Is this really the future of gaming?

Forgive me, this is a bit of a rant.

I've played some of Oblivion. I played the demos for FEAR and Call of Juarez.

I have to say I'm honestly profoundly disappointed with the visuals of these games. FEAR and Oblivion because they seem to be profoundly lacking in any actual artistic design (which was apparently the downfall of Everquest II as well), and Call of Juarez because the investment in rendering power pays miserable dividends.

But what these games have in common is a voracious appetite for shader power, and what really kills me about Oblivion and Call of Juarez in particular is that you REALLY don't see a whole lot of benefit for all the shader power burned.

Am I the only one who feels sort of screwed by the amount of power modern graphics features eat? Does anyone here really think HDR is worth the massive hit in framerate it almost always incurs?

Is this honestly the future of gaming? Mediocre art design glossed over repeatedly by just splattering shaders on everything? In my opinion, Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and Quake 4 are MUCH more attractive games to look at than Oblivion is. All Oblivion seems to do is try and wow you with technology.

Tell me I'm not the only person this bothers. Graphics hardware has gotten moronically more complex than CPU hardware, requiring more elaborate cooling to run at stratospheric clock speeds. The RAM on the X1950XTX runs at 2GHz DDR for crying out loud. And despite what twelve months ago was an obscene power surplus in modern video hardware, we now have games that actually tax this to a fault.

At what point does it just become ridiculous? At least Crysis has a good pedigree and from what we've seen, makes effective use of the shader power it demands.

Am I alone here or does anyone else think this is getting out of hand?

 

I've never played Obilivion or COJ, but I do play F.E.A.R., and I love it. I think the game is amazing both in terms of graphics and gameplay. But that's just me. I've never been impressed with screenshots of Oblivion, or games like BF2142 in terms of visuals. I also find Half Life2 and Quake 4 to be very good looking games, and they are much less taxing on a system. However, they don't feature quite the dynamics in the shadows and lighting that games like F.E.AR. do. But honestly, I think one of the big problems today is the laziness in coding that programmers have. They just get lazy with their code because they know hardcore gamers out there will have the stuff to play it, and everyone else can just turn down the settings. This is what I like about console gaming. They actually try to optimize the code, because they only have one configuration to use. Therefore they have to spend more time making the game run smoothly, and it shows off what the machine can actually do. I think a lot of graphics cards and CPUs aren't used efficiently these days because of sloppy code.

 

it's a bleak future, i agree


though i think the games you listed (except bf 2142 which i think looks ugly for what it requires) do look very nice, they could be better coded to provide better performace, especially oblivion.

that code is just bad, one of the reasons why ports suck is that the programers are too lazy to optimize. another example is halo on PC, ugh.

programers get lazy as computers get more powerful and minimize the effect of crappy code, we get messy code that gets increasingly crappier till even powerful computers start slowing down, then they tell us to get better hardware, and the cycle starts again

 

MDK2 which happens to be a pretty old game (4-5 yrs old I think) has pretty close to or the same good graphics as most of games today.

From a non-techiee point of view.

 

I really can't see it being lazy programmers on an individual level.. but more business decisions. Man hours vs acceptable levels of whatever it is they're accepting.

Oblivion has really impressed me as far as graphics. This forest scene with the trees and canopy shadows and grass and all that... running at 1920x1200 @ about 14 fps on my x1900 xt...

A very pretty slideshow it was though. At the same time, if they'd been able to pull it off with less hardware necessary, I would have appreciated it. And... if they'd gotten a handle on HDR on skin, that would have been nice too...

I guess I'm not sold on the idea that they could drastically lower the game requirements though, merely by "not being lazy". I think we're seeing businesses try to maximize profits, and they decide that the best decision is to spend x amount of time on tweaking for speed, and spend y time on things that will draw more buyers. (When's the last time a game was sold touting graphics hardware effeciency as a feature? Squeezing more performance out of consoles doesn't count.) Certainly, a ton of work goes into game creation, and not all of it programming. Something monumental like Oblivion wouldn't have been possible in the time frame they had with the people they used without tradeoffs. The way they used procedurally generated stuff... speedtree... whoever they licensed that face creation tech from...

I don't think it's getting out of hand. I think it's business as usual.

 

HL2:Lost Coast wins all.

 

That's because no one's really tried. But I remember when UT2K4 was just coming out, my friends and I were all really impressed with how much better it ran than 2003 despite being the same engine, and that was one of the main reasons I rushed out to buy it.

I still can't think of a good reason why games are moving towards overuse of shader hardware instead of, God forbid, actually using them intelligently (Doom 3/Quake 4), or even just having good art design (UT2K4, WoW).

