A Graphic Matter
I have been thinking a lot about the graphic subject lately and I wanted to share my point of view and read yours.
With each new generation of video-games, the gaming industry presents us a new 'graphic standard' that is supposedly better than the previous generation. And one generation after the base 3D consoles (N64/PS1/etc), I can say that a new type of player appeared and has become really popular now a days: the graphic-whore.
I do not intend to judge their position, but the whole graphic subject made me think about it. And I've come up with two different point of views:
1. "Video-Games have the sole purpose of entertaining the player, thus as long as the gameplay keeps you involved and content with it, it has fulfilled its goal."
I can clearly see it with the past generation games. Although their graphics can't be compared to the current-generation, most of them can provide you a better time than most new games.
The fact that some people grew with those 'old' consoles might explain part of that feeling. However, I never owned a SNES, nor a gameboy and still find most of their games more entertaining than the new ones.
2. On the other hand, "developing a game with lower-than-average or lower-than-the-available graphics might give the player a feeling that the company that developed the game was lazy enough not to give the best they could to the game."
Of course that doesn't apply to games that intentionally have 'retro' graphics
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Another thing that bothers me about graphics is that it has the power to decide whether a game will sell/be popular or not. And this happens tremendously often. You can take for example Bastion, released for the PC and Xbox (last year, IIRC). It didn't receive a 10/10 on some review sites because it has colorful/childish graphics.
Another game that I can point is Divinity 2. Most people didn't get to know it because the reviews took 10~20 points out of it because the graphics weren't at the 'standard' at the time.
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To finish this off, I'd like to point something that bothers me A LOT and it's pretty much exclusive to the PC: Companies that make their game for the latest (if not the latest, close to) generation of computers ONLY, by not allowing the user to change quality settings.
I own a rather old laptop (it's from 2009, IIRC) that lacks a decent video-card. However, I can play a good amount of games that require a lot of your video-card by just changing the settings to low.
But when I stumble across a game that doesn't allow me to change the settings, I'm forced to uninstall it, as much as I want to play it.
This happened quite recently when I got a copy of Rayman Origins. While the game isn't graphic heavy, it doesn't give you any options to change glowing-effects, shadows, etc. And I wasn't able to play properly because of that.
Another example is Skyrim. The only way I was able to play it was tempering with the preferences configuration file, as the in-game settings won't do much about shadows and other rendering effects.
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Anyways, I'm aware that this post is quite long, but I really would appreciate if you'd read it and post your thoughts. Thanks.~
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