Review of reviews - Atlus USA does not like graphic whores -

[Drakron]

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?optio ... mitstart=1

 

[Zomg]

That's funny, I always thought of Atlus as a slipshod import mill for B level Japanese games, not as people with pride in what they do. It's cool to see them showing so much personality.

Anyway, I'll get that game at some point in the secondary market.

 

[LCJr.]

Now that wasn't your usual PR spin. Is someone on the Codex staff working for them?

Don't know about B level. The Ogre series always got high marks.

 

[Drakron]

And Shin Megami Tensei series.

Persona is theirs too.

 

[LlamaGod]

"Great" graphics always devolve into "poor" graphics as tech improves, but great gameplay always stays great; it saddens us that the majority of game reviewers don't seem to care.


Just incase any developers read this post and can't seem to remember, I made it large print and colorful.

 

[obediah]

I've been playing steambot chronicles a bit. I was a bit sad that it wasn't 480p widescreen like many late PS2 games, but the graphics are fine.

So far there have been lots of choices in dialogue - I'm not sure if I'll ever replay to see if the choices are meaningful. But you can certainly be a prick.

 

[headache]

That's funny, I always thought of Atlus as a slipshod import mill for B level Japanese games, not as people with pride in what they do. It's cool to see them showing so much personality.

Yeah, I already had some affection for them as a company... I guess first just because I found Trauma Center for the DS amusing, a quirky game you might not expect to get localized. And then I've heard other intriguing things: They're also localizing a very Japanese GBA tactical-giant-robot game: http://www.gamespot.com/gba/strategy/superrobottaisenog/news.html?sid=6151959.

And I heard they're doing Rule of Rose, a PS2 horror game commisioned by Sony for the Japanese market, but too pedophile-riffic for them to want to release in the U.S. BTW it looks quite pretty (not in that way! well, I guess in that way) & expensive-- definitely "A-list".

Seems like they take advantage of the prolific Japanese industry to bring stuff nobody else would to the U.S. & Europe -- A-list, Z-list, whatever. That's pretty neat, and seeing this topic, now I think they're even cooler.

 

[WouldBeCreator]

Great" graphics always devolve into "poor" graphics as tech improves, but great gameplay always stays great; it saddens us that the majority of game reviewers don't seem to care.[/size][/color]

(Another overlong WBC screed.)

While I suppose the second half of the statement is true (more on that in one second), the first half certainly isn't. Are Super Mario World's graphics any less great now than they were when the game was released? Are Sacrifice's? Are Grim Fandango's? Symphony of the Night's? Freespace II's? To be sure, some technical limitations will always get pushed back but that only means that for graphics that were impressive *tech demonstrations* there will be a fairly short shelf life. For graphics that were impressive as works of art, that issue doesn't arise, or at least going "stale" doesn't do much hurt. Where an artist develops an art form that is not defined by the size of its palette, the density of its resolution, or the number of polygons it's pushing, the art he creates within that form is likely to have enduring quality.

Moreover, there's something presumptuous (and rather silly) about thinking of games as more than ephemera. The hardware on which Atlus's games are played is rendered unavailable in a matter of years, a decade at most; the games themselves scratch, break, whatever. Defending your development choices on the basis that you've maximized the game's longterm value is silly economics, then; it's also a shoddy way to treat your fanbase, insofar as you're basically discounting their interests so as to benefit future, as-of-yet-nonexistant players. Consider this scenario: Developer says that it is making its game graphically "scaleable" such that it will improve as hardware improves. Developer concedes that this results in suboptimal framerates on current systems because the game isn't tailored to current hardware. Nevertheless, Developer justifies the game's poor performance on the basis that "in the future, it will still look good." Surely we would say that was obnoxious.

So, if good graphics now (despite their fading nature) would make for a better game now than good gameplay now, I would say that graphics should receive priority, even if in ten years that means the game won't be as cool.

