(Please forgive all spelling mistakes, grammar errors, and incorrect information; I tried researching all information in this article to its fullest. Also please keep in mind; this is not trying to start a flame war, just an opinion of one gamer.)
/start_rant
A lot of threads recently are proclaiming game such as 'Gears of War 2', and 'Killzone 2' to be much better then each other and/or other games. What a sad world we live in.
I believe that now a days gamers are spoiled, we are getting great looking games such as Resistance: Fall of Man, Bioshock, and Mass Effect, and now won't touch a game with so called 'last gen graphics.', the phrase 'Don't judge a book by its cover.' comes to mind.
Yes I loved Mass Effect, (playing it through again a second time.) Bioshock is epic, and Resistance was amazing to watch, and while all of those games are pretty, but what makes them truly good games was they were 'fun'. But what truly brought these games together was the sum of its parts.
Now I would like to direct attention over to 'Too Human' developer, Silicon Knights. They have a formula for their games called 'Flow' defined as:
Quote: a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
The formula comes out, as Silicon Knights say, like this:
Quote: Engagement >= Content + Game Play + Technology + Art + Audio.
If we take graphics and artsyle, they would be fit in, I believe, with 'Art'. Notice it does not repeat 'Art' five times. It's only on there once. Once. Count. So the graphics, which many people are focusing on, are only 1-out-of-5 of the key elements the Flow theory displays as needed to achieve Flow.
Now I would like to state that I am not trying to downgrade the game Art. I admit I find myself lost sometimes looking at screen shots of Resistance 2, and Too Human. They are beautiful. And they are still one of needed elements to achieve Flow, so they are important. But I think gamers, as a society today, and judging the book's a little too heavily these days.
For example, Turok that was released this year. It uses the all-too-familiar Unreal 3 engine, and no where near is it the best looking game using this engine. Or of any game engine, for that matter. Any while I was browsing the Gamespot forums, a lot of people were complaining about the game because of its graphics.
But I knew this in advance, and yet I still pre-ordered it. Why? Because to me, it was fun, and even though the graphics did not fry my brain with how amazing they were, they weren't bad. And now I am happily playing the game today.
Now for a more extreme example. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. After reading through the forums, looking at screenshots and trailer, and after playing through the demo a couple of times. I have to admit, the game does not look very good at all, worse then Turok and yet it uses the same game engine. Unreal 3.
It looks bad, it was slow for an FPS, the plot was uninteresting, and the audio is the same epic stuff we gamers are forced to listen to year, after year, after year. This game just did not work for me, but am I baseing all of the reasons why I am buying the game because of the graphics. Nope.
Now back to what started me on this rant. Gears of War 2, and Killzone 2.
First let's hit up Gears of War 2. The game it's self is still unconfirmed, and no screenshots, trailers, or any game play news at all have been released. So it would not be accurate to say that Gears of War 2 looks better then Killzone 2, because we still won't know what it looks like. End of.
Next, Killzone 2. While the game looks amazing, almost like a full-leagthed CGI movie, is it going to be fun? We don't know, apart from a few tidbits of information, and by dissecting the latest E3 trailer, the publisher and the developer have not released that much information. So while Killzone 2 will, by the looks of it, be one of the best looking games ever. If you don't find it fun, would you only play it by looking at it?
In the end I have to say again, I am not discrediting graphics, but we as gamers need to realize that graphics are not everything, and we have to liberate our mind-set we currently have about games.
And in the end, now real can graphics keep getting? With games like Frycry 2, and Resistance looking almost completely real, as if what was happening in the game could pop out of the screen, game graphics will soon reach a point where the cant really get any more life-like, then life itself.
Maybe when that day comes, then gamers can finally start worrying more about how the game plays, sounds, and feels, then on how it looks.
/end_rant
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