Have We Gone Far Enough With Graphics For Now?

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Roxborough said:

In my opinion (using HZD as an example) deep gameplay consists of: 

- Intelligent AI that can 1. Detect features in the environment 2. Correctly path-find without looking clunky and unrealistic 3. React to the environment and character position so you can't just hide behind the same object for 15 minutes popping your head out and taking pot shots without it pursuing you 4. Reactive to specific damage, if their weakness is fire, maybe have a new animation to show them going "ouch I REALLY don't like this", if you shoot them in the leg, they could falter and stumble a little bit, instead of just constantly pursuing you regardless.

I'll just leave this here:

 

2 hours ago, Roxborough said:

- Non-specific traversing of the environment, so not a yellow notch or piece of rope on a rockface/cliff/building that you can jump up, you should be able to jump up and climb over any surface that looks climbable, and on the bigger monsters you fight, maybe be able to climb onto them too! Same goes for the stealth mechanics, no tall grass is better than other tall grass for hiding (I mention most of this in my other post)

This is more of a game design decision that asks the question "Does it make sense?" and "What does it add?" If you can climb on monsters, what value does it add to the overall combat system? Because if it doesn't add anything (other than maybe player frustration), it shouldn't be included. It's just more bugs you have to fix. On top of that you have to carefully craft the points at which such things can be possible. Making some generic rock face that's climbable would probably not look realistic nor would the character climbing up something they shouldn't look realistic either. And if you wanted to make it realistic, then that's just R&D budget going to studying it on something that may not really matter.

 

2 hours ago, Roxborough said:

- A good balance between combat and non-combat gameplay, puzzle solving/platforming/story/crafting/gathering broken up with periods of combat that change the pace so you're not stuck doing one thing for extended periods of time. Maybe a hunted system, where the humans catch wind that you're in a specific area and send out parties to take you down.

The former I get, the latter, not so much. If you're tracked down a lot, I would see that more as an annoyance than "ooh, that's pretty cool." I'd find it the equivalent of the cops looking for me in GTA... and I didn't even do anything. And if anything, it would just seem like a random encounter.

 

2 hours ago, Roxborough said:

- Combat is always the main gameplay component of every game, and if one area is particularly weak, it feels incomplete to me. Melee in HZD is awful. Period. I get that it is supposed to be a predominantly ranged based game but I don't feel fully in control of Aloy in most scenarios, it just turns into a mess. Even if you meticulously plan out your battlefield with traps, it never goes to plan and feels shallow and disconnected.

What makes you think most battle plans in the real world go exactly as planned?

 

2 hours ago, Roxborough said:

I'd have liked to see more acrobatics rather than just rolling, maybe a faster sprint, or a dive out of the way, or side stepping at the last minute to avoid an attack, or performing a parry, so if a giant tail swipes your way, you could pull out the spear and counter-attack, or take out your bow and fire a tear arrow at the tail to knock it off, rather than literally JUST a dodge mechanic. There just isn't enough to the combat for me, personally. I'm constantly trying to figure out ways to outsmart the machines, and it just turns into spam because there's not much else you can actually do other than the aforementioned.

Then that's a problem with the way the developers designed the combat system. And it again it all boils down to "what does this add?"

 

2 hours ago, Roxborough said:

- Get rid of RNG, if you knock a component off a beast, or find some loot in the game, have it not be a random amount, or random piece. Have it actually be the specific piece you knocked off, and when you loot a machine or human, if you've damaged something it will say "damaged X" and maybe each human's gear is available to loot too to give depth to the looting system; this is DEPTH, which HZD doesn't have much of. I had to kill 100's of rabbits for a specific part as it is a low drop rate, why not increase the amount of X you need to get so it isn't just random, there is a finite duration of time you can spend doing something so you feel like you're making progress rather than let's spend an hour hunting rabbits and not even get anywhere.

I understand the immersion breaking if you're looking for say a rabbit skin and somehow killing a rabbit doesn't result in a drop every time. But if you're going to get rid of RNG, then something else has to give. And I don't think the finite duration makes sense because if one is hunting out in the real world, barring the whole "hunting season" thing, you don't get some arbitrary amount of time to hunt and kill some animal.

 

And simply increasing the amount of whatever it is you need presents another problem: You're grinding. That can also break immersion.

 

All in all though, I don't think any of these have to do with the lack of processing power in available to the system. It's more like there were design choices that were made that you didn't agree with.

[Roxborough]

27 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I'll just leave this here: I love the AI in Half Life 2, probably some of the best, and yet quite simple it seems too!

