Do you mean the character models? Because HDTP is all about models. Without models, there's nothing left. Well there's textures, but all the textures are for models, so...


That does sound about right, but I still wonder though. Assume that two people thoroughly enjoy a game. Both are loving the gameplay, appreciating the acting, engrossed in the narrative, blown away by the sound design, etc. But one of them is totally disregarding the graphics while the other person isn't.

I realise it's fundamentally stupid to argue over quality of game experience, it's a very subjective thing and it's damn hard to establish anything approaching useful metrics. Is a game more enjoyable for everyone when you play with headphones or surround sound, for example? Is a horror game always enjoyed better in a darkened room? But still - if one person is enjoying 4 aspects of a game but not disliking any aspects, and another person is enjoying 5 aspects of the game but not disliking any aspects, why is it unfair to say the second person is having a better game experience?

I'm not sure this discussion has merit, and I don't have any answers. Just wondering out loud.

And of course there IS a potential for shittier graphics in games to automatically give the game more 'benefit of the doubt': i.e. super uber raytraced bumpmapped parallax mapped subsurface scattering effects might lead one to assume that a similar level of effort had gone into the gameplay (even in light of the caveats Jonas pointed out re: dev hours). A more crappy appearance might lower this level of expectation somewhat.

It's the age-old question of "would DX still be as awesome if it came out today?"

(NB you are all, by virtue of being here to read this, ineligible to accurately answer that question)

Well, I still appreciate the art design, aside from graphics. In that context Morrowind > Oblivion for example.

There is also with the "better" graphics it seems games start to lack soul. Sure, Witcher II/UE3 looks good, but it's so damn plastic, devoid of actual life. It looks shiny and unreal. And good way to express emotion I find more important in characters than their polygony count.
Sadly, not many seem to agree with me.

Also the added fact that modern games with all their layers and filters give me a headache rather quickly. Are "better" graphics worth the health issue? 4 hours DX, feel fine. 4 hours Bulletstorm? My head comes out thumping and beating.

It was the first game to make me realize there was more to gaming then shoot 100-get a better gun-shoot 500-get yet an even better gun-shoot 1000 and beat the game.
Considering the number of games that method still applies to, I'd say yes (inaccurate as that may be ).

I have done exactly that for about 5 years now. It's not even a laziness thing. I own glasses. I just don't wear them.

Well, Jonas, since you wonder out loud...I think a 5-pronged experience is not necessarily supperior to an experience based around just 4 of those prongs. For example, consider Portal 2. Portal 2 had an ARG, as you will recall, centered around potatoes. People participating in that ARG arguably got more portal for their moneys worth than people who never did.

That doesn't mean the ARG participants portal 2 experience was necessarily supperior, and in some cases I'm sure you'll agree it were not.

The main thing here is that the additional elements can introduce dissonance, and being completely ignorant of those elements will obviously save you from that.
I posit that a baser understanding of concepts full of dissonance can accomplish the exact same thing.

Like if the lyrics are horrible in a song, a baser understanding of them (merely as a sort-of vocal-cord instrument) can reduce the dissonance, thereby improving the experience.

I can also increase ressonance. Some really simple music (like techno or eurodance) can induce a sort-of hypnotic trance.

That's not even touching on the idea of sensory deprivation or sensory-altering drugs. By inhibiting parts of your brain with LSD or pot many find that they can highten experiences of artwork, music or movies. Sometimes, removing stuff from the experience simply makes it better.

I mean, your example seems relatively clear-cut, but if we're talking in really general terms, I'm not sure it remains so.

Well that does make sense. I personally thought Morrowind looked incredibly dull though, even back then. Devoid of colour, ugly characters, yecch. Just couldn't get into it. Oblivion was ugly too, but at least it had colour, and the landscapes were pretty. Oblivion's problem is that it was incredibly stereotypical, which is one reason why I'm enjoying Skyrim so much more - it lets me explore a setting with a large enough twist that it feels fresh to me, but it's still more vibrant and pleasant than Morrowind.


I think you're hinting at the Uncanny Valley there, which I think is a slightly overused concept (not your fault, obviously). I know what you mean, but to me graphical quality and art quality are two distinct things that are sometimes easy and something difficult to separate. I can think of examples of games with awesome high-tech graphics and awful art direction, I can think of games with amazing art direction despite being restricted to ancient graphics technologies, but I can equally think of games that use all the modern tech bells and whistles to produce brilliant art with excellent and consistent vision. I liked how The Witcher 2 looked though, I found it to actually have a fair amount of stylisation that helped to bring life to its characters. The lip syncing sucked, though, as I recall - and the face animation in general wasn't great.


That's interesting. I'm not sure why that is. I played Bulletstorm almost all the way through in one sitting without experiencing any problems. Any idea what the particular problem is? How do you feel about eg. the film Transformers 2? I ask because if you have no problem with that, your problem might be the broader focus required to interact with a videogame - you can't just let your eyes be guided like in a film because every pixel in a game might potentially hold important information that you need to act on.

Aemer: points taken.

Haven't seen that movie. Although I do have issues "seeing" 3D, so it could be just my eyes.