And just like I'll never understand why anyone would defend the Star Wars prequels, I'll never understand why anyone would think Oblivion's attractive. It's just technology. That's all it is.

 

Someone needs some console games.

Nintendo?

 

its all style with little regard to substance these days, wich is why pc games days are numbers. You shell out big bucks for a handful of a list games, 4 at best titles, then your hardware is obsolete and you either have to play the game crippled, or buy new hardware, which is why consoles are where a lot of devlopers are looking first these days

 

Just because it doesn't look the way you want to doesn't mean it's all style and no substance.

I can name about 10 games this year on pc that were great.

 

Oh, and consoles are any different?

Show me more then 5 console games that look substaintaly different them one another... on the new machines...

Biased much?

 

you obviously just arent familiar with The Elder Scrolls Series...And you havent played Oblivion enough. Trust me keep to it, do some hard cool quests like daedric artifacts, and play the main story and you will be more than impressed. Thats all assuming you like RPGs, ofc.

 

You're forgiven.

Absolutely not. I like bloom.

Another point I can agree on. I loved Far Cry's look, HL2 was fine, haven't played Quake 4 yet, and Oblivion, well, the developers obviously went for graphics over any sort of plot depth or character development.

Take BF2/2142 for instance, those games look absolutely rubbish compared to something like HL2, and they run at a quarter of the frame rate.

I'm not even looking at Crysis, my poor Inspiron wont have a chance at running it.

 

Sometimes its hard to get a balance between visuals and gameplay. I think the Source engine did this the most efficently....the Battlefield Engine, whilst quite good, is fairly demanding in comparison to what it actually produces.

I value gameplay over visuals but a good looking game is important too, but only as long as they have the game mechanics worked out properly first.

Anyone ever played Ubersoldier? It was made by some Eastern European developer and it looked absolutely stunning in some sections maxed out. Shame that the gameplay, scripting, and pretty much everything else ruined it entirely. Of course on the other hand, sometimes you get games with great storylines, which are somewhat held back by ropey visuals. Although I must admit this usually only really matters in the FPS markets, other genres are a bit more forgiving in this regard.

What would be super interesting would be something like an attempt to make a Battlefield clone running on the Source engine, just to show what efficency can produce....There is always War Rock actually, to compare. Although it doesn't look half as pretty as BF2 I suppose, it still runs on 800Mhz....not bad at all.

Heres a picture of that game ubersoldier, only decent one I could find, and the game looks even better running in action...

 

Thats pathetic... Valve is the only company that cares about performance anyways.

 

Why dont you make you own bloody game so i wont have to read your whine?! You think its so easy to make a game? Those people were working hard for 4 years to bring out those games to the public and what do they get? Companies like Intel and Nvidia sponsor game developers to optimize their hardware so it runs best on it and ofcourse trying to make some money out of it (new games require new hardware=money).

 

BINGO! Give me micro machines V3 and the original Goldeneye any day. Oh and mario tennis. Simple endless fun.

Too much time is spent worrying about visuals. Give me good gameplay anyday. Thats why im loving nintendo's current thinking at the moment with the wii and ds.

 

Look, you're ranting. That's nice, but I'd rather not be compared to Star Wars apologists. (for the prequels anyways) <_<

I think Oblivion is attractive... because it is. That's the nature of attractiveness. By the fact that I'm attracted to it, it is attractive. If you could point me towards a screenshot-hosting place, I'll show you what I see.

 

for just show and stuff hdr owns if you play css but other than that i turn it off... eaiser to play and get an extra like 2 or 3 fps i rather turn up aa or anistropic any day and ditch hdr.

 

HDR on Militia: "ARRRRGGGH! It's like a hundred flashbangs have hit me at once!

 

Seems like most people missed the point entirely.

It wasn't (if I understood it correctly) a "more gameplay, less graphics" rant, or a "GPU's have gotten too big and complex", or even "why are my games choppy with todays powerful GPU's", or "why are programmers so lazy".

It was simply "why is it that we can have tens of millions of polygons per second, per pixel lighting, HDR, bloom, parallax mapping and lots and lots of shader effects, but the art still looks like it was made by 10 different artists who had been prohibited from ever talking to each others, agreeing on a single style or ever comparing their work. Why is it that it's ok to spend a year implementing complex HDR lighting, but apparently it's not neccesary to spend two weeks making a decent walk animation?"

How come we can get amazing 3d engines programmed to do the most insane features..... But the quality of the actual art has, if anything, gone down over the last years? I can remember games from the late 90's that had amazing animations, beautiful worlds and characters, where the artists had obviously found the style they wanted and stuck to it.