 

This is more of a game design decision that asks the question "Does it make sense?" and "What does it add?" If you can climb on monsters, what value does it add to the overall combat system? Because if it doesn't add anything (other than maybe player frustration), it shouldn't be included. It's just more bugs you have to fix. On top of that you have to carefully craft the points at which such things can be possible. Making some generic rock face that's climbable would probably not look realistic nor would the character climbing up something they shouldn't look realistic either. And if you wanted to make it realistic, then that's just R&D budget going to studying it on something that may not really matter. I don't disagree with what you are saying. What I am saying is, the gameplay feels shallow, to me, personally, and I'd like something a bit more than rolling around like a headless chicken. My suggestions are just what could add more depth. I'm more bothered about movement. I don't want a generic rock face that is climbable, what about just an animation that shows her climbing over an incline... or jumping up something at her own height,like what Breath of the Wild has with climbing up a mountain. I mention in my previous post they did what they could with the time they had to develop the game, and it is still a truly great game, I just get bored easily with it now due to the lack of depth.

 

The former I get, the latter, not so much. If you're tracked down a lot, I would see that more as an annoyance than "ooh, that's pretty cool." I'd find it the equivalent of the cops looking for me in GTA... and I didn't even do anything. And if anything, it would just seem like a random encounter. I wouldn't want them to constantly come hunting for you, but say you have a period where you're out in the wilderness for more than 30 minutes without an encounter, which can happen a lot in HZD, it would be cool to have a random encounter, there aren't very many, if any that aren't mission/story based. But the melee combat is that crap I wouldn't want it to be implemented unless the combat system was deeper, blocking, parrying etc...

 

What makes you think most battle plans in the real world go exactly as planned? I don't think that they do, but when they all fail and turn into the same messy roll-fest, it makes me not want to play it so much.

 

Then that's a problem with the way the developers designed the combat system. And it again it all boils down to "what does this add?" It adds depth... that's what it adds, it adds more gameplay... I'd like to be able to just go, right, I want to go hunting and killing some people, because it's fun. And if you don't find the core mechanics fun, you're not going to have fun doing that are you? How many of us go on Assassin's Creed for example, just to kill hordes of dudes, I know I do! 

 

I understand the immersion breaking if you're looking for say a rabbit skin and somehow killing a rabbit doesn't result in a drop every time. But if you're going to get rid of RNG, then something else has to give. And I don't think the finite duration makes sense because if one is hunting out in the real world, barring the whole "hunting season" thing, you don't get some arbitrary amount of time to hunt and kill some animal. I'm not asking for realism, I just don't want to be hunting 100's of rabbits for 1 drop, and because it is random, it's frustrating to spend hours doing a remedial task. It becomes a CHORE to play.

 

And simply increasing the amount of whatever it is you need presents another problem: You're grinding. That can also break immersion. Yeah, so have a nice tidy balance of it... say... 5-10 rabbits? That's not a big ask, not a chore. 100's is a chore!

 

All in all though, I don't think any of these have to do with the lack of processing power in available to the system.  It's more like there were design choices that were made that you didn't agree with. It's a bit of both. To program for the additional A.I functions to enable the humans/machines to know what environmental feature removes you from detection is quite a feat, it would be the same with pathfinding and trying to get rid of all the bugs associated. They opted for the predetermined animation approach to traversing the environment, instead of something a bit more reactive, Aloy hits a big incline, but still walks up it like she's on a flatter surface for example; this should prompt her to put her hands down on the ground for stability, and programming that would be tough to react with rocks/uneven surfaces etc...

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just wanted to comment on this:

32 minutes ago, Roxborough said:

They opted for the predetermined animation approach to traversing the environment, instead of something a bit more reactive, Aloy hits a big incline, but still walks up it like she's on a flatter surface for example; this should prompt her to put her hands down on the ground for stability, and programming that would be tough to react with rocks/uneven surfaces etc...

Then we can say Guerilla Games went for the lazy route because MGSV features what can be considered some of the most realistic depictions of climbing in a game: https://kotaku.com/why-snake-is-the-best-climber-in-video-game-history-1636633722

 

And keep in mind this game was released on the PS3 and 360.

[Roxborough]

36 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Just wanted to comment on this:

Then we can say Guerilla Games went for the lazy route because MGSV features what can be considered some of the most realistic depictions of climbing in a game: https://kotaku.com/why-snake-is-the-best-climber-in-video-game-history-1636633722

 

And keep in mind this game was released on the PS3 and 360.