The point that "great gameplay always stays great" is sort of true. It's true in the same sense that great graphics always stay great (as in the examples I pointed out above, or even older ones, like Contra). But gameplay that *seems* good is often revealed to be lousy with the passage of time. Warcraft I seemed to have great RTS gameplay (to fans of the genre; I don't want to debate the merits of RTS), but that was revealed not to be so once Warcraft II and then Starcraft came out. Warcraft I's gameplay is no longer "great" to anyone familiar with contemporary RTS games. Super Mario Bros. seemed to have "great" gameplay, and indeed the gameplay is still very good. But if you play it today, there are lots of frustrating elements, from the weird jumping mechanics to the relatively homogenous levels. Doom was brilliant and remains solid, but the gameplay is weak compared to what you find in current FPS games (especially on the multiplayer side). If you replicated Doom with today's top-end graphics, I'm sure it would be well-received, but I'm also sure that most people wouldn't find its gameplay "great." I could go through this for standout games in every genre.

It's true that games that were innovative still seem remarkable, but they aren't necessarily as fun to play as they once were.

I'll also add that the games where the gameplay seems to have stood the test of time also tend to be the ones where the graphics still look good. (This may be less true on the RPG side.)

--EDIT--

@ headache:

Just noticed your sig. "[A] doubling in polygon count means a doubling in the amount of time an artist needs to spend generating the model . . . ." I assume you're quoting this for comic effect, since it's not just a little bit wrong, but hilariously wrong.

 

[headache]

@ WouldBe:

I had a desire to quote the whole article, or get the essence of it, in my sig, probably a bad idea. How would you correct it-- I assume the exact proportion seems wrong? (I'm just an observer, no tech knowledge beyond that of the dilletante.) They both certainly increase together, that's the point. The hardware race-- powered by Moore's law-- means increasing graphics capabilities resulting in (more and more rapidly) escalating costs, increasing conservatism in game design, and even decreasing competence. That's what I wanted to relay from this article.

I think that graphics as they currently stand-- let's say PS2-level-- are perfectly adequate as a framework for almost any kind of great gameplay. I like specatular graphics as much as the next guy, but I stopped desiring their improvement a few years ago. Everything looks pretty swell now-- how much more do we need when we're playing games not watching blockbuster movies? (Nintendo seems to be adopting this thinking in how they're approaching the "Wii".) The amount of resources needed already seems too high just to get your game good-looking enough to sell-- the one Steambot review that complained that now that the 360 is out this game's graphics cannot be tolerated is the kind of thinking that really scares me.

So, if good graphics now (despite their fading nature) would make for a better game now than good gameplay now, I would say that graphics should receive priority, even if in ten years that means the game won't be as cool.

If this truly presents itself as a trade-off in developing, nowadays I don't think putting more into graphics would pay off much, not in proportion to the cost. I think we're at a point in technology where any game with an average (read: huge) budget and corresponding graphics should stop the graphics one-upsmanship and focus on the gameplay.

 

[obediah]

While I suppose the second half of the statement is true (more on that in one second), the first half certainly isn't. Are Super Mario World's graphics any less great now than they were when the game was released? Are Sacrifice's? Are Grim Fandango's? Symphony of the Night's? Freespace II's? To be sure, some technical limitations will always get pushed back but that only means that for graphics that were impressive *tech demonstrations* there will be a fairly short shelf life. For graphics that were impressive as works of art, that issue doesn't arise, or at least going "stale" doesn't do much hurt. Where an artist develops an art form that is not defined by the size of its palette, the density of its resolution, or the number of polygons it's pushing, the art he creates within that form is likely to have enduring quality.

Uhm graphics != artistic merit. The quote was about graphics, not art.

Yes, all of the above game have sucky graphics. Star Wars episode III had good graphics, Freespace II doesn't hold a candle to it. Now the quality of the artwork in them is a different bag.

Moreover, there's something presumptuous (and rather silly) about thinking of games as more than ephemera. The hardware on which Atlus's games are played is rendered unavailable in a matter of years, a decade at most; the games themselves scratch, break, whatever.

You should take better care of your shit.

Defending your development choices on the basis that you've maximized the game's longterm value is silly economics, then; it's also a shoddy way to treat your fanbase, insofar as you're basically discounting their interests so as to benefit future, as-of-yet-nonexistant players. Consider this scenario: Developer says that it is making its game graphically "scaleable" such that it will improve as hardware improves. Developer concedes that this results in suboptimal framerates on current systems because the game isn't tailored to current hardware. Nevertheless, Developer justifies the game's poor performance on the basis that "in the future, it will still look good." Surely we would say that was obnoxious.

