TuringTest said:
Lateinos said:
My guess (as well as my hope) is that games will be taken further in the direction of immersion. In the last decade of gaming, we've had an upsurge in games which make you feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself. We've crept through the halls of a once-splendid underwater city, still haunted by the ghosts of its past. We've read graffitied messages on safe-room walls, some serious, some facetious. We've found our way through crumbling apartment complexes, littered with the bodies of their former occupants.
Immersion is what I value in my games most of all. Take Bioshock, for example, which is probably my favorite game. As much as I love the gameplay, including the excellent combat system, it is the immersion that makes this game so exceptional. It is lucky the gameplay is so elegant, or else it may have gotten in the way of the oppressive atmosphere, which filled me with incredible paranoia throughout.
To further immersion, graphics will continue to improve. Many games have already crossed the uncanny valley to become pleasing again, and soon, all commercial games will have reached this point. It is possible that the industry will experiment with 3D at some point in the future, considering the role another dimension could play in immersion, but what sort of technology and when are far beyond my reckoning. I just hope it's not one of the 3D technologies they're using in movies; I'm not a fan of the 3D craze.
Immersion has always been something that's been interesting to me - and I think graphics are certainly a very confusing thing. Considering I can well immerse myself into games like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft, while I can't immerse myself into say, Call Of Duty, it may seem like graphics aren't important or actually reverse what people expect. Really, in my opinion, I think the graphics need to be more about the tone of the game or what the game is trying to represent over than looking shiny in order to immerse better - on the same note, however, yes, graphics are consistently if subtly improving over time. Remember when Metal Gear Solid 2 had cutting edge graphics? Yeah...
So yes. Immersion, assuming the game devs see the potential dollar in it and roll with it, should be very deep in the future. And as for 3D - I'm not sure of it. But if motion control improves to the point of no longer requiring a peripheral AND being very consistent, fun and easy to use, and they develop some method of 3D that works and isn't absolutely, completely clunky and overpriced like most 3D methods are in this day and age - I very much look forward to seeing what happens there.
To elaborate, I didn't mean to say that improved graphics are essential to immersion, just one of several factors in the effect. What's important for the immersion is not the fact that the objects in the game are more lifelike, but rather, the ability of such an increase in detail to convey information to the player. For example, let's suppose our game designers want to place a corpse in the game. There are a lot of reasons to do so, but let's say the reason is to warn the player of the impending danger of the area they are about to enter, thus building suspense. The question I have nearly every time I see such a corpse in a game is inevitably: "How did they die?" The more detail I see in the killing blow, the more I understand about the circumstance of his death, and therefore, the dangers ahead. If He has a bullet hole in his head, I can expect to see some soldiers around. If he looks like he's been torn apart by claw-like mandibles, I'll be on the look-out for wild animals and/or alien mutants.
Not that practical information is really what I'm looking for in the corpse. Instead, what drives my craving for information about this nameless, unknown man or woman is natural curiosity. What I usually wonder consciously is merely "How did he/she die?" but this is only the first question in a series of questions, which ultimately leads to the most pressing question of them all: "Who was he/she?" Confronted by the remains of a person, I am instantly filled with a desire to understand this person, tantalized by the impossibility of knowing this person.
What I mean ultimately about graphics is that the better they are, the more details the art director can add, and perhaps more importantly, the more recognizable each detail becomes. If games continue on this track, then games will continue to update their graphics to resemble, as much as they can, the real world. What the video game medium secretly craves is to be the real world, and every graphical limitation is an obstacle to be surmounted in pursuit of this goal.
Good graphics do not cause immersion, but they do encourage it. Given their new options, as well as an increased ease in pursuing them, art directors will indulge in greater levels of detail. However, just as today, only those game designers who use details intelligently will benefit fully from the immersive properties of increased graphical capabilities. That's why there are high spec, graphically advanced games that are less immersive than Minecraft, in spite of the latter's jarringly un-lifelike graphics.
And, of course, immersion is often dependent upon sound as much as the image, in fact, in a lot of ways, more so.
