Mon Apr 19, 2004 11:56 pm
photo-realism should be a secondary concern to gameplay and especially AI. Why do you replay old games from the past, even though graphically they're fonk? Why is HL still being played to death and modded constantly? How many games have you played that looked great but were in fact at best mediocre and at worst cr*p? I like graphical realism, but if it's a choice between that and some clever AI with a gameplay challenge, I'll take the latter. Operation Flashpoint looks like cr*p, but has sublime AI and is a wonderful convincing battlefield experience, and tbh is so absorbing that you actually forget about the graphic being foul, and are actually just good enough.
Get good graphics, sensible AI, and well thought out levels, and you've got a winner; but I'll pass on the graphics if I had to. I'll never buy a game on the basis that "it's got great graphics" Bionicle has great graphics but I won't be playing that.
As far as realistic physics is concerned, well soldier sims have had this feature for a long time. In fact it raises an interesting conflict with graphics renedering. If you want to shoot a bullet a long way in a vidgame, how is the space defined in which it will travel? Are you going to have one big open space in which a ballistic arc can be calculated, or are you going to accept the limitations of distance fog tables and allow the projectile to disappear into the background renedering? This was the problem with the first DF, the Voxelpsace engine allowed for a huge gameply area and you coulkd shoot 1500m+ with a Barret, but the engine was a s slow as f*** and looked cr*p. Eventually they replaced it with a faster fog tabled graphics engine, but the lovely open gameplay had gone
And other than for hard core soldier simmers (like me) for most games where the action is up-close-and-personal, you don't need realistic bullet falls and the like.
Edited by - Tawakalna on 4/20/2004 1:33:23 AM
Get good graphics, sensible AI, and well thought out levels, and you've got a winner; but I'll pass on the graphics if I had to. I'll never buy a game on the basis that "it's got great graphics" Bionicle has great graphics but I won't be playing that.
As far as realistic physics is concerned, well soldier sims have had this feature for a long time. In fact it raises an interesting conflict with graphics renedering. If you want to shoot a bullet a long way in a vidgame, how is the space defined in which it will travel? Are you going to have one big open space in which a ballistic arc can be calculated, or are you going to accept the limitations of distance fog tables and allow the projectile to disappear into the background renedering? This was the problem with the first DF, the Voxelpsace engine allowed for a huge gameply area and you coulkd shoot 1500m+ with a Barret, but the engine was a s slow as f*** and looked cr*p. Eventually they replaced it with a faster fog tabled graphics engine, but the lovely open gameplay had gone
And other than for hard core soldier simmers (like me) for most games where the action is up-close-and-personal, you don't need realistic bullet falls and the like.
Edited by - Tawakalna on 4/20/2004 1:33:23 AM