7 ms·

Graphical fidelity is ruining video games

44 points by davezatch 10y ago

galfarragem 10y ago
What the author really misses is the ingenuity he had when he started playing video games. Playing an old videogame now is not nearly as fun as it was when I was a kid so it can't be only a graphics issue. Without ingenuity a videogame will never be fun. How I wish I could play Dwarf Fortress when I was a kid. Now is too late for me. Ingenuity (and free time) had gone.
- grimoald 10y ago
  Yes! I have the theory that everybody likes the kind of games they grew up with. I started playing video games around ~2000 and I can't really enjoy these 2D platformers or simple 3D games like Doom. They just look too … ridiculous and unrealistic to me. Current games on the other hand are just needlessly shiny and … realistic to me.
Kristine1975 10y ago
Very interesting article. A few nitpicks however: I’m sure there were other true-3D games before it, but I challenge you to name one off the top of your head Descent was published in 1995, one year before Quake. And it was fully 3D, even moreso than Quake since you could rotate around all three axes. Before Quake, games couldn’t even simulate a two-story building, which ruled out most realistic architecture. The Build engine (used e.g. in Duke Nukem 3D) was capable of faking multi-story buildings with the creative use of teleporters.
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y ago
  I believe one of the earliest 3D games is Elite, from 1984. (Example of gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmCaNwBwXoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmCaNwBwXoQ) But I too didn’t know of it until very recently, when Elite: Dangerous came out. In my social environment, the Quake series was however very well known. I have the impression that Elite was more restricted to the British market.
- jameshart 10y ago
  There were 3D games with full environments even in the 8 bit era. Novagen Mercenary, released in 1985. Freescape games, beginning with Driller, from 1987.
- PopsiclePete 10y ago
  And my personal favorite - System Shock. You could actually look up/down on that, and it had .... drum roll....sloping surfaces! Come to think of it, Ultima Underworld was also pretty impressive
eggy 10y ago
Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer. Strange, but I have spent more time with If (interactive fiction) these past few years, and any games that have more 'artsy' or abstract visuals. Hell, I even like the demo Breakout clone on the Pythonista app more than realistic games. I was into viewing Machinima at one time, and I think there the realism works better than in games, although there were some really cool Machinima works done in a zany forced-perspective, or cartoon style that were fantastic. I think the point is that we have focused too much on high frame rates and realism, and drifted away from the creative, storytelling side. I think that's why the animated movies, like The Incredibles, or Despicable Me and Zootopia do well. They use the old animation tricks that don't actually mimic real physics, but our cultured sense of movement. I don't have much interest in the second wave of VR either; I am trying to continue to find awe in the real world around me, and would prefer to be in an immersive world of crazy Bugs Bunny and Jessica Rabbit!
- brobinson 10y ago
  >Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer. This comment is great since I don't think you're aware a major studio game called "DOOM" was just released in the last few weeks. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpxDFExwhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpxDFExwhU (it was renamed from Doom 4 to just DOOM since this demo was shown)
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  I don't think high frame rates are the problem. Quite a few old console games ran at 60 FPS, and a lot of newer games don't because the "realistic" graphics take too much time. Higher FPS are useful because they cut down on latency, so if a game requires quick reactions (e.g. a fighting game) high FPS are a must. I remember reading that a lot of Counterstrike players turn down the visual details in favor of higher frame rate, since the visual details do nothing for gameplay whereas the higher FPS does.
- animeweedlord 10y ago
  Much to my chagrin, modern games don't focus on high frame rates. 30 fps is the new standard, 60 fps if you're lucky, most PC ports of console games are locked to 30/60hz and require physics-borking hacks to lift the limit, and even the games that do support arbitrary framerates tend to have a target FPS designed into them, such that even a monster PC with all of the graphics settings turned down will frequently choke.
calferreira 10y ago
Well, games with high graphics and realism have cars that you cannot use and other things to give the sense of immersion. If your playing let's say GTA and the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird. What i think take from the article is that game development moved away from it's roots. Every game is for the eye candy instead of being fun, the only company that comes to my mind at the moment is nintendo. Yeah, things don't look too good for them at the moment, but one of the most popular games of all time has simple graphics and simple gameplay and it's fun. It's called Super Mario Bros.
- qrendel 10y ago
  I think it's more that the intent of games has been diverging for a long time, to the point where they are really several different art forms all getting lumped together under the category "games." The most obvious that come to mind: - interactive fiction, both movies (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls) and novels (To The Moon, MUDs) - simulators of various kinds (most FPSes are basically war simulators, or at least laser tag simulators, but also stuff like racing and flight sims) - pure gameplay (platformers, 4X games) - puzzles (Tetris, Bejeweled, The Witness) - others... Then those get combined in every imaginable way by the developers, yielding a huge spectrum of games so that it's very difficult to put most of them into a single category. At the edges they're still fundamentally different things. They're never going to evolve into a single Platonic ideal that can be called "games" (that was closest to being true back in the Atari days, where everything was fairly similar to Pitfall or Donkey Kong) - just keep diverging into different experiences (especially with VR coming around now), while still maintaining a continuous spectrum of different types that borrow from the best (and worst) parts of the purest genre forms. The extreme focus on high-end graphics and realism is mostly due to the influence of a few of those genres - simulators and interactive fiction. That's a huge portion of the market, so it seems like all games are just about graphics now, when that really isn't true.
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  > If your playing let's say GTA and the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird. I think that's one point of the article: Instead of creating a game not set in the real world where for some arbitrary, unexplained reason there are huge blocks everywhere, developers create games ostensibly set in reality where those same blocks look like buildings. Except that you expect to be able to enter these buildings (like in reality), so when you can't that breaks your immersion. So keep the blocks, but don't make them look like something that exists in reality, because then players will expect them to behave like the real thing.
