Welcome to the début of a little series I'm calling '
What's the Dilly Now?'
A segment inspired by things I read or see on the internet or things I just think about sometimes.
Todays topic:
Graphics in gaming!
A look at graphics and realism and how they're potentially doing more harm than good.
(Be fore-warned, this is going to be heavily opinionated)
Let it not go without being said that I like my cartoons. Being an aspiring internet cartoonist it's just a given, so it's also a given that I'm not too hung up on realism or a realistic look in my entertainment, that would only be part right...
You see, despite how much I do love cartoons, I can appreciate the work and love that goes into creating something that looks stunningly realistic, it is a real chore and one that I'm woefully incapable of.
Now, let's step away from the cartoon portion of the discussion and move directly into the main focus, gaming.
Gaming as a culture has been pushing towards realism for well over a decade (possibly longer) now and it's an admirable goal. Considering where gaming started with true gems like Pacman and Pong it's no wonder that given the opportunity, money and technology to do what it has, gaming has developed in massive bounds in what is a relatively shot amount of time, hell! We were still running on pixel sprites when I was 7 and that was only 16 years ago.
Saying all this though, you know what I do miss? Creativity, gaming has seen a lot of change, I know I just wrote the above paragraph talking about it, but it's also started to see is a heaping helping of stagnation.
See, it's my opinion that with all these incredibly pretty, high-end, realistic graphics we've hit a pinnacle, I don't think gaming hardware or software is likely to see a significant rise in quality too soon at least not to the standard that we've seen in the last 10 years and with the current development costs put into mainstream titles people are taking fewer risks
This has been said buy a great many people, who're all more articulate than me and it's true. A current triple A title sees a development cost of around $10,000,000 upwards(with some reaching as far as $100 million upwards), so a company has to make 'safe' bets with their titles (it's also the main reason we're seeing so many sequels lately).
Gaming companies are companies first and companies have to worry about their profit income, it's understandable and I don't begrudge any company for it, it's not their only focus, a gaming companies ultimate goal is to create top quality entertainment for their audience and for the most part they succeed, whether it's because that certain title is enjoyable or because their audience will happily pay full retail price for anything with a certain name on it.
Unfortunately though, the first goal, guaranteeing stable income, gets in the way of innovation and creativity, something that made gaming unique and interesting a short decade ago.
If you look back to the PS1 and N64 era you'd notice that a lot of the games don't look overly great.
There were a handful that scratched the surface of pretty but due to hardware limitations they were never going to make it, which is OK, because back then no one was expecting them to.
I should state here that I'm not going to turn this into a 'my era of gaming was better than this new fangled rubbish' rant, because that's not entirely true. Gaming was still very new to the world in this era (well new-er) and hadn't really blossomed as a culture, which it most certainly has today.
Mistakes were plentiful back then, but I think that was the beauty of it, gaming had room to be experimental in those earlier years, we were still trying to touch base on what we could achieve with what we had, some results pleasing, some not so much.
Granted we have plenty of examples of this in the current generation of gaming, A prominent example in my head is Mirror's Edge, certainly not the first 1st person parkour game, but definitely one that stood out for being something different and daring in a market becoming gradually more saturated in a majority copy-paste realism simulators.
It didn't do all too well from what I hear, but was at least given acknowledgement for trying something different (as well as giving multiple people motion sickness).
Back to the 90's for a second, like I said, gaming was all over this experimentation stuff, many existing franchises were entering into the polygonal world with varying degrees of success and failure, games like Mario, Sonic and Final Fantasy.
That last one is what sparked off this whole segment for me. Recently a Square Enix statement was released to just reiterate that 'Re-making Final Fantasy VII would take too long to be worth doing to current standards' and it made me wonder...
Who said it has to be made to current standards? Also what exactly is the current standard?
Are we talking about Final Fantasy XIII standards? I'll admit it was a gorgeous-looking game, but beyond that there wasn't much in the way of innovation, in fact a lot of that game seemed like a step backwards by PS1 standards...
Or are we talking about the highest standards presented in XBLA titles? Because sure, they're not graphically amazing (all the time) but what they lack in that department they tend to make up for in spades regarding story and game play, which is what the fans of FFVII really care about.
What I think is going on is that a lot of developers are guilty (Square Enix especially so) of thinking that their graphics are the only reason people buy their games and as such it's become their main focus. Sueenix's profits recently looked terrible but they're seemingly so insistent that we'll love FFXIII so much that a direct sequel is being made.