And yeah, if that's interpreted more or less correctly, I agree completely.
Oblivion looks amazing, technically speaking. I'm a sucker for HD and bloom and other show-off effects, and I love that part of Oblivion. But the animations have *got* to be made by a monkey. An untrained one, at that.

Everquest 2 looks awful to me. Sure, again, pretty decent engine, with lots of fancy features, but it looks like they pulled a new artist in for every single model in the game. And then separate artists again for the setting, landscapes, environment. The result is that it looks like someone took screenshots of 5 different (but individually very nice-looking) games, opened Photoshop, and copy/pasted characters from four of the games into a picture from the fifth.

In some ways, I think the original Half-life looks much better than Everquest 2 or Oblivion. Sure, it's low-poly, has no shaders, lousy texture resolution, but at least it has some kind of coherent style. It looks like the characters and the world belong together. And the animations are better and more detailed than in Oblivion, even without ragdolls or fancy physics.

Apologies if I misunderstood your rant and ran off at a tangent, but I definitely think this issue is rant-worthy.

 

Yeah, you pretty much nailed it. Games are woefully unoptimized, and worse, have miserable art design. Call to Juarez should NOT bring my system down like it does. I'm disgusted to say F.E.A.R. is an efficient engine compared to some of these games coming out, like Oblivion.

And for what? Another render pass? Shader Model 3 effects that are being used solely to push hardware and say "Hey, look what we can do?"

That's my problem. Wasted performance from every angle. Wasted on poor programming, wasted on bad art design, wasted on needless effects.

And I'll reiterate one more time: HDR results in WAY too much of a performance hit for what it does. Like Sylvain said, Bloom suits me just fine, and it doesn't incur that kind of obscene performance drop.

I'm impressed that for how intelligent you have to be to code for this incredibly complex hardware, that these people could be so foolish as to make horrible art design choices and not even optimize their code. It really seems to be all about technology anymore.

 

I'll agree with that at least. Playing WoW, it wasn't the graphical detail and complexity that caught my eye. It was the art. I'm not a huge fan of that game, but the art does have an undeniable appeal. Also, I don't think Oblivion guys spent that long on the HDR. Gold weapons glow pretty yes, but have you ever walked up to an npc in decent lighting, while you're carrying some kind of lighting source? It's a little bit completely broken.

 

It's not the coders. It's the management that says "All these nifty features are what sell games, we'll get some cheap artists and throw some stupid story together to wrap around an engine that we'll advertise purely on effects."

 

Well, keep in mind they're different people.

The coders are there to make incredibly complex (and yes, optimized) code that is capable of HDR, Bloom and whatever else. (Don't assume that just because it doesn't run as fast as you'd like on your computer, they haven't tried to optimize it)

The artists are there to make art that looks good when pushed through that engine.

Am I saying artists are dumb or untalented? No. Just that there seems to be a big push towards giving all the attention to the code, the engine and the technology, at the cost of art. Artists might be getting inferior tools, lower budgets or tighter deadlines. Or companies might just recruit random artists without caring as much about quality as they do when hiring programmers. Whatever the reason, the art side suffers as a result.

I agree with l33t_c0w (although I know some people disagree), WoW might have a lot of flaws and shortcomings, but I respect their artists for making a world that looks, well, artistic, that has style, and *sticks* to a style, and does it well. You may or may not like the cartoony style they've chosen, but at least it's consistent, which, in my opinion, is infinitely more impressive than all the shader effects EQ2 throws at people.

And finally, I don't agree that games are too unoptimized. A hell of a lot of work goes into coding games, and it's just impossible to optimize everything. On the whole, games tend to perform remarkably well, and an impressive amount of under-the-hood trickery and optimizations have to be performed to achieve it.

If we talk about actual code quality though, I'm less impressed (from what I've seen. I'm glad I don't work at Valve and have to deal with the monstrosity that is Source on a daily basis... But again, given such lousy code-bases (often based on 15 years old code because no one has time or money to start over from scratch), optimization doesn't exactly become easier. So yes, there's plenty of room for improvement, but the performance isn't what bothers me about todays games.
It's the complete lack of attention given to the "raw" art (As in, the actual models, textures and animations, the stuff that depends on artists, rather than the engine)

As Pitabred said, it seems that people are trying to replace quality artists with a quality engine. And the result is things like EQ2 or Oblivion.

 

Man that game rocked, I had that on my sega dreamcast and the graphics were really good!

