Synopsis: Advances in graphics are producing photorealistic environments, outpacing other technologies that make up games (physics, artificial intelligence, animations, etc). This produces a jarring disconnect between what we see and how everything moves and behaves. The game industry has a decision to make about how to deal with that disconnect.
I just watched a bunch of YouTube videos on DirectX 10. There's no question about it, the graphics have become pretty close to photorealistic. I saw one clip showing graphics from Age of Conan, Crysis, Bioshock and others. Lighting, textures, details, it's all there; just gorgeous graphics.
I've often commented about what a waste it is for games to crank out such beautiful graphics when the gameplay itself remains unchanged. Crysis is a first person shooter, just like any other. It's a remarkable technical achievement, but it's just a shooter. Put the pipper on the enemy, click the mouse - boom, he's dead. There's nothing wrong with it being a shooter. I'm simply taking exception to the fact that new games have primarily been exploring avenues of better graphics.
Certainly we see that in MMOs. The most significant achievement in MMOs was World of Warcraft and its ability to polish the package to a fine luster. It's the same gameplay that has come before, but it's put together very well.
While I was flipping through YouTube videos, I happened upon a bunch of videos demonstrating Crysis AI oddities. My favorite was the video of two enemy soldiers talking. The player got the drop on them from a sniper position. He calmly shot one of the pair, which promptly ragdolled to the ground, dead as a stone. The reaction of the surviving soldier? He just as calmly continued talking to his dead compatriot.
Other videos illustrated other rather dumb traits of the game AI. Certainly MMO AI is simplistic. I'm sure that players have been picking up on game AI goofs and blunders for a while now. Certainly Far Cry exhibited some of the same oddities that Crysis does. Older games had even simpler opponents.
The funny thing about improving the realism of the graphics is that I think a greater percentage of players are going to notice the non-realism of the rest of the gameplay. Developers understood almost immediately that the physics of a game needed to be improved if they were going to take the graphics to a photorealistic level. It's just too jarring a departure from what the player is seeing if it doesn't behave the way that it is displayed.
Physics has become something of a hot topic in gaming. I would claim that's because of the requirement that the simplest behavior of objects must match their appearance. A box knocked over should tumble and bounce, not just slide. If it only slid, then the player would be reminded that there isn't actually a box there, but just some triangles and some code. It breaks the suspension of disbelief that the player is maintaining when seeing those beautifully-rendered scenes.
Organic movement is also important. A photorealistic character standing stock still may provide great material for screenshots, but as soon as the character starts moving, it had better be natural. If it's not, the delicate fabric of realism created by the graphics is torn apart.
The highest-order sense of realism that improved rendering calls for is the decision-making of the computer-controlled characters. The artificial intelligence. If a photorealistic monster both moves in a natural and realistic way and interacts with its environment in a physically realistic way, it would become rather disappointing to have it visibly tense its muscles, roar at the player in the tight confines of an underground corridor (photorealistically textured, of course), raise its double-bited axe with the nearby torchlight glinting off its razor-sharp edges - only to have it smack into the ceiling. Courtesy of the physics engine, the ceiling would chip from the blow, and the chips would bounce off the shoulders of the monster. Courtesy of the graphics engine, it would be gorgeous to watch. But because the AI says that the axe must be raised behind the head of the monster, the axe will keep bashing into the ceiling of the corridor and the monster will never get around to swinging its axe.
The AI didn't match the realism of the display or the physics. It's tough to get all these elements realistic, especiallly when organic beings are involved. With that character stuck there, we're reminded that it's a computer game instead of being immersed in the notion that we're facing mortal danger in the form of an axe-wielding monster.
So I may cast doubts on the value of advancing the quality of the graphics in games while leaving the rest of the games in the stone ages of technology, but I figure that the advance of the graphics is going to be a flashpoint for players to insist on higher fidelity physics, animation, artificial inteligence and every other technology involved in the gaming experience. Graphics have outstripped the rest of the field, and developers are going to have to hustle to move the rest of the technologies forward.
The alternative to this rosy technological scenario is that developers may do what the authors of Eve Online have done, which I thought was immensely clever; they went into space.
Games that take place in space require spaceships, not people. There are no swinging arms, running legs, flowing cloaks and hair. It's just cold, angular plates and mechanisms that swivel and hinge on a couple axes. The spaceships don't need to path around trees, walls and pits. They just need to travel in straight lines with the occasional concern of striking a planet or another ship. The realism found in Eve Online is accomplished rather easily because of the dearth of organic complications.