I don't find anthing obnoxiuos about designing a game that can improve in any way with increased processing power. Your statement is even more stupid because the range of "current" systems is indestinguishable from the range of average systems over 5 years. You can't build a game to cover today's current systems without accomidating future systems for most people out there.

So, if good graphics now (despite their fading nature) would make for a better game now than good gameplay now

Then you've designed a fucking shitty game and need to change careers to special effects rendering.

The point that "great gameplay always stays great" is sort of true. It's true in the same sense that great graphics always stay great ... genre.

Gameplay is not immune to the passage of time. However, at least for this crowd, we go back and play old games largely for the gameplay, sometimes for the nostalgia, but very rarely if ever to bask in the graphics. In fact many gameplay problems in older games are there because graphics were such shit back then and really hampered UI.

It's true that games that were innovative still seem remarkable, but they aren't necessarily as fun to play as they once were.

I'll also add that the games where the gameplay seems to have stood the test of time also tend to be the ones where the graphics still look good. (This may be less true on the RPG side.)

Well I don't think any of them still look good. But the ones where the graphics are so horrible I get a headache trying to read my parties's names certainly make for worse gamplay.

 

[kingcomrade]

Doom was brilliant and remains solid, but the gameplay is weak compared to what you find in current FPS games (especially on the multiplayer side).

I'll agree with the multiplayer bit, but single player has a leg up on pretty much every single other single player FPS game I've ever played. It's the only single-player FPS I play on a regular basis and I'm a big fan of FPS games. The level design was superb (you weren't moving from one scripted hallway to the next, there was a lot of freedom of movement even as you had to find keycards in a certain order, a game mechanic which so many people hate for some reason, possibly simply because it is popular to hate), but most importantly the combat was elegant. Today's FPS games are terrible when it comes to combat. In too many games, the enemies have hitscan weapons that they fire instantaneously. In too many games, you have this retarded expanding circle to represent recoil (or even worse, guns that just plain don't shoot straight so much that it is easier to hit someone if you put your aimer beside them rather than on them). In too many games, your avatar is just plain too fucking slow. My biggest frustration in FPS games is with character speed, a frustration that I don't recall ever having with DOOM.

The FPS genre is a twitch genre, which is all about reflexes and acadish mental geometry. Putting in enemies who basically hit you on digital die roll (i.e. unavoidable, unlike the zombies in Doom, who took a second after aiming to fire), unintuitive weapons, and a slow avatar just makes you feel like you aren't in control. If anyone can recommend me a game that they think is better than Doom I'd be happy to shoot them down.

If you replicated Doom with today's top-end graphics, I'm sure it would be well-received, but I'm also sure that most people wouldn't find its gameplay "great." I could go through this for standout games in every genre.

Who finds modern FPS games to have "great" gameplay? They all seem pretty gimmicky to me.

 

[WouldBeCreator]

@ headache: To paraphrase Twain, it can take more time to make a lowpoly model than it takes to make a highpoly one because maximizing efficiency can itself be time-consuming. That's why the polygon count on amateur work tends to be so (unnecessarily) high. Also, a lot of the ways in which polygon counts are getting pushed up these days are basically on the procedural side (i.e., not hand-crafted). Using faces generated by FaceGen isn't more labor intensive than making your own lower poly faces, etc. I can't give you hard numbers, but I think it's just a mistake to say, "More polygons = more work." (Does it take twice as long to use twice as large a palette or to write music with a larger audiobank?) I agree with the general proposition, though, that game art is more expensive now than it was in the past (at least the distant past; say 1980's), but with outsourcing and procedural stuff, I'm not sure that it's more expensive than it was, say, six or seven years ago.

@ obediah: I don't see the point in trying to differentiate between graphics and art. It's clear that what Atlus meant was, "Games that play great still play great in the future, but games that look great don't look great in the future." That's simply wrong. I'm going to assume that the rest of your post was just trolling and not take the time to slice-and-dice through it. If you'd like, you can imagine that my response would have been a collosal failure and consider yourself a winner.