 

I've got a great example... MGS2. I love that game, probably the greatest game of all time to me. At the time, it looked absolutely fantastic. Now, it's starting to show its age (as is the PS2 in general). The textures are washed out, the edges are jagged, and the lip-syncing isn't quite spot-on. But despite all that, I have played and beating MGS2 at least 10 times, but I've only played through F.E.A.R. 3 times. Everything about MGS2 lent itself well to the game, including the art design. Everything fit; everything made sense (artistically speaking... plot is confusing at times). It didn't go out of its way to throw in thousands of shadows like Splinter Cell did, but at the same time looked fantastic and in many ways better than Splinter Cell. Time was spent on animations to make everything as fluid as possible, and it really showed. That was one fine piece of technical beauty there.

 

At the risk of making an oblivion apologist out of myself, I really don't think their art is too bad, for the most part. The Elder Scrolls is more "traditional fantasy" -- it's supposed to be unflashy, and though I think they could have made a few things more artistically pleasing (animations too... though most fpss seem to have not particularly awesome animations...) for the most part I think they did well. I imagine they spent most of their art time on worrying about "what would this look like in real life?" and didn't have a ton of room left for "how can we make this minotaur look extra stunning?"

... I think the minotaurs look funny... on the other hand, them Billies are kinda neat lookin.

 

I find this all very interesting, because when I play a game, I play it for content, and I do not care very much at all about the graphics (as long as I can play the game).

 

It's not that they go for traditional fantasy that's the problem.

When you're next in combat, try going to 3rd person mode, and the look at your own and your opponent's animations.

Their animations are horrible. When characters walk, their feet don't follow the ground. And god help you if you dare try to attack or block while performing another animation (like walking). Then try walking backwards. Or strafe.

 

I think content is really important too. A large part of a game's graphical deficiencies can be overcome with good art design.

Just like your monitor is your interface with your computer, the visuals of the game are your interface with that world. If a game looks distractingly bad, or runs like garbage, it can ruin the experience.

 

I think the root of the problem is that almost every game company out there (EA is SOOO guilty of this one its not even funny) thinks "ohh, we can run it on high settings on our 10,000 dollar test machine, so the consumer should be fine!" and in an effort to get an unfinished game onto the shelves so they can begin raking in the cash they COMPLETELY forget about beta testing or OPTAMA-****ING-ZATION. Uhh, I didn't read all the posts after this so sorry if I repeated anything.

 

Heh? No replies?

 

here are my thoughts on this if I understand correctly.

The problem is that the graphics themselves and hardware is beautiful.

HOWEVER, the art itself is horrifing. They can texture, shade, and anti alias all they want to.. but, unless they pull it off with proper design and motion its all fruitless.

*IF* thats the case then I agree whole heartedly. While oblivion and fear don't bother me art wise I have yet to play them on a high end system. So for me.. I sorta play oblivion on morrowinds graphics.. Soon that will change when my nc8430 comes in and then I will comment more on the art.


on the other issues

As to the "optimization".. I do feel that *if* game developers tried they could get FAR more beautiful games.

I have noticed on consoles.. that when its released.. the graphics aren't as great as they are towards the end of its life cycle.. usually the artist or developers or whoever will find ways to make the games look better and better.. its not as drastic as in computers.. Maybe its the artist, maybe its the developers.. I dunno.. the point is they find ways to better the graphics in some way.. (possible nothing more then better art)

Gameplay.. I prefer gameplay over graphics.. I like a good story line. simple as that graphics does not a game make. However, I also think its important to keep in mind that oblivion is a giant sand box game.. so while I dislike sand box games.. oblivion and morrowind are the exception.

Summed up all to a point?

For all the graphics, art, and everything else it all leads to money and mainstream. Game companies are no longer out to please gamers.. they want to please EVERYONE.. games are becoming too mainstream and people will invest huge amounts of money.. and thats who is being targeted... rich people.. its no longer for gamers..

 

That's how I understood it too, and if so, I agree entirely.

I don't agree that game developers don't bother optimizing their games. They do, as much as is humanly possible. Sometimes, the developers in question don't know their stuff, and so aren't able to write the most efficient code. Sometimes they just inherit an old, crappy codebase that no one dares to improve on because it's horrifying code that breaks as soon as anyone looks at it. But most of the time (always), they just have plenty of do getting the actual game working without getting more than 6 months delayed.

Big games already cost around 20 million to make. I really don't think anyone here are in a position to say "You should throw in another 3 million, delay the game 4 months, and spend that time optimizing your code".

At least, not unless you yourself have proven that you can make a similar game, with similar graphics, perform much better.

