There have been several points in time where I was like "Wow! Game graphics will never get better than this!" (and I was always wrong.).. But at what point would you have been fine if all graphics technology and progression just came to a halt? (You'd still have all the same games you have today, they'd just have a graphic quality from your chosen time period.)
For me it would have been around 2004, Half Life 2, GTA San Andreas, Vampire the Masquerade. If gaming graphics remained the same from that point forward and I had no knowledge of what came after, I would have been completely fine and dandy.
There have been several points in time where I was like "Wow! Game graphics will never get better than this!" (and I was always wrong.).. But at what point would you have been fine if all graphics technology and progression just came to a halt? (You'd still have all the same games you have today, they'd just have a graphic quality from your chosen time period.)
For me it would have been around 2004, Half Life 2, GTA San Andreas, Vampire the Masquerade. If gaming graphics remained the same from that point forward and I had no knowledge of what came after, I would have been completely fine and dandy.
2004 at Half Life 2.
The point and importance of high end graphics is way overemphasized in games today, while the point gameplay is undermined (as the collateral damage of going too much on the visuals).
It is kinda perverse, to be honest, that all the new processing power and technology goes towards shit like raytracing and polycount and tesselation and whatnot, but gameplay is getting simpler and simpler and more and more homogenized even between ”supposedly” different genres.
I have to ask, why are people completely missing the point here?
I have to ask, why are people completely missing the point here? Dwarf Fortress comes to mind as one of those games that actually pushes gameplay over graphics, all these other AAA games people keep claiming "does both" don't. There are no AAA games that put gameplay above graphics period.
In dwarf fortress style, what you get is stuff akin to you pulling a gun out on one NPC and that NPC has an actual life, actual friends and does things in this world. That gun pull ripples through the society simulation and actions get made based on it. We're not talking about fully scripted events, but more akin to triggerable if the right circumstances begin to happen.
The idea should be that the game has loads of content the player will never see or never realize is about the player. Less of an in your face and gamey as hell and more about depth, detail, impact. The result would be that every play through will have different things happening and you, as a player, might learn ways to reach certain thresholds but it won't be a switch... you cannot just go pointing guns in people's faces and get the content you want, in fact if you point at the wrong people's faces something else might happen entirely.
Enough of binary sliders, we HAVE the technology for a deeper risk simulation than "you screwed me so -10 points or you didn't so +10 points" or worse "You have 20 cool so you win". I mean, Neural Networks aren't a fantasy anymore, making a world that is brimming with life can be done... but your graphics card would need to be used for massive AI calculations instead of pushing out pretty pictures.
Considering how powerful computers are, that we spend all that power on graphics that really only look marginally better than the last gen (and so forth) seems rather insane.
you know Its funny the dreamcast I think was more powerful graphically wasn't it? it lost big time to ps2The PS2 era. The 3D was good enough, the 2D was perfected and making games wasn't hideously expensive.
It had certain advantages, and certain drawbacks as well. Not having a DVD drive basically buried it though. But I meant the sixth generation as a whole. PS2, Xbox, GameCube. That era.you know Its funny the dreamcast I think was more powerful graphically wasn't it? it lost big time to ps2
Actually by the PS2 era game development was already hideously expensive.The PS2 era. The 3D was good enough, the 2D was perfected and making games wasn't hideously expensive.
The situation at Naughty Dog was becoming untenable as development moved from PlayStation to PlayStation 2, largely because the studio was growing, the money necessary to make games was increasing, and the pressure on the two founders of the studio was mounting. It was at this time that they considered, for the first time, selling the company.
“Around [the time CTR came out], we went to Tokyo. We were sitting there with [Game Informer’s] Andy McNamara, Andy Reiner… and Kelly Flock. Kelly used to run SCEA, basically. We were really drunk in the Lexington Queen at maybe four or five in the morning. Maybe six in the morning. I remember it being light when we came out.”
The five men were drinking overpriced Jack and Cokes, talking about the state of the industry, Sony’s and PlayStation’s future, and, inevitably, what would come of Naughty Dog.
“Kelly looked at me and Andy and said, ‘so when are you guys selling the company?’” Rubin recalls. “And I said, ‘why would we sell the company?’ We were on top of the world, right? He said, ‘because you made the number one game. There’s no where to go but down from here.’”
“That kind of hit me with the alcohol,” Rubin continued. “And maybe it was the fact that CTR was killing me. But there was actually kind of a point here. You sell things at their high, right? That didn’t necessarily mean we won’t be able to do more, but things were getting harder. Games were getting a lot more expensive… It got to the point where you couldn’t afford to fund your own game as a developer.”
Moving from PlayStation to PlayStation 2 hit Rubin and Gavin like a ton of bricks. They were accustomed to funding their own projects, going all the way back to the 1980s, but it just wasn’t possible anymore. Jak & Daxter required $14 million to make – a fairly paltry sum by today’s standards – but that doesn’t take into account that Gavin and Rubin each put $2.25 million into its development, accounting for about a third of Jak’s overall cost.
“It was very clear that it was getting out of hand. So we couldn’t fund games ourselves,” Rubin admitted. “We were going to become more reliant on publishers. Once you become reliant on publishers, being independent becomes less cool.”
Rubin threw out the names of still-successful independent developers like Epic and Valve, but “There are very few independent developers that are really killing it in the way that Andy and I were killing it in the Crash days.” Cash cows like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans, he opines, were simply not possible back then.
“You were either on console or PC, and all those games were going to be $15 million and up. So we saw that coming. We knew we were going to be close to the publisher. We had an incredible relationship with Sony…” Rubin said. “Sony always let us chart our own course, always let us make the games we wanted to make, and they paid us really well as a company.”
- https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/04/rising-to-greatness-the-history-of-naughty-dog
It had certain advantages, and certain drawbacks as well. Not having a DVD drive basically buried it though. But I meant the sixth generation as a whole. PS2, Xbox, GameCube. That era.