Johnw1104 said:
Dating back to the Intellivision when they advertised their superior graphics to the Atari VCS, people have always cared about visuals. We may seem to have an obsession today, but to some degree it's always been there and there has to be decent gameplay accompanying the high res graphics. That said, even now a beautiful game won't necessarily sell as well as a fun one (such as the Order). Heck, in the past ten years probably the two most successful games were Wii Sports and Minecraft. |
There's still a "hardcore" stigma against games that look like cartoons. I understand that intellivision and atari and commodore had a bout about graphics but that's as good as graphics were back then. Now we have all different ways of approaching graphical art styles and visuals, to me, should take a back seat to gameplay.
My way of thinking is more eastern. Atari, Intellivision...are American made companies. Western companies. They usually put graphics ahead of gameplay which is a trend I continue to see today. Yeah, NES didn't look like the Master System but guess what sold better? This is a subject that could take either side as Wii Sports and Minecraft are casual games. They're not really aimed at hard core gamers. This in itself breeds another topic or thread.
I've heard people on VGChartz ask why people play games that look bad and cartoony like Mario or Zelda. The amount of people who think like that are enormous. Not that there's anything wrong with that type of thinking, everyone is entiteld to their own opinions but that doesn't change the fact that people criticise graphics before even playing the game. So, in short, I guess my way of thinking is more eastern in design philosophy. Make a game that plays well and graphics that aren't complete crud. If they look amazing, that's even better! But at least for me, I'm not going to not play a game because it's too realistic or too stylistic.