Exactly! I love the MGSV animations and movement. It's a shame the AI was so terrible But that's a staple of MGS.

[Mira Yurizaki]

30 minutes ago, Roxborough said:

Exactly! I love the MGSV animations and movement. It's a shame the AI was so terrible But that's a staple of MGS.

In what way?

 

I mean, in some ways humans are pretty stupid too and will do things in hindsight made you go "why didn't they see that!?" There was a discussion about this before on the programming forum where it was concluded that making perfect playing AI is easy. It's making AI dumb enough to be believable is hard. And then of course you still have to balance what you might expect to happen vs. what's more fun. Does it make sense that enemies will basically revert to a "relaxed" state that quickly even though they should know someone exists? No. But it'd be infinitely more frustrating if you only get one shot and they're constantly on alert.

[Guest]

20 hours ago, Roxborough said:

Exactly! I love the MGSV animations and movement. It's a shame the AI was so terrible But that's a staple of MGS.

That’s a design choice. If they were smart, you couldn’t do what you could. Dumb by design to let the player feel powerful. 

 

Edit:

ever hear a guard say “oh... I guess it was nothing”? That’s to let the player know what the guard is doing so the player can do cool things. If he didn’t, the player wouldn’t know what was going on. 

[aigars2]

We are going for digital reality which mirrors that of real world. It will only stop there. Games these days suck actually because they are not fundamentally new. 

[Zodiark1593]

On 6/22/2018 at 8:42 AM, Roxborough said:

Exactly! I love the MGSV animations and movement. It's a shame the AI was so terrible But that's a staple of MGS.

A common design goal of many games is to make the player feel as though they're "good" at the game.

[JZStudios]

On 6/22/2018 at 8:15 AM, M.Yurizaki said:

Just wanted to comment on this:

Then we can say Guerilla Games went for the lazy route because MGSV features what can be considered some of the most realistic depictions of climbing in a game: https://kotaku.com/why-snake-is-the-best-climber-in-video-game-history-1636633722

 

And keep in mind this game was released on the PS3 and 360.

I'm not finding the video, but HZD does have inverse kinematics and she does lean forward and use her hands.

 

But back on topic, I don't think graphical power is necessarily the issue, it's optimization which sucks. There are some things which are clearly pushing the limits, which is fine, but why is it forced? Ubisoft is notorious for this on the PC ports. There SHOULD be a large difference in not just visuals, but also performance from low settings to high. A lot of games have very little difference in on or the other, and often both. I'm starting to almost not like 1080 because games are trying to cram so much excessive crap on screen it becomes hard to see anything.

In the old days, alpha transparency and polygons were limited, so you got sharp crisp details where they were needed. Increasing the resolution and texture quality just makes the image clearer, but the base models are still easily and clearly defined.

Now there's so much that improving from 1080 to 4k kind of only technically clears the image, there's still an absurd amount of things on screen. Think about AA for example, a lot of the older games are 100% playable in 480 like they were designed, but imagine something like HZD in 480. I can't imagine it would be very easy to play.

[Mira Yurizaki]

25 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

But back on topic, I don't think graphical power is necessarily the issue, it's optimization which sucks. There are some things which are clearly pushing the limits, which is fine, but why is it forced? Ubisoft is notorious for this on the PC ports. There SHOULD be a large difference in not just visuals, but also performance from low settings to high. A lot of games have very little difference in on or the other, and often both. I'm starting to almost not like 1080 because games are trying to cram so much excessive crap on screen it becomes hard to see anything.

Maybe that's just the problem. We're getting to a point where the bar to great looking visuals of 5 years ago is lowered while hitting the point of exponential diminishing returns on the higher end. Or rather, the apparent quality is a logarithmic curve and we're at the point where the slope is tiny. I recall with all of those tessellation demos with an adjustable slider that at about a factor of 0.2 (I'm presuming this is standard, because it was common across the demos), it was very hard to tell what detail was added. Sure, if you enabled the wireframe, you could see it, but without it, you couldn't tell.

 

25 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

In the old days, alpha transparency and polygons were limited, so you got sharp crisp details where they were needed. Increasing the resolution and texture quality just makes the image clearer, but the base models are still easily and clearly defined.

 

Now there's so much that improving from 1080 to 4k kind of only technically clears the image, there's still an absurd amount of things on screen. Think about AA for example, a lot of the older games are 100% playable in 480 like they were designed, but imagine something like HZD in 480. I can't imagine it would be very easy to play.

