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Gaming and Cinema Modern Gaming I Miss the Graphics of Yesterday's Games
Gaming and Cinema Modern Gaming I Miss the Graphics of Yesterday's Games
| I Miss the Graphics of Yesterday's Games |
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| Tuesday, 02 March 2010 01:08 |
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Before you ask, no I’m not feeling nostalgic right now! I am not referring to the 8-bit graphics of Castlevania. The look of early 3D video games through the early 2000s is what I am referring to. Modern games have reached a point to where they look like forged photographs. As we near perfection the little things start to bother us, the simple things that make the shot look canny. This ultimately kills the immersion. In the past everything required a stretch of imagination. We could pick apart the large pixels and polygons and imagine what was really there in far greater detail.
As true photorealism draws near less and less imagination is needed to enhance the immersion. This is both good and bad. The good part is that things look the way they are supposed to look and enhance the immersion to an extent. At the same note the lack of required imagination further reminds that you are playing a game, not experiencing a whole new world. It is no longer the scene itself that reminds you, it is the slightly cartoony colors of the peoples’ faces, an animation that is slightly off, a special effect that seems underplayed, the little things that previously did not matter when everything was already far from realistic. Playing an old first person shooter can easily make you laugh as you stare at what use to be state of the art graphics, but have you ever stopped to wonder why they once looked so real? Why you were once so immersed in the world? A good plot and aesthetics always help, which leads your mind to fill in what cannot be drawn in detail. Shades of gray pixels painted over a handful of polygons would become a car engine, a dozen different green pixels in a sprite became a real keycard, and those strippers in Duke Nukem, well our imaginations probably went wild there. It was like we were children again playing pretend, only this time the world was already created. All we had to do was experience it. Now that car engine is carefully sculpted to match its real life counterpart, that keycard is now sports a bump map, and those strippers look far more convincing. But all these details require far more time and effort to pull off. Corners are cut, they have to be! Not all aspects of the world get the same amount of attention; just the main things the developers know you will be focused on. So here and there little hiccups will catch your eye and blow apart the world you just got sucked into. For example it bugs the hell out of me that I cannot see through the scopes in Kill Zone 2 until they are right over your eye. That is not how it works in real life! Yet I understand from a developer’s perspective why this is done, but it still breaks the immersion. Little hiccups like these are invisible in older games, because everything looks just as bad! Remember how in old games when level details would be drawn right onto the walls, like the urinals in Duke Nukem? In every room you went into you would have to stop and analyze the sea of pixels, then everything would fall into place and you would see what was really there. It was fun when my friends and I would be hunched over a CRT monitor trying to figure out what the artists drew on the wall. We would then all laugh when we realized those six pixels represented a thermostat, but then every time we saw those six pixels we would see a thermostat. The worst part of current “near photorealistic” games took me a while to figure out. My younger sister finally pointed it out to me when my family was playing the recently released Bioshock 2. She asked after the opening sequence “Is the rest of the game a cartoon like this?” I almost responded, “What are you talking about? This looks damned near real!” But then it hit me. While the levels themselves were fairly realistic the people that populated them look like ridiculously over detailed cartoons! And that is how people look in every game! I am never convinced that I am staring at a human face, whereas is the past I was. When I saw the “artistic overhaul” that the developers of Borderlands showed off a while ago, I was pretty mad that they threw away the look as well as the dark and serious tone of the game. Seeing it now though, it looks… right. It just looks like they took state of models and simply added outlines to the features, but it looks the way it should look. While the fact that the game does not take itself seriously would really kill the immersion for me, a lighthearted tone has never destroyed the intensity in an FPS. It is this intensity that always draws me in, so I could perhaps get drawn into the world. To top it off since it is supposed to look like a cartoon, where can the visuals disrupt the immersion? I got to say bravo to the creators of Borderlands for solving my biggest issue with modern graphics, though I should not give too much praise as I have yet to play the game. If it were up to me, the look of games would have never evolved past Volition’s Red Faction and I would have built on the interactive environments of Duke Nukem. I do not want an interactive environment like in Crysis. The interactivity of an object should not be limited to it being a dynamic physics entity. If I see a payphone on the wall I should be able to pick it up and start dialing numbers. These days it seems like gamers are more content with realism over interactivity, so that phone becomes either decoration or something to blowup. That is how all levels seem like today, decoration! Yes, the decoration is vital to the aesthetics of the world, but for reasons previously stated these aesthetics now just as easily break apart the world we are trying to dive into. As proof I am not feeling nostalgic I recently started playing a PC game called Mount & Blade. It was made by a small independent developer and it does look like a game made eight years ago, yet I find it far more immersive than any RPG or FPS I have recently played. Why? Well the gameplay mechanics are in fact based out of real life, but could the rather dated graphics have something to do with it? I have more recently turned all the graphic sliders down in that game to maximize the frame rate, and I do not feel bad at all about doing that. The game sucks me in all on its own, and perhaps I am once again using my childlike imagination to create the state of the art graphics. I am not wishing that we downgrade our games’ visuals. In fact I am looking forward to the day we achieve true photorealism! The day we achieve that is the day we can truly thrust our minds into another world like no other form of media can! It will be the day that games provide a true source of escapism from the burdens of life. This in between period though, is dismal, but we do not have to suffer from the current technological state as people are still making mods for Quake and Unreal Tournament 2004. Looking deeper into it though, the dawn of photorealism may in fact be a realization, rather than a technical achievement.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 02 March 2010 13:49 |