Joof 10y ago
Would still recommend Halo. It has diversity in enemy types in a similar way to DOOM. Graphical fidelity prevents experimentation by making things too expensive to try. That's why we have indie games! Go play some! It's like Sundance, there is a bunch of crap and a bunch of incredible creativity.
- qrendel 10y ago
  Game Maker's Toolkit had a really good video on DOOM and enemy types not long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q The entire channel is golden, especially for those interested in game design or criticism.
cairo_x 10y ago
It seems like every time there's a new game I need a new goddamned computer. And then the game is like 90 bucks!? Where's the fun in that? They are games, not god damned niche specialty hobbies. Imagine if films, or music, or books were like that? It's ludicrous. I guess it's a different thing, but damn. Computing has managed to become affordable, while gaming has become a hobby for the middle-classes, like skiing, or yacht racing, or formula one. It's like a vomitorium of the senses, and a lot of it is not particularly inspiring.
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  >It seems like every time there's a new game I need a new goddamned computer That's what consoles are for :-) Edit: This isn't supposed to be a snarky "console masterrace" comment, but merely the observation that consoles have fixed specs and a life-cycle of five or more years where you can play current games without having to buy new hardware. (I don't even own any consoles, unless you count emulators.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nadya 10y ago
    Or future-proofing your PC by not buying low/mid end parts. Spending an extra $400 when building so you can keep the PC for 4-6+ years instead of 1-2 years. If you don't mind playing games on "low/mid" console-equivalent graphics this isn't even necessary except for the most poorly optimized games. Unless you want to be playing the newest games on max/ultra settings and expect 60+fps at all times you will not need to buy new hardware or even the highest-end hardware at anywhere near that rate. Unless you're buying a $350 Facebook-browsing machine to game on the lowest settings - you will not need to upgrade every 1-2 years to run games. You lack the option to play the newest games at max/ultra settings at 60+ fps on consoles. Because the options simply don't exist and you can't update the hardware to allow for it. You get 30fps and med/med-high graphics at best.
    - cairo_x 10y ago
granula 10y ago
This again?
kstenerud 10y ago
"I just don’t understand the game industry (and game culture)’s fanatical obsession with realistic graphics. They make games worse." I just don't understand talkies. They make movies worse. I just don't understand TV. It's worse than radio shows. I just don't understand 60fps filming. It just makes the props look fake. Every entertainment form has its visionaries, master craftsmen, and then the other 95% made up of crap (not to mention the industry learning curve as people discover what works and what doesn't). This has nothing to do with graphical fidelity. There were shit games on the Atari 2600, and there are shit games on the PS4. Good entertainment immerses you in the environment, such that you don't even think to question how things work. If it fails in that, the designers are doing something wrong.
- Tiksi 10y ago
  While I more or less agree with you, and there's nothing wrong with graphical fidelity in itself, I think the argument is more one of priorities. If you have 6 months to build a game, do you spend 3 on graphics and 3 on gameplay or do you spend 5 on graphics and 1 on gameplay. Personally, I have no insight into the game industry, so it's very possible that it's not a zero sum tradeoff, and crappy games would just be crappy games with crappy graphics if they focused on graphics less, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if gameplay was at least somewhat scarified for graphics.
  - mohaine 10y ago
    The argument is NOT one of priorities. It is that if you go for too much realism, then you have have to start making things real instead of fun. Example from the article: Run speed in Doom is stupid high which is fun and seems normal, but would look silly and off-putting in a photorealist game.
- saidajigumi 10y ago
  I can't help but feel you didn't read past the headline. You've just about entirely missed eevee's point as elaborated in that essay: that earlier generations of games with a lot less graphical and detail oomph achieved your stated goal better: Good entertainment immerses you in the environment [...] Most of the article is spent in trying to explain this observation and get underneath it in a nuanced way. There's a lot of good observations in there. It's worth noting that major figures in the gaming world are making big stakes on this very premise[1]: "The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct Final Fantasy 7 from the ground up with the current technology," Kitase wrote. "Producing a proper HD remake of Final Fantasy 7 that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one installment." That's exactly what Square Enix is doing with the forthcoming FF7 remake, installments. A big part of eevee's criticism might be summed as "graphical density is a poor substitute for environmental, interactive density". I've played too many recent-era games whose gameplay felt straightjacketed and linear, their gorgeous eye-candy environments managing to be disappointingly boring. In the worst cases, the gameplay worked hard against ever looking at and appreciating the highly detailed environment. What an enormous waste! [1] http://www.gamesradar.com/final-fantasy-7-remake-too-big-one-game/ http://www.gamesradar.com/final-fantasy-7-remake-too-big-one...
rajahafify 10y ago
The problem is not the fanatical obsession with realistic graphics. It's the lack of fanatical obsession with unrealistic graphics or whatever else you care about. Everyone is free to do whatever you want nobody stopping anyone to do anything. Build your game and let gamers vote with their money.
aphextron 10y ago
This is spot on. I recently played through Doom again in OpenGL mode with the Project Brutality mod, and it was better than any FPS I've played in years.
georgeecollins 10y ago
One of the reasons why Minecraft is so revolutionary is that because it was an indy game, it could peg its graphical fidelity to same crude level as the simulation. The whole world is WYSIWYG in a way that high graphical fidelity FPS games aren't. High res games are showing you all sorts of details that can't be simulated in any detail. A commercial game would never have been made with such blocky graphics and low resolution textures, because they would be scared to market such a clunky looking game. But the clunky-ness of the graphics enables the fidelity between the look and the simulation. The irony is it is so successful it made low res graphics a style.
touristtam 10y ago
So the author is discovering this about the video game industry right now? This has been apparent for anyone to see, if you cared to, for the last 10 years at least.

