tube82 said:
1. when games were not that detailed and pseudo realistic it was much easier for me to "love" the characters. it has to do with imagination... guybrush threepwood in the first two monkey islands was a way better character than he is now because it was up to me to imagine the details. ...and imagining he would even be made a "lifelike" character in a new title makes me shudder. 2. how bad the "realistic" games look is always obvious a few years later. i remember when everquest 2 and world of warcraft released in 2004. a lot of gamers thought EQ2 looked better because of its advanced tech. 3. it's funny how most gamers have their favourite games made 10-15 years ago, but now all of the sudden only HD games can be good. yeah, that makes sense... heck, ff7 has so damn ugly looking characters without textures AT ALL, but somehow in THAT case it doesn't matter? wasn't the scene where aeris dies emotional? and if it was, how, without "lifelike emotions"? 4. and about your just cause example: for me, the most immersive GTA title was... the first one! yes, the one with top down view! why? because the concept of roaming free in a big city and being able to go anywhere was new and awesome! i was very motivated to see all three cities. going 3d was the logical next step and it looks better for sure, but it was just more of the same in 3d. i didn't need "lifelike 3d graphics" to be motivated to explore everything. 5. another problem is how games become short and often more linear in structure because the HD graphics are expensive and time consuming to create. that is obviously NOT good for the games. when i read that a FF7 remake would take 10x as long to make as the original i wonder: are graphics that important? wouldn't it be better to have games of the scale and with as varied locations as FF7 than HD graphics? |
1. I agree. It's part of the reason I find most SNES gen titles to have aged better than most PS1 gen titles.
2. Also agree, but I would be interested to see if this happens this gen as well. For instance, MGS 3 & 4 from last gen still retain the same look and atnosphere when I orginally played them, even though they have realistic graphics and art style.
3. Bad example, this is the Final Fantasy game everyone is begging a remake for, partly because it hasn't aged well. The fans want to see the world fully realised like in Crisis Core or Advent Children. Also, the dying scene was actually conveyed through CGI (more emotion than was typically visualised at the time), followed by text. The idea of your imagination taking over applys to sound and acting as well as visuals. The emotion was again conveyed through imagination when reading the text. Developers now have more options to convey emotion rather than relying on a users imagination.
4. I'm not sure many would agree with this. 3D as you said was the next logical step, but it also improved the mechanics in many ways. That in itself improved immersion. I'm not sure how you can say it was more of the same when it completely changed the game mechanics.
5. Look at the number of open-world games out this gen: Fallout 3, Oblivion, GTAIV, Assasin's Creed 1 & 2 etc. those are quickly off the top of my head. This sounds to me more like developer inefficiency. The FFVII remake comment especially sounds like SE are very inefficient as other JRPGs have been released that have the traditional JRPG structure. FFXIII in particular took an age, not because they were making it technically appealing or because they wanted to add in lots of gameplay options, but due to the sheer volume of artwork and CGI. I have the distinct feeling that SE are the direct antithesis of developer efficiency.
