Well then what do you propose to do? Hire less 3D modellers and concept artists (who ultimately make the assets we see), and instead hire more thinkers instead? Like how there are only so many artists that perform exceptionally and stand out, game designers who think about the mechanics in much more depth are also not very common (and you'd have to look pretty damn hard for people who can do both). Even though the game industry is made of many teams, its the those faces like Sakurai, Sakomoto or Cliffy B that make it seem like an auterish medium. My point with that is that a group or a small team can say 'yes lets think a bit more about the mechanics before we try to model stuff' but when theres a massive group of people who all have different jobs, how exactly do you prioritise the mechanics when the other half of the team are asking 'Do we have anything else we need to draw/model/texture yet? We've only got a year left!'Theninja said:
The problem is not our attempts to advance our games (and we've certainly still got ways to go), its that the publishers like 'safeness' and right now our 3rd person cover based shooter is the (apparently) safest possible bet. Its that our game designers are not being told 'lets make a unique or fun game' but instead 'lets make GeOW or COD or whatever, it feels safe and relatable enough to make money' and the writers and artists are told to come up with new assets and story and whatnot around this basic frame. If anything, these guys are more original than our game designers, if only slightly due to them ripping off Alien(s) or something every thirty seconds.
The reason why I count framerate problems as a problem with the visuals is because it ultimately is as a result of poor optimisation of the visual game assets. If it was purely a gameplay problem, it wouldn't be fixed by getting a better graphics card, and it would have to be a failure as a concept. Theres a reason why you could have so many zombies on the screen in L4D without the game chugging the GPU. The problems AFFECT the gameplay, but it is not a result of the gameplay being flawed. Flawed gameplay cannot be fixed with a beefier set of processors. It needs a concept, many iterations and very thorough testing.
Hitboxes are what we use to tell if a bullet hit the enemy. The thing is is that you need the visual aspect to be able to say 'yeah I definitely hit him'. A misaligned hitbox means the game is lying to your eyes, its a failure to implement an element of the mechanic, but ultimately means the visual aspect cannot be trusted. I'd call it a mix of visuals and gameplay functionality.
You don't want to go back? I don't either! Where exactly did I say that? I wrote that post telling people that our visuals are not as good or bad as they seem, or rather as they make them out to be. Our visuals in most games are actually kind of average; not functionally problematic, but they can be dull and lack in detail at times. It's exactly why I wrote that saying a SNES game has worse graphics but better gameplay is redundant because the SNES visuals have become so iconic to people its a charm. The chibi look being as a result of optimising the hardware by using smaller sprites, and that means good visuals with strong and memorable characteristics, which means that the visuals on it aren't bad at all.
Conclusion: Gameplay and visuals affect each other, can't have one without the other in a game, poor concepts/optimisation of one hurt the other and so on. They're interlinked. Thats why I find the Gameplay versus Graphics war retarded. If there was a sacrifice to one, it was probably either the publisher or a lacking in experienced workforce.
Games are a visual medium. We should be advancing our game engines (Unreal Engine, again very well optimised engine, not possible without extensive innovation in the visual department) and we should be advancing our game mechanics (Half Life 2 giving us a physics engine, probably requiring the GPU to calculate it, but it was implemented in the gameplay mechanics)