44 points by davezatch 10y ago

What the author really misses is the ingenuity he had when he started playing video games. Playing an old videogame now is not nearly as fun as it was when I was a kid so it can't be only a graphics issue. Without ingenuity a videogame will never be fun. How I wish I could play Dwarf Fortress when I was a kid. Now is too late for me. Ingenuity (and free time) had gone.

grimoald 10y ago
Yes! I have the theory that everybody likes the kind of games they grew up with. I started playing video games around ~2000 and I can't really enjoy these 2D platformers or simple 3D games like Doom. They just look too … ridiculous and unrealistic to me. Current games on the other hand are just needlessly shiny and … realistic to me.

Kristine1975 10y ago

Very interesting article. A few nitpicks however: I’m sure there were other true-3D games before it, but I challenge you to name one off the top of your head Descent was published in 1995, one year before Quake. And it was fully 3D, even moreso than Quake since you could rotate around all three axes. Before Quake, games couldn’t even simulate a two-story building, which ruled out most realistic architecture. The Build engine (used e.g. in Duke Nukem 3D) was capable of faking multi-story buildings with the creative use of teleporters.

pYQAJ6Zm 10y ago
I believe one of the earliest 3D games is Elite, from 1984. (Example of gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmCaNwBwXoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmCaNwBwXoQ) But I too didn’t know of it until very recently, when Elite: Dangerous came out. In my social environment, the Quake series was however very well known. I have the impression that Elite was more restricted to the British market.
jameshart 10y ago
There were 3D games with full environments even in the 8 bit era. Novagen Mercenary, released in 1985. Freescape games, beginning with Driller, from 1987.
PopsiclePete 10y ago
And my personal favorite - System Shock. You could actually look up/down on that, and it had .... drum roll....sloping surfaces! Come to think of it, Ultima Underworld was also pretty impressive

eggy 10y ago

Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer. Strange, but I have spent more time with If (interactive fiction) these past few years, and any games that have more 'artsy' or abstract visuals. Hell, I even like the demo Breakout clone on the Pythonista app more than realistic games. I was into viewing Machinima at one time, and I think there the realism works better than in games, although there were some really cool Machinima works done in a zany forced-perspective, or cartoon style that were fantastic. I think the point is that we have focused too much on high frame rates and realism, and drifted away from the creative, storytelling side. I think that's why the animated movies, like The Incredibles, or Despicable Me and Zootopia do well. They use the old animation tricks that don't actually mimic real physics, but our cultured sense of movement. I don't have much interest in the second wave of VR either; I am trying to continue to find awe in the real world around me, and would prefer to be in an immersive world of crazy Bugs Bunny and Jessica Rabbit!