It's quite funny that spookyu *both* complains about lack of optimization and beta testing. Those two are pretty much opposites. you have x months left until launch. Do you spend it trying to find bugs, or do you spend it making things run faster, at the risk of introducing new bugs?
Saying "they should do both" just doesn't make sense. You might as well say that Intel should be making 20GHz computers that consume only 3W under load. It's just impossible to achieve both goals. They could either move resources from debugging to optimizing, or the other way. They can't magically draw extra time out of a hat, and use it to do *both*.

 

i like substance in my games graphics are a small part. but i think if you have alot of choices in a game, such as changing the storyline, items you can use or get and also modding is a big plus. because if im going to spend 50 some odd dollars on a game i want to be able to play it for along time without getting bored with it due to using every item and leaving me wondering why i bought this game for 50 dollars when it has a lack of things i mentioned.

 

Good, cheap, quick. Choose two. Games are being shoved out the door at a fast pace because of licensing, so you're losing out on good because they aren't gonna spend loads of money on quality artists.

 

I would agree if they made an attempt to do either one! Point and case: battlefield 2.

 

Yes, point in case. It runs on my computer. It even runs smoothly if I don't go overboard with settings. If they'd done nothing to optimize it, I'd get maybe 3FPS (probably closer to 0.03), and it would crash as soon as I tried to launch it.
From this I conclude that they have tried to iron out the bugs, and that they have tried to make it run as good as possible.

Or wait, maybe you were actually on the BF2 dev team, and know that they made the concious decision to do no optimization and no debugging whatsoever on the game?

Otherwise, it's not a "point in case". It illustrates nothing, other than that games aren't perfect.

So to be blunt, I don't care if you agree. Personally, I agree with what I know to be true, which is that they try to do both as well as possible. If you don't "agree" with the truth, then hey, good for you. Lots of people live in their own little world where they can define what's true and what isn't. Nothing wrong with that.

But that doesn't change the fact that debugging, testing and optimization *is* done on any game. All three are integral parts of the whole game development process. All three are done basically from the first line of code is written, and until the game is shipped.
You might as well claim that they made the game without any 3d models, or that it doesn't support mouse/keyboard controls.
That doesn't make it any more true.

What you might claim is that they should do *more* of all three. (Except that then you'd also have to come up with a way to fund that extra development time). Or more of one, at the cost of the other.

 

Jalf, don't take everything so personally, I know they do optimization on any game. For gods sake I'm just playing the devils advocate. Plus, your thinking (which is actually an almost perfect parallel of mine) is sort of hypocritical, because you are just as guilty of that narrow mindedness by pulling this "truth and agreement" stuff (after all, truth is only a view point). I find I am guilty of this often, when I "know" something I go on a holy crusade to purge the idiocy and narrow mindedness from people's minds, but again, its a little hypocritical when you really think about it.

 

I personally believe that pc gaming is slowly dieing, I was a die-hard pc gamer, and now i have moved on to the xbox 360 and soon Nintendo Wii, console Gaming is the only thing i find worth playing where as companies are playing it safe with computer gaming and making the same crap over and over.

 

Politically correct bull****!

...just sayin'

I don't know... there are still good games coming out for the PC. I think, for now at least, it's a unique platform from consoles, so I don't think it's going to die. I do kinda wish I hadn't just missed out on those LucasArts golden days. I'll have to play more of those games sometime.

 

The sky is falling the sky is falling!

 

That's funny, what I see is that most console games are "same crap over and over". There are gems, but most of the innovation that does happen, revolves around new input methods (webcam, wiimote, DDR dance mat).

PC games tend to be where the "gameplay" innovation happens. They might still use old-fashioned mouse and keyboard, but they use them for new things, new types of games, new experiences. And of course, both have shallow, "same old crap" games aplenty, no doubt about that.

I'm not taking anything personally
I was just trying to say that given a budget of X million dollars, and Y months of development time, it's impossible to increase the amount of resources spent on *both* optimization and debugging. You can increase one at the cost of the other. But it's impossible to do more of both, without taking the resources from something else.

And I'm saying that I happen to know that a lot of optimization and debugging *is* done.

No it isn't.
It is perfectly possible to be right or wrong. If I claim that 2+2=5, I'm wrong. If I claim that you have not posted in this thread, I am wrong. And if I say that developers do try to optimize their games, I am right.
There are viewpoints, and there is truth. The two are very distinct things.
You might have a "viewpoint" that 2+2=5", but that doesn't make it any more correct, and in that case, you should find a better viewpoint.

But your viewpoints regarding whether Tomb Raider is a fun game, or whether a particular shade of orange is pretty, or whether coffee tastes nice, are, well, viewpoints. It's subjective, and your opinion is as good as mine.

But it's nonsense to say that "truth is a viewpoint", or that it is hypocritical to say when someone are wrong.

 

Well said Jalf