I do think it's temporary. The last decade or so has seen an incredible growth of the gaming audience. It now spans all backgrounds and generations, and a large part of game buyers are new to the hobby. Sooner or later, they too should start getting bored by expensive games that look good, but are interesting for 5 hours or less.
Graphics are not unimportant. It was always an important part of games, and even in the pioneer days it was always about pushing the envelope. The problem is at the moment that money invested in graphics seems better spent than money invested in gamedesign and story, as you can currently get away with selling pure eye-candy, because there still are enough people who buy it and later feel ripped off.
Games just keep getting larger and larger and larger...
Moderator: LW Moderator
-
Doomed_Space_Marine
- Super Member
- Posts: 136
- Joined: Tue May 27, 2008 10:11 am
- Has thanked: 1 time
- Been thanked: 2 times
I think as far as FPS is concerned, John Carmack set the status quo for the importance of technology contrasted with game design.
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are about the most defining and influential shooters ever to come out. Bar none. That said, Carmack constantly held back the evolution of the genre because he built technology for a game, and not a game for the technology.
Tom Hall had a very different vision than the other members of id software (why he was fired), and Doom could have potentially provided the interactive story-driven FPS something along the lines of what half-life did some five years on (just read the Doom Bible), but Carmack was adamant that the public wouldn’t have been able to embrace something like that.
To this day, the majority of all shooters adhere to the point & shoot + run over items’ philosophy.
Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are about the most defining and influential shooters ever to come out. Bar none. That said, Carmack constantly held back the evolution of the genre because he built technology for a game, and not a game for the technology.
Tom Hall had a very different vision than the other members of id software (why he was fired), and Doom could have potentially provided the interactive story-driven FPS something along the lines of what half-life did some five years on (just read the Doom Bible), but Carmack was adamant that the public wouldn’t have been able to embrace something like that.
To this day, the majority of all shooters adhere to the point & shoot + run over items’ philosophy.
-
Trey
- Super Member
- Posts: 1671
- Joined: Thu Jul 12, 2007 3:43 am
- Location: U.S.A. - Just like Disneyland! (but with more Porn, Drugs, and Guns)
- Has thanked: 2 times
- Been thanked: 13 times
Speaking of Conspiracies. There's a certain amount of truth to the theory that Game software producers and Graphics card producers have an incestuous relationship. While on one hand you can say that audiences demand more eye-candy with every game release, and you have to push the envelope to keep gamers happy; there's also the fact that Graphics card producers get thogether with Software developers to tailor their game software to take advantage of the newest graphics capabilities. Hell, they funnel money to software developers to make sure they do that. Hence all the card specific problems we seen crop in in the last few years. If you don't have that proper Nvidia card (or whatever) you're not going to be able to get the game to run properly without a bunch of tweaking. Still, it's alot like planned obselesence you almost have to upgrade to the newest hardware in order to run the newest games, in the end you trash a perfectly good graphics card. It's not like consoles where there is a know quantaty of processing power, memory, etc. and you have to make the game fit the system. In PC gaming the sky is the limit.
-
Doomed_Space_Marine
- Super Member
- Posts: 136
- Joined: Tue May 27, 2008 10:11 am
- Has thanked: 1 time
- Been thanked: 2 times
I think it's kind of funny the minimum RAM requirement for Doom 3 is 384 Mb, but it will happily run on the Xbox Console, which only has grand total of 64 mb of onboard memory. But this is because the Xbox doesn't have to fight against Windows 
Edit:
My nonsense aside, you make some valid points Trey. Most video cards these days only have a life span of about two years, where in the past you could get much more mileage out of them. Hardware vendors are certainly enjoying game’s like Crysis which make you look at your rig in a different light if you haven’t upgraded in awhile. But, on the other hand, GSC Gameworld has stated Stalker Clear Sky will maintain the great scalability for different hardware as the original did. So it’s not all gloom and doom.
Edit:
My nonsense aside, you make some valid points Trey. Most video cards these days only have a life span of about two years, where in the past you could get much more mileage out of them. Hardware vendors are certainly enjoying game’s like Crysis which make you look at your rig in a different light if you haven’t upgraded in awhile. But, on the other hand, GSC Gameworld has stated Stalker Clear Sky will maintain the great scalability for different hardware as the original did. So it’s not all gloom and doom.
I wouldnt say that Stalker was so well optimized. Crysis runs on 64mb video card btw.Doomed_Space_Marine wrote:My nonsense aside, you make some valid points Trey. Most video cards these days only have a life span of about two years, where in the past you could get much more mileage out of them. Hardware vendors are certainly enjoying game’s like Crysis which make you look at your rig in a different light if you haven’t upgraded in awhile. But, on the other hand, GSC Gameworld has stated Stalker Clear Sky will maintain the great scalability for different hardware as the original did. So it’s not all gloom and doom.