Now I'm not going to sit here and cry about how they can seemingly justify giving one of their worst games a direct sequel while their most fan-appreciated game isn't worth the time, money or effort to re-make.
It's a tough choice for them, they seem to want to do it, but they know they'll never please everyone who's anticipating it, which is uncharacteristically smart of them at the moment and I appreciate their honesty there, but regarding the modern standard thing, I don't want that.
I'd more than happily play an FFVII re-make with polished Kingdom Hearts visuals. That would make me happy.
And from a financial stand-point Squeenix have nothing to lose from it, their fan-base is so established and hardened towards the company that regardless of graphical style they'll still pay full retails price for a graphical (and possibly mechanical) update to what is regarded as Square's sole success in the industry*
*Which they're wrong about, sure it was the first Final Fantasy to move away from pixels, but it wasn't their greatest.
Let's move away from Final Fantasy now and get back onto general creativity, as an example I'm going to choose a company that has made a really odd transition, Naughty Dog currently known for the Uncharted games, previously known for the Jak and Daxter games, further back known for Crash Bandicoot.
Now, Crash Bandicoot was an odd one, It was a platforming game which was released, generally alongside the Playstation (I know I got my copy bundled with my playstation). It received pretty decent reviews and made the whole world wonder what the hell a Bandicoot was.
The basic story is a mad scientist, hell bent on taking over the world genetically evolves two bandicoots, one gets away and decides to stop the evil dudes plans while trying to rescue his girlfriend, the other evolved bandicoot.
You don't often see that kind of story coming out of anything that isn't an Arcade or indie title...
Crash still makes an occasional appearance today in awful gimmick games.
Jak and Daxter was released for the for the PS2 and was highly praised as being one of the first games to boast a world where you can move freely between areas without any noticeable loading, it practically invented the seamless world in videogames.
It's story was about some mute kid call Jak and his friend Daxter who gets turned into some kind of talking ginger weasel and are sent off on a quest by a guy with a tree trunk stuck in his hair to save the world and it's energies (eco) from an a couple of evil guys using dark eco to fuel some kind of doomsday robot, I guess.
The Jak and Daxter games went through the same trauma that Final Fantasy did when they eventually allowed their lead protagonists to speak...
The last game I saw released about them was a spin off on the PSP involving only one of them.
Then there's Uncharted, a game that as far as I've heard is about a male Lara Croft shooting people and raiding tombs with no intention of giving the artefacts to museums.
This is Naughty Dog's current most popular franchise and to me it sounds boring as shit.
I don't doubt that maybe the story or the gameplay make it stand out better than that little blurb I just wrote, but as is it's not really catching my attention.
It's creativity and intrigue that draw me towards a title, Dark Void, even though I never ended up buying it drew me in enough to at least try the demo because it was a dude fighting alien robots with a jetpack, that sounds really awesome.
I looked stuff like 'Splosion Man, Half Minute Hero, Orcs Must Die!, IloMilo and countless other arcade titles because, sure they're not realistic, they're not sporting the highest grade UI's or mechanics, they just have what they've got and they're working brilliantly with.
The sky is the limit for the modern gaming industry and I think that's the problem, so much has been done to ensure that we can do just about everything we expect to be able to do with our games now that it is all we're doing. We've hit the graphical pinnacle and we're not making any attempts to come back down again.
I mean Halo was supposedly a revolution in FPS gaming, but has it gone anywhere since? It's come to the point where it has literally been made again but with shinier graphics.
Which is an issue in and of itself, that part where I said we're not attempting to move away from the pinnacle, this is what I mean instead of trying to tread the experimental ground that got us where we were, we're trying to bring the ground to us and make it conform to current standards.
This is only going to further the stagnation of gaming. That also goes for these HD remasters I keep seeing. I can understand wanting to bring the good old days to the modern generation but you shouldn't be allowed to cash in on it. You added some shininess to the character models, congrats, I can do the same with the plastic wrap filter in photoshop. It's something that needs to stop and stop really soon.
Because I think if we're ever to see another 'golden age' of gaming we're going to have to sit back and really truly look inside ourselves and ask 'Is what we're getting right now really all that we'll ever want?'
I hope it's not just me that thinks maybe it isn't.
G wrote this whole thing while itching to play 'Baby Monkey' on his iPad, a game with only two buttons and more fun factor than most current-gen titles.
