Elder Speak (Week of April 3 – 6)

About the author

Randy Yasenchak

is the editor-in-chief of Elder-Geek.com. You can follow him on twitter @randyyasenchak.

2 Comments

1. 
   zkylon
   April 04, 2012

   @wednesday
   Awesome, glorious RE2 footage. Believe it or not, I can stand Skyrim’s and Dragon Age’s spiders, but RE2 to this day frighten the sh*t outta me. Back when RE2 was new, I beat it like 10 times and never thought two things about them, but I tried it I think was last year, and I just couldn’t get past the spider part (if you don’t remember, it’s the underground sewer thingie).

   I love that game, such a great atmosphere and gameworld layout.

   On to the day’s topic, I think good graphics are simply a bad, shallow thing. The way I see it, as console generations have gone forward, budgets haven’t increased proportionally with development costs, and that’s a problem developers solve by cutting corners and ambition, and that’s a very big issue.

   I think graphics won’t ever make a lasting impression on anybody’s life, but gameplay design can and has done so in the past.

   I’m not saying let’s do Atari 2600 games, I just think that the perfect era for gameplay-graphics balance was the PS2 era. Beautiful, smart and engaging games.

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2. 
   SuicideMachine
   April 05, 2012

   @Wednesday

   I’d like to see more games focused on a gameplay, instead of graphics… especially now, when a current console generation is getting close to an end and squishing more power for rendering of graphics becomes almost impossible. Obviously, it’s nice to see games rising the bar for graphics from time to time, but it’s important to remember – these are all games and as games, they must offer something apart from graphics. What matters for me is if graphics in a game serve their purpose, thus adding to a gaming experience? Or do they just “look nice”?

   One of the worst things I can think off, is when the graphics break the immersion that the game is trying to create or worse – get in the way of gameplay. And as much as I hate it – there are games that do that… because… I guess it’s easier to sell game that looks better. What is also bad, is that because people demand games that look better, devs must spend more time working on levels, so they need more employees, but many companies can’t afford it, so… they make levels more linear, they force events, where player has to kill xxx enemies to proceed (which “kills” gameplay)… and they make games shorter and shorter. Even though, it’s cool to play a greatly looking game, I think, it is a perfect time, for games with worse-graphics, but non-linear level design, instead – to start popping up, because that trend of short, 4-hrs long linear games is starting to be really annoying.

   Sorry for any mistakes I’ve made as a non-native English user.

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