brobinson 10y ago
>Doom was the last video game I played regularly. Obviously, I am not a gamer. This comment is great since I don't think you're aware a major studio game called "DOOM" was just released in the last few weeks. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpxDFExwhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpxDFExwhU (it was renamed from Doom 4 to just DOOM since this demo was shown)
Kristine1975 10y ago
I don't think high frame rates are the problem. Quite a few old console games ran at 60 FPS, and a lot of newer games don't because the "realistic" graphics take too much time. Higher FPS are useful because they cut down on latency, so if a game requires quick reactions (e.g. a fighting game) high FPS are a must. I remember reading that a lot of Counterstrike players turn down the visual details in favor of higher frame rate, since the visual details do nothing for gameplay whereas the higher FPS does.
animeweedlord 10y ago
Much to my chagrin, modern games don't focus on high frame rates. 30 fps is the new standard, 60 fps if you're lucky, most PC ports of console games are locked to 30/60hz and require physics-borking hacks to lift the limit, and even the games that do support arbitrary framerates tend to have a target FPS designed into them, such that even a monster PC with all of the graphics settings turned down will frequently choke.

calferreira 10y ago

Well, games with high graphics and realism have cars that you cannot use and other things to give the sense of immersion. If your playing let's say GTA and the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird. What i think take from the article is that game development moved away from it's roots. Every game is for the eye candy instead of being fun, the only company that comes to my mind at the moment is nintendo. Yeah, things don't look too good for them at the moment, but one of the most popular games of all time has simple graphics and simple gameplay and it's fun. It's called Super Mario Bros.

qrendel 10y ago
I think it's more that the intent of games has been diverging for a long time, to the point where they are really several different art forms all getting lumped together under the category "games." The most obvious that come to mind: - interactive fiction, both movies (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls) and novels (To The Moon, MUDs) - simulators of various kinds (most FPSes are basically war simulators, or at least laser tag simulators, but also stuff like racing and flight sims) - pure gameplay (platformers, 4X games) - puzzles (Tetris, Bejeweled, The Witness) - others... Then those get combined in every imaginable way by the developers, yielding a huge spectrum of games so that it's very difficult to put most of them into a single category. At the edges they're still fundamentally different things. They're never going to evolve into a single Platonic ideal that can be called "games" (that was closest to being true back in the Atari days, where everything was fairly similar to Pitfall or Donkey Kong) - just keep diverging into different experiences (especially with VR coming around now), while still maintaining a continuous spectrum of different types that borrow from the best (and worst) parts of the purest genre forms. The extreme focus on high-end graphics and realism is mostly due to the influence of a few of those genres - simulators and interactive fiction. That's a huge portion of the market, so it seems like all games are just about graphics now, when that really isn't true.
Kristine1975 10y ago
> If your playing let's say GTA and the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird. I think that's one point of the article: Instead of creating a game not set in the real world where for some arbitrary, unexplained reason there are huge blocks everywhere, developers create games ostensibly set in reality where those same blocks look like buildings. Except that you expect to be able to enter these buildings (like in reality), so when you can't that breaks your immersion. So keep the blocks, but don't make them look like something that exists in reality, because then players will expect them to behave like the real thing.

Joof 10y ago

Would still recommend Halo. It has diversity in enemy types in a similar way to DOOM. Graphical fidelity prevents experimentation by making things too expensive to try. That's why we have indie games! Go play some! It's like Sundance, there is a bunch of crap and a bunch of incredible creativity.

qrendel 10y ago
Game Maker's Toolkit had a really good video on DOOM and enemy types not long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q The entire channel is golden, especially for those interested in game design or criticism.

cairo_x 10y ago

It seems like every time there's a new game I need a new goddamned computer. And then the game is like 90 bucks!? Where's the fun in that? They are games, not god damned niche specialty hobbies. Imagine if films, or music, or books were like that? It's ludicrous. I guess it's a different thing, but damn. Computing has managed to become affordable, while gaming has become a hobby for the middle-classes, like skiing, or yacht racing, or formula one. It's like a vomitorium of the senses, and a lot of it is not particularly inspiring.