Still; it's a pain that I feel so damn miserable after playing an UE3 title for a considerable time.

The problem is actually due to graphics or better due to the game engine in general. One problem is the frame update rate. UE3 has rather unstable frame-rate. This means the frame-rate bounces between a low and higher value constantly depending on your camera view. This inconsistent frame-rate puts stress on the brain since it is used to see a constant frame-rate in reality. Also in movies the frame-rate is constant not so games. Another problem is the "look ahead" and "dynamic defocus". If you turn quickly in real life your eyes move faster to the target than your head to avoid nausea. The eye also slightly reduces the focus during the fast turn (by moving the focal point closer where stuff moves less fast) so the flood of information is reduced to get an average information flood again. Games on the other hand keep full rendering during turning and also do not "look-ahead". So the brain is flooded with massive information which it is not used to.

I know this problem myself. Certain games I can't play longer than an hour tops as then I get nausea and could puke while others I could play on a marathon and it doesn't yield any negative effect. It's in general games with fast turning and/or fast movement speed that have unstable frame-rates.

Hassat, what monitor do you use?

I don't recall having headaches on account of games...not even motion sickness...since playing the settlers on my dads 80282, on a 15" CRT monitor.

That game ran at a very low resolution, and would have massive high-contrast blinking because all the animations happened synchronously, so when a lot of workers were walking back and forth with stuff, that would really mess me up.

I ordinarily never get headaches from gaming, though it can be tirering...

So when gaming was invented or came about as a medium, the idea was always to emulate /be capable/get closer to photo realism? Was this thought process inevitable? What did the people think when they saw pong? Did they imagine other games coming out of this, or just a "better" looking pong? Is this something that was inevitable because of the way that humans work/think? So it comes about that games cannot be enjoyed for the sake of games, for the sake of its invention, but can only take the medium for granted and then wish for that medium to "improve"?

In regards to buildings, I was just talking about the look of a building. I can and Im sure you can too, look at a building and know if they are old or newer. You can read certain signs and codes that tell you this. But what if I showed the picture to a tribesman who had never seen anything taller then one or two stories? How would he know which building is newer?

I see a few people have questioned the merits of HDTP. I personally think its a worthy project, and when they're done, is it a new product, or an updated product? How much do visuals matter to a game? If we say "Deus Ex when used with HDTP is an updated product" we can say the ideas of the game matter more then the graphics used to represent those ideas. If we say its a new product, then we tie the graphics in with the game and say they're one product, and changing any aspect changes the original product. From my point of view, its updating the product and will give the game a new look and hopefully a new audience too. Maybe better graphics help people in regards to the imagination; it helps them imagine that the game is already photo realistic and immerse them in the game better, as they are not as aware that they're playing a game? I don't know, but in our current environment that HDTP is a good project and will help spread Deus Ex to more people.

Can games be played for the sake of games anymore? I've seen countless threads of many forums saying "the graphics on this game are crap!" implying or outright saying that they will not enjoy the game because of this fact. So maybe we have gone to far and now can never go back, graphics must constantly improve to sell.

I guess it comes down to personal taste. On the Steam forums there a few that say Skyrim's graphics are crap, and more that either say they're not (on ultra), or that it doesn't matter. In the discussions here about it I can't recall it being an issue one way or the other. My own example would be vanilla Freelancer, which while I've played just a bit less than DX, I wouldn't say the game had great graphics. The Crossfire mod for Freelancer has much improved graphics and it's nice to fly around space looking at the wonderful planets, nebulas, and such. I still like playing vanilla Freelancer even though I could play the campaign in the mod, as I have a couple of times.

I suppose it could be a matter of what you've been brought up with. When I was a quite a bit younger it was ferkin Space Invaders, so my expectations might not be as high as say, anyone who's only been gaming in the last five years. I love all the pyrotechnical explosions in Just Cause 2, highly entertaining as that might be, I don't rate it a better game than vanilla Freelancer because of that.

Not sure about all the way back with Pong, but have you ever seen Tron? I think that represented pretty well the ideas that some people had about the future of the medium - I think everybody always knew that games would get more powerful when processing power improved, but I don't think people quite agreed in what way games would grow. Some probably imagined fully realised worlds in terms of aesthetics, whereas others might have been interested in the depth of simulation you could achieve with more cycles.

We've got both of course, we would've creamed our pants in 88 at the thought of real-time physics simulation at the level of PhysX, I think that's a good example of a technological improvement that's had a huge impact both on gameplay and visuals.

I guess the whole paradigm of immersion through visual fidelity and breath and authenticity of interactivity with the virtual world was if not started then cemented by Janet Murray in her 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck. I guess if nothing else it caught the zeitgeist in the development communities, that immersion was king and everything must always be more authentic and more consistent in order to maintain the player's immersion and (the hint is in the title) eventually approach the total immersion of the Star Trek Holodeck where the game can't be distinguished from reality. That idea has more or less been debunked since then, but it gives you an idea of where people used to think games were headed.

I wish it hadn't been debunked

I think they were working for profit, just not monetary profit. Profit can be more than just money.