@ kc: It's a matter of taste, I suppose. I don't play FPS games enough to be able to make a strong argument, but to my taste Doom's lack of jumping and 2D aiming system, while elegant, makes the game feel pretty stiff compared to current titles. Also, there is a certain sameness to the encounters throughout the game. That said, it's held up remarkably well (especially compared to, say, Wolfenstein 3D or Heretic or Rise of the Triad, etc.). I loved it when it came out and still find it playable now. But I think that the average player prefers the scripted style of gameplay in Call of Duty type games and the rich physics of Half-Life.

 

[obediah]

@ obediah: I don't see the point in trying to differentiate between graphics and art. It's clear that what Atlus meant was, "Games that play great still play great in the future, but games that look great don't look great in the future." That's simply wrong. I'm going to assume that the rest of your post was just trolling and not take the time to slice-and-dice through it. If you'd like, you can imagine that my response would have been a collosal failure and consider yourself a winner.

I guess because they are different isn't enough? How about for the same reason we don't decide how good a painting is purely on how photorealistic it is?

It's clear you don't have a clue what Atlus meant. They specifically state using a different 3D engine to make the game "prettier", not hiring better artists or taking more time to express the world they've imagined. He's talking about squeezing X more plygons in, or frapplemapping. And he's right, in 5 years he'll have a pathetic number of polygons and everyone will have abandonded frapplemapping for giz-junk-and-hower map-bip-mopping.

 

[WouldBeCreator]

Tell me which of these definitions of "graphics" you think excludes the artistry involved:

1. A work of graphic art.
2. A pictorial device used for illustration, as in a lecture.
3. A graphic display generated by a computer or an imaging device.

A graphic is a visual depiction. A thing. It is not a concept -- like "photorealism" -- or a method -- like "frapplemapping." When you say, "Good graphics will become bad graphics" that means "What looks good now will not look good later." (As is clear by his use of "pretty" to describe graphics; not, say, "technically adept" or even "impressive.")

Maybe to you a game's "graphics" means the technical aspects underlying what the player sees on the screen. But that's not standard English. Standard English means that graphics are what the player sees on the screen. And what you see when you play Freespace II or Super Mario World or Symphony of the Night or Sacrifice or Grim Fandango still looks fantastic. They will all still look fantastic ten years from now.

 

[denizsi]

(not in that way! well, I guess in that way)

I love it when they are pretty in that way

@ obediah: I don't see the point in trying to differentiate between graphics and art. It's clear that what Atlus meant was, "Games that play great still play great in the future, but games that look great don't look great in the future." That's simply wrong.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean there. Is it that, regardless of the gameplay and especially artistic style, good graphics is good graphics and will always stay so to the eye? If so, then I think that you are mistaking artistic style for graphics.

Artistic style is a specific use of the available technics that no matter how old it gets, it retains a character and a certain appeal to some people. You think some specific 10-20 year old titles look great because the way they established certain things has personality and it invokes some feelings in you. For an honest and objective comparison, you'd have to play a few dozens of equally old games with equally old graphics and still say "they all look as great as Super Mario's". So I think there is all the difference between graphics and art.

 

[Sirbolt]

Stop talking out of your ass WouldBeCreator, graphics has absolutely nothing to do with artistic merit. Or does the original Unreal still look beautiful to you? It had, for it's time, simply amazing graphics, but now it is surpassed in almost every regard by any run of the mill shooter. The same applies to Doom and any FPS you'd like to mention. Freespace 2, while certainly attractive in it's day doesn't hold a candle to Eve. You seem to see things through a veil of nostalgia.

 

[WouldBeCreator]

@ Sirbolt: Freespace II still looks fantastic to me. I just replayed it recently. I haven't played Eve and I certainly agree that it's possible that it's possible that a space game could look better. But I don't think that Freespace's graphics have "devolved into 'poor' graphics" by any measure. (http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/f ... otId,4964/)

Again, I just don't understand how you can say "graphics has [sic] absolutely nothing to do with artistic merit." That's like saying "paintings have nothing to do with artistic merit." The graphics are the art. When someone says, "Freespace II has great graphics" they don't mean "The number of polygons that Freespace II pushes onto the screen is impressively high." They mean that the game looks good. Unless you think that no artistic skill goes into making graphics look good, it's nonsensical to say that artistic merit has nothing to do with graphics.