So the industry has at least two ways to go.
1. Continue to push the technologies in order to fill out the realism of an organic environment.
2. Produce an environment that is better suited to whatever technologies are available.
A third way worth mentioning is:
3. Reduce the quality of the graphics such that realism is not the goal, permitting the player to think of the game as a toy instead of an alternate reality.
The second and third choices are not unlike each other. Number two states that there are environments that can look great but not place significant demands on other technologies (e.g. space MMOs). Number three states that there are environments that don't place significant demands on any technologies. The latter would be for games that focus on deriving their entertainment more from the gameplay mechanics than from the realism of the gameplay environment.
The funny thing that happened on the way to photorealism is that there is now a demand for realism in all aspects of these virtual environments. It will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to that demand. Will they attempt to reduce the demand by entertaining us with environments that don't attempt realism or will they attempt to continue the trend towards realism? The former requires clever gameplay constructs to entertain us. The latter requires the sort of engineering that gave us DirectX 10.
User Comments
I'd say check out the upcoming Star Wars title, the Force Unleashed... you'll have to do some searching, but the physics system they are using, as well as the AI, puts everything else I've seen to shame.
So some are indeed concerned about not just how realistic things look, but how realistic they actually play.
A teacher I had in a game design class kept hammering about how games have to be realistic to be fun... I kept reminding him that the 'funnest' games aren't realistic. Card games? Arbitrary rule sets that don't behave 'realistically': you can't pummel your opponent when he wins (and get away withit), some cards are 'worth' more than others even though they're all just pieces of paper, etc. Chess? Again, totally unrealistic. Even football, basketball, hockey, are all games played with unrealistic rulesets in order to make them more fun. Football wouldn't be very fun if you could do whatever you wanted, such as bring 50 guys onto your side,hand them each a football, and have them all run to the end zone through the stands. Those artificial and unnatural rulesets are what MAKE the game. Realism itself is a boring, ugly, and dangerous place.
I still enjoy PONG! Totally unrealistic! But fun as heck. Based on 'fun', my days with my Intellivisions had more 'fun' per game than my PCor any console today. People forget that: Pretty graphics don't mean squat if the game sucks. I play to play a game, not stare at pretty graphics. But with today's ADD kids who can't comprehend thinking ahead 5 seconds let alone 5 moves, let alone 5 hours, let alone 5 days, you have to have eye popping graphics to keep them interested for more than 5 seconds. They wouldn't know a fun "Game" if it came out of their gamepad and smacked them in the face.
When I see how much more popular console games are than PC games these days, it makes me want to cry, as its just another sign of the dumbing down of the world. I remember when you could tell ho 'good' a game was basedon the size of its instruction manual. These days, you can print the entire 'manual' on the size of the cover of the game disc box and have room left over for ads of upcoming games.
I need a new keyboard ;) space bar and some letters are acting up... that's realism....
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7iCdN2FGOaQ
there ya go, some info on Force Unleashed.
heerobya, thanks for the reference. I'm assuming that the Havoc and Euphoria physics demos that I've been seeing from the guys who produce Star Wars titles are going to end up in that game. They've done some wonderful work, and it's that sort of activity that suggests to me that photorealism has been sparking a push in many areas of game development.
That said, I tend to lean more towards eric_w66's philosophy that realism isn't necessary for a game to be fun. In truth, given what I read from players, I fear what sorts of behavior ever greater realism will bring to the current recipe of gaming, which focuses on violence.
eric_w66: "I remember when you could tell how 'good' a game was based on the size of its instruction manual."
Yet the instruction manual for chess or go would be very brief.
I don't have a problem with 'dumbed down' games. We all have something that we like pumping our energy and enthusiasm into. For other stuff, we like the quick and easy.
I think that most industries go through a few stages where the enthusiasts get the ball rolling, then the masses discover what they're doing and take over. The idea gets taken quickly to something that the masses can enjoy. Then the enthusiasts get to leverage all the stuff that the masses brought in order to get the most out of their original idea.
I think of the auto industry and all the people who fix up and modify their cars. I think of the skiing and snowboarding industries and all the people who still hike to remote places so they can ski out. The original experience that the enthusiasts had is lost, of course, but they can do things that they would never have been able to do because they leverage everything that the mainstream brought to the activity.
