That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.
back
5 comments
I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday:
https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining...
Probably to coincide with the anniversary.
It was/is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444
Oddly one of the more interesting quake 2 mods i played around with was Brazen. It made the Quake 2 weapons have realistic ammo management and carrying capacity.
The most intriguing part was perhaps that you could transfer ammo between magazines, and empty ones was thrown into the game world.
The developer would go on to make a variant of this that was compatible with Action Quake, with a bit of Matrix influence thrown in (you could climb buildings by "wall jumping").
That's a great article that really articulates some of the feelings I'd had towards modern games, especially FPSs.
I've been really enjoying Minecraft lately because it bucks that trend for all of the right reasons.
All of its graphical simplicity both helps make the game world more modifiable, and encourages users to use their imagination to interpret the world, just like simple LEGO blocks do.
I know what you mean, but as someone who works on rendering tech (for CG not for games, but games are more and more using the same tech), I would like to clarify something. You do want realism in your graphics. You want realism in the way light is calculated, you want realism in the way materials interact, in short you want fully physically modelled materials. Watch Disney animated movies (or really any high-budget animated movie), notice that no matter how stylised it gets, the lighting is always as realistic as possible, or if the visuals are really trippy, still grounded in the usual physics, it's just the materials and geometry that get twisted in fun ways. Humans have a really good feel for lighting, so you want that to be top-notch. Now that we've practically achieved real-time physically-based lighting calculations, I'm seeing lots of games opt for a less realistic style of materials. I think the oppressive drive towards realism was a necessary step to build the tech that will allow for real artistry. You can cheat and take shortcuts as much as you want, but there is no substitute for having a real solid base for lighting and I'm pretty excited to see what will come out in the coming years.
And then we got WoW and now things are tilting back towards cartoons...
Yeah, but that's still progress in a way, progress away from the false goal of unconditional realism. Cartoons are generally cheaper, which means we can have more things, and also has more useful design space. Something like TF2-style "all characters must have distinctive silhouettes" is much harder if you're also trying to do total realism, because you end up so much more constrained with where the distinctiveness can be. (Color? No, nobody's running around on the battlefield in bright red. Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. A lot of guns look a lot like other guns. etc.)
Here's a presentation by Valve about the visual design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust...
And here's the paper for it: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_Illu...
It is not even just about the cost to produce. Realist games sacrifice gameplay itself, because if you are on the bleeding edge of fidelity you cannot have a lot of useful gamey aspects (speed, object density, environment complexity, etc). You can put more non-interactive polygons on the screen but only in exchange for gameplay quality.
Amen. I recently tried playing a MMORPG that seems to throw a insane polygon count at the player models (boob physics galore). End result is that my computer screams for mercy any time i set foot in a spawn zone.
I think there's room for both, and it's not that limiting. An Uncharted 4 looks amazing and has all the elements you describe, but is obviously a lot harder to implement than an Overwatch (which is great looking in a cartoon fashion, with vibrant colours etc.)
> Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair.
Clearly you've never played TF2.
Read harder.
Whoops. Too bad it's too late to delete now.
Things run faster when not realistic and are cheaper to produce (Normally)
I personally prefer the art style approach over trying to make it realistic/technical approach by making realistic representation as if it was real life. TF 2 > Crisis
This is a BIG why the Indie Game movemnet
It's not just the graphics, it was gameplay too. Take a COD game and contrast that to a quake 3 1v1. No comparison.
Of course, IMAO.