@ denisizi -- I'm not sure what *you're* saying, so I'm guessing there's just a communications gap. All I'm saying is that some games that looked good at time T-10 still look good at time T and will still look good at time T+10. Yoshi's Island looked great in 1995. It looked great in 2005. I am quite confident that it will still look great in 2015. Part of the reason why is that it utilized the extent of the SNES's palette and sprite effects. If Nintendo had said, "Why bother having a larger palette than the NES? Why bother allowing for sprite resizing and rotation? Whatever graphics we do now will be dated ten years from now!" then Yoshi's Island wouldn't have looked as good then and might not have wound up with the kind of enduring graphics (art!) that it has.

Art can be separated from game graphics in a sense, which is that game graphics are basically art expressed through technology. (The same is true of paintings or mosaics or architecture or sculpture or pottery or any other form of visual art, although the technologies involved there were not electronic.) That is true of gameplay too, which is design expressed through technology. But if the art or design is fantastic and is fully expressed (or very adequately expressed) through older technology, then improvements in technology will not "tarnish" the art. That's why gothic cathedrals still seem magnificent to us even though we can build much more technically advanced structures that soar much higher without the need of buttresses; it's why Renaissance paintings are still considered magnificent even though we have better paints, better mastery of human form, and so forth.

 

[Sirbolt]

WouldBeCreator;
Freespace was ahead of its time, while it doesn't look terribly dated today, give it ten years and it will. It's doubful that anyone unfamiliar with the game would see it's graphics in the same light as we do though.

No that is, in this case, like saying that the canvas and paint which an artist utilises has absolutely nothing to do with artistic merit. You can have "great" graphics that will age extremely poorly because the art-direction was shoddy or bound to the times. "Lens flare is in, lets throw in as much as we can! Ooooh, pretty!" In the case of FPS-games that focus on realism above all, they will ALWAYS look dated as newfangled ways of drawing the same things are invented.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

what types of choices do you get to make in the game?

 

[WouldBeCreator]

Sirbolt: You seem to have shifted to my position.

To be sure, some technical limitations will always get pushed back but that only means that for graphics that were impressive *tech demonstrations* there will be a fairly short shelf life.

However, you seem to be persisting in the bizarre view that graphics are "the canvas and paint." That's true, if by that you mean, "Graphics are like the painting once the paints have been put on the canvas." The monitor is the canvas and paint. The graphics engine is, I suppose, the brush (although the analogy is very imperfect). The *graphics* are the finished product.

If you ask a player what he sees when he plays a game, he would say, "I see the graphics." Out of curiosity, what word would you use to describe what he sees, since you seem to think it's *not* graphics . . . .?

If your point is that some graphics that once seemed great no longer do, I wholeheartedly agree. You may quibble over the Freespace II example, but it's hard to imagine Yoshi's Island ever looking "bad," unless one simply doesn't like the art direction. (Likewise SOTN.) I think the same thing is generally true of gameplay, though. Plently of people thought that Ultima III had great gameplay, or that King's Quest II had great gameplay, or that Warcraft had great gameplay. But all of those have proven to be markedly inferior to their successors, in the same way that Half Life II, as pretty as it looks now, will no doubt be outstripped by Half Life IV.

For older games, it's as often the gameplay elements (UI, saving method, content diversity) that kills them as it is the graphics.

 

[Sirbolt]

I don't think my position has shifted.

Do you seriously claim that a game can't have "great" graphics combined with forgetable art? That it can't have great art but then implement it poorly? Graphics, without the suffix of "good" or "bad", just ARE. It is the art that infuses the graphics with a value. The distinction here is that the word alone doesn't entail anything in particular. Art is evocative, graphics are not.

Preferably, if i ask a player what he sees while he is playing a game the answer would be "the vault dweller" or "my space ship" or whatever.

Graphics do not age very well, that is the whole point. While your examples are valid, they are the exception rather than the rule, and the only valid reason for them still being "pretty" today is because of the art direction and the way they took advantage of the limitations of the respective format and nothing else. Good art is always good art, regardless of it's age. "Good" graphics are not always "good" graphics.

 

[WouldBeCreator]

We are more or less in agreement, then. I agree that you can have good graphics that don't age well and that don't represent a lasting artistic achievement. I am not sure whether you can have good graphics that represent *no* artistic achievement, but that's a tangential point.

