to play. To me art direction is like icing. If the cake is made of cardboard, it's still a crappy cake. However, a good cake without icing is still pretty good. This is pretty obvious stuff but people still like their beautiful, cardboard cakes. :shrug:
I like the cake analogy. I'm a big fan of cake, and like most cRPGs these days, they are often very bad. Is the cake more important than the frosting? Yes. I too would eat cake without frosting, but would never eat frosting without cake. OTOH, neither would I ever buy a frosted style cake without, not only frosting, but excellent quality frosting. And frosting is actually much harder to do well than the cake itself. So I think the analogy works pretty well. What I would like to see from these indie devs is a cake that I would actually want to eat, and unfortunately that includes the more difficult to make frosting.
I think it really needs to be pointed out that just because someone *wants* something doesn't mean they expect it. I think anyone in this thread who claims that they wouldn't like to see graphics at the level of Crysis or Crysis 2 in Dead State and AoD are lying. A photo-realistic Dead State would be amazing. You may say that you don't care about the difference in graphics quality between Doom II and Crysis II, but I don't believe you. It reminds me of girls who say they don't care about looks. I never believe them without proof (an ugly boyfriend works well). Only a very, very tiny percentage of girls who say that really mean it. Same deal here.
I am very excited about both Dead State and AoD despite their old gen graphics, but that doesn't mean that criticisms about the graphics are not valid or shouldn't be voiced. There is no point in pretending that the graphics are going to be good by modern standards. Will they be excellent graphics by 1990 standards? Yes. Will they be excellent graphics by 2007 standards? Definitely not. Castle Wolfenstein and Crush Crumble and Chomp are two of my favorite games of all time (I didn't have a computer that could play the early cRPGs from that time). The difference between that level of graphics and Dead State is much, much greater than the difference between Dead State graphics and Crysis. And yet I still think it is something worth bitching about even though the devs are not in a position to do anything about it. It's not a deal breaker, but it definitely saddens me that they (or maybe "we") can't do better in 2010.
I do admit that I am a graphics whore. I am not ashamed of it in the slightest. CG is a field that has always interested me. And one of the things that has kept me living all these years is to watch the progress of graphics go from the level of Crush, Crumble, and Chomp to the level of Crysis. I find it kind of offensive when people claim that graphics don't matter. I'm sorry but they
do matter. I can remember a time, before computer games even had graphics. And you know what? I strongly prefer the fancy graphics. Would you rather play a game like Super Star Trek where a spaceship is represented by an ASCII character like "+" or "*" (don't remember what it actually used)? Or would you prefer a photo-realistic, bump-mapped, zbrushed star ship Enterprise that looks slightly battered and creaky and real enough to step right onto? It's your choice, but I would prefer the latter. Now, why I prefer it gets into the whole "immersion" issue which is a whole other can of worms, and I believe a false enemy of the Codex. It's like that thread about 3d being the enemy. It isn't. Correlation is not causation.
BTW, when I mentioned the issue of being disappointed with the graphics I wasn't really expecting such a shit-storm about it. And I wasn't expecting the whole thread to turn into an argument about graphics. It was merely a comment. An observation. One that the devs should expect unless they want to spend the next 5 years working on cutting edge graphics. It wasn't intended to mean that the games were without value because they don't look like Crysis. It is pretty small on my long list of disappointments in the year 2010. No HAL 9000. The best we can do is
megahal. No flying cars. No nuclear fusion. No Moonbase Alpha or Mars base station or interstellar spacecraft. No replicants that look like Sean Young (when she actually was young) or cities that look like the one from Blade Runner. We are now living in the future but it aint all it was cracked up to be. The lack of photo-realism in Dead State and AoD actually ranks pretty low on my list of disappointments. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth discussing the problem and trying to come up with solutions so that maybe at some point in the future indie games *can* have photo-realistic graphics. VD didn't just complain about the lack of real cRPGs. He went out and did something about it. And this discussion has motivated me to at least think about starting an open source game engine project and coding for it myself full time. There clearly is a need for one. After all where would these projects be without Torque 3D? Maybe they wouldn't "be" at all.
Again, these 2 games are pretty much the only ones I am really looking forward to at the moment. When I expressed my disappointment I didn't fully realize the difficulty of getting beyond Torque3d graphics. I have since been schooled on this issue (in both senses) however and agree that for practical purposes there really is nothing that they can do about the graphics. So I think discussing "art direction" is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Compared to modern games, the game will still be ugly. There is nothing anyone can really do about that. That's something we just have to accept for now. Would you care about the art direction in Doom or Wolfenstein 3D? The very idea seems kind of laughable until you get beyond a certain level of graphics.
of cRPGs. Your generation is starting to not only play these games (what's weird is that the girls play them too), but make them as well. You really shouldn't mind taking 3 minutes to read a post. Hell quite a few posters here can't be bothered to post even a single word. They post a pic or an emoticon instead. You may think that walls of text are boring, but I think that replying with emoticons and pics are boring. Cue the rest of this thread being spammed with huge pics and emoticons. Being clever and being predictable are not the same thing, believe it or not. Do you consider this to be a long post? I bet you do. I bet there is also a clear correlation between the lengths of people's posts and their ages. The New Shit indeed.
:D
