Words by Greywolfe
I’m currently playing through Hand of Fate. I might never finish playing it for review, because that game just keeps toying with my emotions. I’ll do most of a run, get almost to the end and then get killed by something random and unexpected.
I’m also playing a handful of other games – Shovel Knight, Braveland Wizard and older Sierra games and the like and as I’ve been playing them, one thing has become startlingly clear: while they’re obviously modern and while they’ve all obviously been through a 3d pipeline, none of them have needed that extra step.
So, let’s talk about how technology is basically attempting to drive game play over a cliff, sometimes.
This is you!
In the beginning, there was @
In the very beginning, computers couldn’t display graphics at all. So we made do: Games had character symbols that you could “interpret” as a character. For rogue-likes this meant that the @ symbol became very important, because that became you. $ was treasure. And all of this worked out rather well, because you’d see the game in your mind – you’d say, “oh, here’s a $, I wonder what treasure I’m going to find?”
Then graphics happened. First, crude, blocky graphics, followed by nicer, more colourful graphics and finally we started entering the realm of fully-fledged media production with real sound, because, of course, in the beginning, we didn’t have sound chips that could create the sound of footfalls on cement or seem like an orchestra was playing.
And, of course, it was all good.
But the thing that made it good was the gameplay. In a rogue-like, you’re always only a couple of steps from catastrophe: Maybe the potion you pick up halves your health. Maybe the bow you pick up is cursed. The first shot is fantastic, but every shot thereafter is a catastrophic miss. It created stories in your head. Stories that you could then tell your friends.
The mechanics mattered. As gaming got more stylish, this point held mostly true. Certainly, there were almost always games that had style over substance: Cyberia springs readily to mind from those days, or the haunting Beyond: Two Souls, with those crazy Quick Time Events.
The gameplay though had to matter, because that’s all those early experiences had. While some folks did try to pretty up their games, when you only had four colours, it meant that those four colours had to work really hard to look good. Take Weird Dreams, for example, or the forerunner of Surgeon Simulator, Life And Death. For the time, both of these games looked “pretty good”, all things considered, but they played terribly. Life and Death had the problem of being too complex, while Weird Dreams suffered from floaty controls, making the game impossible to beat. [to give Weird Dreams it’s due, it was “made that way” because the game was meant to be a dream sequence.]
By contrast, at the time, there were wonderful games that only used two dimensions to do amazing things like any of the Mario games, or EarthBound, telling a fantastic story. Or even the fourth instalment of Ultima, which – while a little light on the story, had an amazing idea – the sort of idea one doesn’t see in modern gaming.
But gaming isn’t static. And technology changes.
3d changed our perspective. Literally.
The 3d Revolution happened
Towards the mid-nineties, graphics cards started being able to do the third dimension. It was sort of serviceable 3d, but it worked. You got the impression of what you were looking at – even if it was rather boxy and rather ugly even only a year later.
The problem with technology is that it’s an arms race. Because Doom was a massive success – though it wasn’t “true 3d,” it meant that everyone had to hop on the bandwagon. And to some degree, gaming got sort of stuck for fifteen years. Everything had to be “more real”, leading to the term photorealistic.
Part of the problem, of course, is that game play suffered. Remember how I mentioned Cyberia before? Well, Cyberia’s plan was: Make a really beautiful looking shooter. The trouble was that, at the time, “really beautiful” also meant “rendered in 3d or bust,” because that was the only real way to make that work. What you got left with was a wonderful looking game that took the same pathway regardless of how many times you played it, but – at the time – it looked amazing.
Twenty years down the line from Cyberia, game play is still suffering.
Some of this can be attributed directly to the 3d element in gaming, because that subsumes so much development time that it leaves very little time for anything else. Yes, there may be a design document, and certainly, there will be a specification for how the game is played, but witness things like The Order: 1886. What should have been an intriguing game with a distinct premise – a sort of setting we don’t ordinarily see in gaming – the game play was marred.
In some cases even, the game play doesn’t need 3d. I mentioned Hand of Fate earlier in this piece and the reason I bring that up is because that whole game could have existed in 1989 when graphics were particularly primitive. Even, with some wrangling, the combat system.
But modern developers – in particular – feel like they must throw every bell and every whistle onto a game in order for it to have “the best chance at selling”. Expect to see this happen with things like the Oculus Rift. [The first “really new” technology to be introduced in a very long time] – Sadly, sometimes, it seems like this bit of common sense doesn’t seem to trickle down.
In Summary
Not every game needs all the technological bells and whistles. Some games in fact, might even be enhanced by the lack of 3d [or any other technological advance, as per your preference]. What matters most is story, gameplay and whether or not your intended audience enjoy what you have created on it’s own merits. Remember that, for the most part, technology is just a bullet point. It is not your game.