What Atlus's rep said was: "'Great' graphics always devolve into 'poor' graphics as tech improves, but great gameplay always stays great."

My response was: Re: Graphics -- "For graphics that were impressive as works of art, that issue doesn't arise, or at least going 'stale' doesn't do much hurt." Re: Gameplay --"[G]ameplay that *seems* good is often revealed to be lousy with the passage of time."

The rep said graphics always go bad, I said that in some cases they don't. The fact that in most cases they do doesn't contradict my point at all. In fact, the rep's point wasn't even that graphics *worsen* over time; his point was that they become "poor." I'm not sure that's true in most cases. Of games that were lauded for having really stand-out graphics, the only one that I can think of that looks really crappy now is Myst. (I'm sure there are plenty I'm forgetting.) I don't think Half Life II will ever seem to have "poor" graphics, though the graphics will certainly look less impressive when games are photorealistic.

My larger point is that it's silly to focus on the long-term appeal of a game. Make a game that looks good and is fun today. If you wind up hitting the right notes, it will look good and be fun ten years from now. But if not, who cares? I don't think games need to be high art to be worthwhile.

As for whether you've shifted your position, you, like the Atlus rep, staked out an absolute position: "[G]raphics ha[ve] absolutely nothing to do with artistic merit." Now you're saying: "It is the art that infuses the graphics with a value" and "While your examples are valid, they are the exception rather than the rule, and the only valid reason for them still being "pretty" today is because of the art direction . . . ." I would consider that a shift, but I'm sure there's some Codex linguistic game you can play to explain to me how it's not.

 

[Drakron]

what types of choices do you get to make in the game?

Well there is one that makes you go to the hero path or the villian path.

You can actually back down from the villian path and into the hero path at some points and there is a slight villian variantion on ending if you fail to win the leadership.

Beyond that I do not know, I hear that dialogue does change depending (meaning if you are a prick the people you are a prick to will not like you and dialogue changes) on what you previous selected but I am a PAL gamer and only get the chance to play this at around September.

 

[Zomg]

@ kc: It's a matter of taste, I suppose. I don't play FPS games enough to be able to make a strong argument, but to my taste Doom's lack of jumping and 2D aiming system, while elegant, makes the game feel pretty stiff compared to current titles.

The odds are good that KC plays Doom through the fanmade Doomsday engine (as I do) which can add jumping and 3D aiming (well, technically 2D, to the original version's 1D). Yeah, it's unfair to give Doom credit for that, but so's cancer.

One of the reasons for using Doom as a good example in these kabuki graffix discussions is that its entire design is totally out of the question for current generation games due to the path that graphics have led mainstream gameplay down. Many enemies on the screen at the same time? Out, the money has to show in those enemy models. Bullet running speeds? You'd have to render the environment too quickly. It's a crisp example where change isn't progress.

 

[Twinfalls]

WBC. Let's take this slowly. It's all about context.

The Atlus guy is specifically responding to gamer-magazine idiots. Read his comment:

Here's a typical quote from the "GRRLGAMER" review of Steambot: "... now that the Xbox 360 is pumping out next-generation graphics and the Playstation [sic] 3 is soon to follow suit, these kinds of flaws [in Steambot's engine] are that much more apparent and that much more distracting." So, Steambot's graphics are poor because it doesn't look like an Xbox 360 game? That's a ludicrous comparison--but it's guaranteed that a few other reviewers are thinking the same thing, even if they're not admitting it in print.

"Great" graphics always devolve into "poor" graphics as tech improves, but great gameplay always stays great; it saddens us that the majority of game reviewers don't seem to care.

When 'Grrlgamer' complains that a game doesn't have Xbox 360 graphics, it is talking about polygon count and shiny effects. In short, tech. Rather than any intrinsic or artistic merit.

Note how the Atlus guy says "great" graphics, and "poor" graphics - ie he uses inverted commas. This signifies he is referring to the mindset of the typical reviewer. It's clear that he probably thinks what is called 'poor' can be perfectly great and lasting, but for a lack of shiny effects and poly count.

So he is most definitely not talking about artistic merit, but the specifically stupid view that the mainstream press has of graphics, namely equating shininess with quality.