Maybe the reason why good older game art is so cohesive is that one, maybe two nerds were sitting behind Deluxe Paint when creating all of the art work for the games.
Nowadays…sheesh, what’s the art department size for a next gen game? And how uber-focused must the art lead being in trying to herd those cats?
While I agree it must be a challenge, look at World of WarCarft for an example of how it can be done successfully. Enormous art team, very consistent art style. They must have a helluva design bible.
It really depends upon the game type and graphical style. I replayed all the Wing Commanders a while back, and the sprite flight engines for the first 2 games are pretty crappy, while the flight engine for WC3 is still pretty fun, even though it’s terrible even compared to the engines developed a couple of years after it.
I agree with the isometric/first person distinction – I think the old Ultimas, for instance, are still o.k. Or the isometric fighting engines of the Gold Box games, vs. the “first person” exploration graphics, which are painful.
So is there a point where this will stop happening? I mean I find the graphics in System Shock 2 to be just fine. In 10 years, will HL2 still be acceptable (though not as good as the contemp stuff)? Was there a line (or will there be) where we can play these games no matter how old they get? I think Steve is right in saying the blurriness is a lot of the problem, but that’s kind of relative. I don’t remember thinking MoM was overly blurry at the time. But now 800x600 games, like Diablo2 look a bit dated to me. At the time, I thought it looked great (others thought it could have looked a lot better, I know).
So clarity is a big part of this. I can’t see anything in X-Com. I’m curious though as to whether or not I’ll have the same problem some day when I play Oblivion.
I don’t know, the cut off for me is the whole SVGA/VGA difference - once you’ve got used to at least 640/400, all the old VGA and Amiga games I used to obsessively play just seem like trying to play a Seurat painting - I honestly can’t believe that I didn’t get distracted by how big the pixels were.
I think it’s already stopped – the graphics from 10 years ago, for instance, (unreal, etc.) may lack polygon counts, but they’re still do a pretty good job and are not ugly. There was a pretty radical change every 5 years previously - compare the stuff in 1980 to 1985, or 85 to 90, or 90-95. Since 96 or so graphics have been good enough that they’ll never be “unplayable”, as a lot of stuff before that is unless you’re pretty devoted or nostalgic.
A graphiclly great looking game with crap gameplay is a crappy game.
A so-so looking game with great gameplay is a great game.
There are alot Super NES games that I would rather still play, and genesis for that matter, then alot of the super high quality graphic games out today.
I still play Yar’s Revenge, and that’s an Atari 2600 game. Great, though very simple, game play. It has crap, well atari 2600, graphics.
I suspect HL2’s graphics will still be considered damned good ten years from now. HL2 looks good not because of its technology (which is good), but the artwork. Compare Oblivion’s zombie people to HL2’s characters.