I'd argue for open world games that require you to view things at a distance, lower resolution is a problem. But if you're not required to really spot things clearly enough far away, then resolution becomes less of a problem.

[Roxborough]

On 23/06/2018 at 1:15 PM, fpo said:

That’s a design choice. If they were smart, you couldn’t do what you could. Dumb by design to let the player feel powerful. 

 

Edit:

ever hear a guard say “oh... I guess it was nothing”? That’s to let the player know what the guard is doing so the player can do cool things. If he didn’t, the player wouldn’t know what was going on. 

Hence why I said it was a staple of MGS. I quite liked it for about 2 hours, but when there's zero challenge, it becomes monotonous. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

On 6/23/2018 at 5:15 AM, fpo said:

That’s a design choice. If they were smart, you couldn’t do what you could. Dumb by design to let the player feel powerful. 

 

Edit:

ever hear a guard say “oh... I guess it was nothing”? That’s to let the player know what the guard is doing so the player can do cool things. If he didn’t, the player wouldn’t know what was going on. 

To be fair, humans are known to be stupid or ignorant like that. The Bavarian Fire Drill is a real thing.

[Giganthrax]

Why would you want graphics to stagnate? If anything, I wish developers could really take advantage of modern hardware instead of having to optimize for crappy console hardware. 

 

And I'm not saying that because I myself would get to enjoy it anytime soon. All this talk of 240hz and 4K is cool and all, but how important is it, really? I'm gaming on a 1680x1050 monitor and 1360x768 TV, both on 60hz, and I just don't feel the need to drop a couple hundred euros for an 1080p screen because, frankly, games look & run pretty darn good for me. I really don't need to be able to run everything at ULTRA MEGA EXTREME settings in 4k to be able to enjoy a game.

 

Still, I want graphics to keep evolving. Evolving graphics mean that, once I do decide to upgrade, I'm going to get so much more for my money. 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

To be fair, humans are known to be stupid or ignorant like that. The Bavarian Fire Drill is a real thing.

I had no idea that’s why it was called haha. 

 

Makes sense for some stories. 

Spoiler

Story of 1940s Germany warning:

 

My grandma’s house was occupied by German soldiers at the time aiming at a bridge waiting for the Americans & her friend came in screaming not knowing the soldiers were there saying “who lets these idiot soldiers come into town?” 

 

Not really authoritarian but funny from the Bavarian women asserting dominance by shouting & not expecting challenge. I have a few other stories that have effect or failure but I think 1 story is enough. 

 

[Guest]

54 minutes ago, Giganthrax said:

Why would you want graphics to stagnate? If anything, I wish developers could really take advantage of modern hardware instead of having to optimize for crappy console hardware. 

PC exclusives?

[Giganthrax]

1 hour ago, fpo said:

PC exclusives?

We'll never have high-end PC exclusives for as long as piracy is as easy and as widespread as it is now. It's simply not worth it for the developers. 

 

Also, PC exclusive genres such as complex CRPGs, grand strategies, MOBAs and so on, just don't need super-duper graphics. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Giganthrax said:

Why would you want graphics to stagnate? If anything, I wish developers could really take advantage of modern hardware instead of having to optimize for crappy console hardware.

They are. We have examples like Ashes of the Singularity which can happily keep an 8 thread processor busy and DOOM which runs impressively well while providing great visual detail. 

 

The problem is that not everyone is up to date and a vast majority of people don't have high-end machines. Even if a developer is going to do a PC exclusive, their baseline is likely going to be a potato with a midrange card from four or so generations ago. Besides, optimizing for "lesser" hardware trickles up. It's much easier to scale something up than it is to scale it down.

[TacoSenpai]

Until our 2D Waifus become real the answer will be an unequivocal no.

[Guest]

47 minutes ago, Giganthrax said:

We'll never have high-end PC exclusives for as long as piracy is as easy and as widespread as it is now. It's simply not worth it for the developers. 

 

Also, PC exclusive genres such as complex CRPGs, grand strategies, MOBAs and so on, just don't need super-duper graphics. 

planetside 2? 

Arma 3?

crysis? 

 

Edit

black desert online?

world of Warcraft?

war frame? 

[Giganthrax]

5 hours ago, fpo said:

planetside 2? 

Arma 3?

crysis? 

 

Edit

black desert online?

world of Warcraft?

war frame? 

Aside from Crysis, none of those games were high-end graphically when they came out. 

 

Furthermore, 4 out of those 6 games are multiplayer titles, so piracy is a non-issue.

 

Finally, they're all 5+ years old titles from a time when AAA games were cheaper to make.