World of Warcraft may be an annoying 'dumbing down' of MMOs, but it is also setting a standard for quality that future games will aspire to. That's at least one benefit of having MMOs 'dumbed down'. Another might be the sheer volumes of cash being brought to bear on new ideas.
And get that keyboard fixed :)
To me, a game shouldn't even need a manual. Complicated does NOT equal good. Complicated usually equals frustration.
I game should be so easy to learn, so natural, that you don't even need a tutorial or manual. You should just be able to play.
This is the beauty of the Nintendo Wii. How do I use the controls for Tennis? Like you would actually play Tenis. No explaination or manual needed.
Easy to learn hard to master is the way to go.
But back to realism... it can either help or hinder a game, you both are very right about that.
It's why I hate games where you can't jump or climb. It's something so incredibly simple in real life, heck once babies master crawling they start trying to climb on everything, and once they master walking they starting jumping AND climbing on everything.. it's natural human instinct.
So why do some games not let you jump and climb? They don't want you to exploit the terrain and geometry. They create massive doors with ancient writing and glowing runes on them so that you can walk through them and be in awe. They want you to see things as they've created them, if you have too much freedom to climb/jump on stuff you end up finding unfinished sections or wierd angles that cause the geometry to F up.
I dunno, I think games are about having fun first and foremost. A game that perfectly mimics the real world would not be as fun as an exagerated one. I want the exlosions to be larger and more fiery then they are in real life, I want to be able to run forever without getting tired and jump higher and have super strength etc. etc.
At the same time, I want things that look cool. If I push somebody off of a cliff in a game, I want realistic ragdoll physics.
I don't think "dumbing down" is the proper term to use for the modern MMO (or any game genre really.) I think the proper term is "lowering the barriers to entry."
Video games (and certainly MMOs) are no longer a niche thing, shunned upon by the "popular" world. The game industry is doing better then Hollywood now!
Anything that brings more people to the genre, the better. All it does is increase competiton and brings more developers to the table. Eventually, these two factors will combine to create the next big huge game. More popular the genre, more devs want to make a game. More devs = better chance for talented people = better chance for top notch games.
So it's not "dumbing down" at all, it's "lowering the barriers to entry." Elitists and self-proclaimed "hardcore" seem to think it's dumbing down, but I think ya'll are just upset that being a gamer is no longer being a priviledged minority... you are just one of the millions in the majority.
People accept all the limitations of consoles because they're just consoles. Make the same game for computers and it's "dumbed down" In the process they get games made for computers that are two generations ahead of available hardware. People wonder why computer games fell behind consoles. Try running crysis on a $500 walmart computer.
MMO problems are even worse because they have to render so many objects that the computer itself doesn't control. The server had to accept the imput, act on it and try to tell all clients how to display the results. Yet people are demanding MMOs with a hundred avatars interacting on screen. The race for better pixels has led to conditions no game can meet. Computers can't keep up with the graphiocs now how are they going to find ways for the hardware to deal with better physics and AI?
Our computers aren't fast enough for a realistic AI, period. The best shooter AI I've seen is from FEAR and even so, it becomes repetitive, because the AI is based on predefined IF-THENs. A good gaming AI would be An adaptive AI that learns from previous encounters, and since I've been fiddling with the programing aspects of a self-learning linguistic AI, I can tell you it would make great bots, the only problem would be the neural network working on the fly. There is an easy bypass that is simply imprinting the learned skills to the next bot, having all the learning occur between lives, which is commonly referred as genetic algorithm. Even so the major problem is that the more knowledge an AI has, the more CPU time it needs to think and that can really annoy any action oriented gamer.
Look up the term "uncanny valley" on google or your fave search engine for some interesting commentary on some of these issues...
Yrs,
Shava
Thanks for the mention, Shava. The Uncanny Valley hypothesis is just an observation that people will react strongly (negatively) to attempts at duplicating the human form that fall a bit short. Developers are falling short by an ever smaller degree.
To check to see where things were, I shot over to YouTube to see what was going on. I offer a couple examples of work that I found.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1LN97l30-k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK-MZFJHWDc&feature=related
Another 10 years of this and the Uncanny Valley will have been firmly and absolutely crossed. In the meantime, I'm sure that developers will use a variety of crutches to ensure that the lack of perfect realism in human characters won't weird players out. Such as occluding sections of the faces with helmets, tattoos, hair and the like. Or by just sticking with avatars that aren't expected to appear real.
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