You know, an entire genre basically died because people were too obsessed with graphics. I'm referring, of course, to the adventure game genre. Let's look at this fallen game style and its evolution, shall we?
The adventure game was the first form of video game to ever hit personal computers, in the form of text-based parsers. They weren't always intuitive at first, but they let people live out fantastic adventures in their heads. No graphics necessary or available; writing talent and intuitive puzzle-making determined how well the games did.
Eventually we started getting some minor graphics in text adventure games, and then somebody went and made a text adventure game that used full-fledged graphics for all environments. You moved around an actual avatar in the game world, and could see things happening. Granted, it wasn't very good-looking by modern standards, but titles like King's Quest were leaps and bounds above their text-only predecessors.
As time went on, the graphics interface of the adventure game improved markedly, and the tedious text-only parser was eventually replaced with a point-and-click standard (which was much easier, though it did lend itself to a few issues with how much complexity puzzles could have when you only had 2 buttons to work with). The golden age of adventure games came right around when King's Quest VI came out: the graphics looked great, the puzzles were tricky but not obtuse, the load times were slickly absent, and the voice acting was getting much better.
And then things started going downhill. Enter the FMV adventure game, where the primary focus was the graphics. And the graphics sure did look nice, but... well, something strange happened to the gameplay. You see, as the graphics kept improving and we started getting live actors and brilliantly pre-rendered visuals, suddenly the puzzles started to get a lot less logical, and the interfaces got a lot more clunky. The load times got worse too, and now we had to contend with not one, but as many as six CDs that had to be swapped regularly.
This all hit a fever pitch of insanity right around when Riven: the Sequel to Myst came out. The visuals in Riven were top-of-the-line, totally unmatched by anything else at the time. The atmosphere was brilliantly done. You could even pan around a scene and take in many vistas, something you could NEVER do before in a 2D adventure game. And the gameplay? What gameplay? Riven was a total mess. The puzzles were so obtuse that the original Myst's puzzles looked tame in comparison. The interface was almost impossible to negotiate with. Every five minutes you were changing CDs. It was a disaster of a game.
Shortly after, adventure games were deemed "unprofitable", and the rare new one that came out ended up being more of the same: illogical puzzles, bad interfaces, and worse loading issues. The genre was thoroughly killed by un-creativity. At least until Zack and Wiki, a game that looks a lot like it was made in 2000 instead of 2007, came along and breathed new life into the genre with a whole new kind of adventure game style and an actual scoring system to reward quick-witted players moreso than the ones who took forever to solve puzzles. While it's not a critical success, it's still much more of a success than any adventure game has been since the days of Sam & Max and King's Quest VI.
The point is this: gameplay, not graphics, are key. If you focus too much on graphics at the expense of gameplay, sooner or later people say "forget it" and drop your game faster than you can say "normal-mapped". Most of these games people praise today will be forgotten and despised within a decade, as so many of the classics of yesteryear are, because they're only "fun" due to the visuals. Strip those away, and you're usually left with a sub-par game. And therein lies the reason why I love the Wii's low graphical capabilities: no talent means no success, and the Wii games that show real talent will actually remain fun to play 10 years down the line whereas most of the 360 and PS3's "must-own" library will be seen as horribly dated by then.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