Kristine1975 10y ago
>It seems like every time there's a new game I need a new goddamned computer That's what consoles are for :-) Edit: This isn't supposed to be a snarky "console masterrace" comment, but merely the observation that consoles have fixed specs and a life-cycle of five or more years where you can play current games without having to buy new hardware. (I don't even own any consoles, unless you count emulators.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Nadya 10y ago
  Or future-proofing your PC by not buying low/mid end parts. Spending an extra $400 when building so you can keep the PC for 4-6+ years instead of 1-2 years. If you don't mind playing games on "low/mid" console-equivalent graphics this isn't even necessary except for the most poorly optimized games. Unless you want to be playing the newest games on max/ultra settings and expect 60+fps at all times you will not need to buy new hardware or even the highest-end hardware at anywhere near that rate. Unless you're buying a $350 Facebook-browsing machine to game on the lowest settings - you will not need to upgrade every 1-2 years to run games. You lack the option to play the newest games at max/ultra settings at 60+ fps on consoles. Because the options simply don't exist and you can't update the hardware to allow for it. You get 30fps and med/med-high graphics at best.
  - cairo_x 10y ago

granula 10y ago

This again?

kstenerud 10y ago

"I just don’t understand the game industry (and game culture)’s fanatical obsession with realistic graphics. They make games worse." I just don't understand talkies. They make movies worse. I just don't understand TV. It's worse than radio shows. I just don't understand 60fps filming. It just makes the props look fake. Every entertainment form has its visionaries, master craftsmen, and then the other 95% made up of crap (not to mention the industry learning curve as people discover what works and what doesn't). This has nothing to do with graphical fidelity. There were shit games on the Atari 2600, and there are shit games on the PS4. Good entertainment immerses you in the environment, such that you don't even think to question how things work. If it fails in that, the designers are doing something wrong.

Tiksi 10y ago
While I more or less agree with you, and there's nothing wrong with graphical fidelity in itself, I think the argument is more one of priorities. If you have 6 months to build a game, do you spend 3 on graphics and 3 on gameplay or do you spend 5 on graphics and 1 on gameplay. Personally, I have no insight into the game industry, so it's very possible that it's not a zero sum tradeoff, and crappy games would just be crappy games with crappy graphics if they focused on graphics less, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if gameplay was at least somewhat scarified for graphics.
- mohaine 10y ago
  The argument is NOT one of priorities. It is that if you go for too much realism, then you have have to start making things real instead of fun. Example from the article: Run speed in Doom is stupid high which is fun and seems normal, but would look silly and off-putting in a photorealist game.
saidajigumi 10y ago
I can't help but feel you didn't read past the headline. You've just about entirely missed eevee's point as elaborated in that essay: that earlier generations of games with a lot less graphical and detail oomph achieved your stated goal better: Good entertainment immerses you in the environment [...] Most of the article is spent in trying to explain this observation and get underneath it in a nuanced way. There's a lot of good observations in there. It's worth noting that major figures in the gaming world are making big stakes on this very premise[1]: "The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct Final Fantasy 7 from the ground up with the current technology," Kitase wrote. "Producing a proper HD remake of Final Fantasy 7 that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one installment." That's exactly what Square Enix is doing with the forthcoming FF7 remake, installments. A big part of eevee's criticism might be summed as "graphical density is a poor substitute for environmental, interactive density". I've played too many recent-era games whose gameplay felt straightjacketed and linear, their gorgeous eye-candy environments managing to be disappointingly boring. In the worst cases, the gameplay worked hard against ever looking at and appreciating the highly detailed environment. What an enormous waste! [1] http://www.gamesradar.com/final-fantasy-7-remake-too-big-one-game/ http://www.gamesradar.com/final-fantasy-7-remake-too-big-one...

rajahafify 10y ago

The problem is not the fanatical obsession with realistic graphics. It's the lack of fanatical obsession with unrealistic graphics or whatever else you care about. Everyone is free to do whatever you want nobody stopping anyone to do anything. Build your game and let gamers vote with their money.

aphextron 10y ago

This is spot on. I recently played through Doom again in OpenGL mode with the Project Brutality mod, and it was better than any FPS I've played in years.

georgeecollins 10y ago

One of the reasons why Minecraft is so revolutionary is that because it was an indy game, it could peg its graphical fidelity to same crude level as the simulation. The whole world is WYSIWYG in a way that high graphical fidelity FPS games aren't. High res games are showing you all sorts of details that can't be simulated in any detail. A commercial game would never have been made with such blocky graphics and low resolution textures, because they would be scared to market such a clunky looking game. But the clunky-ness of the graphics enables the fidelity between the look and the simulation. The irony is it is so successful it made low res graphics a style.

touristtam 10y ago

So the author is discovering this about the video game industry right now? This has been apparent for anyone to see, if you cared to, for the last 10 years at least.