A short time ago, at a computer terminal far, far, away, Trav wrote:
>Will Day wrote: >> I played Mechwarrior I for _years_. THAT's how you know you have a great >> game. > >That is the problem now with computer games. Companies think all we want >to excite us are stellar graphics etc. BIg graphics no meat. > >That is what I want -- CONTENT, not just awesome graphics.
I was thinking about this. It used to be (in the earlier days of computer games) that the graphics systems available for computer games were severely limited. Their hands were pretty much tied in terms of graphics. So, in order to sell games, companies focused on the story and on the gaming aspects. This is what differentiated most games. Games had to stand out for their stories and their gameplay.
Now, with the wide availability of inexpensive, FAST hardware, it creates a lot of opportunity for advances in graphics systems for computer games, and similarly, creates the opportunity for a game to stand out from a competing product. Many companies realized this, of course, and strive to have their product stand out for its graphics systems.
Unfortunately, of course, this is often at the cost of story and gameplay.
Of course, you could also say that this lack of story and gameplay creates an opportunity for _another_ company to come along, license the latest graphics engine, and build an engaging story and interactive gameplay on top of it.
I don't see this happening a whole lot today, though, and I don't see it happening anytime soon for BattleTech/Mechwarrior fans. Although when MW3 comes out, it will supposedly incorporate technology from VWE's Btech Centers, they'll still have to spend a lot of time making it work on the home PC rather than their $X0,000 centers. I just hope they allocate enough time and effort to devote to story and gameplay.
Perhaps sometime soon, hardware and PC graphics systems will begin to stabilize, and companies will again have to focus on story and gameplay to sell their games. Or perhaps, even if we don't reach a technological plateau in terms of graphics, we might reach a _perceived_ plateau, a graphics saturation point where no matter how large the advance, it's just not very apparent to the player. For instance, if games went from a resolution of 2048x1536 to 4096x3072, it's a huge technological leap, but would it really look that much better?
This may actually happen in the next two years, if 3-D cards become as ubiquitous as we might hope. If most games in the market program for the same basic 3-D hardware, then a game's 3-D graphics will no longer be a selling point, as they'll all be technologically equivalent. Not to mention that programming for a single API like Direct-3D will allow programmers to spend less time on creating new graphics systems, and it will shift the responsibility for graphics advancements from the software programmers to the hardware. As a result, programmers will have more time and resources to spend on implementing interactive gameplay.
Irrespective of the hardware development, though, perhaps gamers will get frustrated with the lack of attention to story detail and gameplay control, and there will be a backlash against the almost exclusive focus on graphics which seems to dominate the game market today. I think I've reached that point now.
>DITTO on the MW1 engine. It is amazing to me how a company like >activision who has done things well in the past, can just forget what >everyone wants. I mean MW2 mercs is like they said ok this is what they >wanted, but this is how we can do it the cheapest. Everyone who >complained wanted the game to continue like MW1. HELLO ACTIVISION WAKE >UP!!!!!
I think it's two things. One is the change in focus in the market. The other, of course, is that Activision is a game publisher, and not always directly involved in the game design. We should remember that Mechwarrior I, although published by Activision, was actually written and designed by Dynamix, who is now published by Sierra.
And even then, the people who designed the game may no longer even be with Dynamix anymore. Does anyone know what Damon Slye, Mark Brenneman, Paul Bowman, Cyrus Kanga, and Kobi Miller are up to today? It would be interesting to hear what they considered their focus was for Mech1, and how they think it compares to its modern successors.
===
Will Day