Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Lepanto on February 22, 2014, 01:22:59 pm
-
So, graphics. How much does a campaign's graphical quality affect your FSO experience? Do you think that the community's asset standards should keep rising, and that new campaigns should strive to have full-HTL modpacks? Or are you willing to tolerate some graphical weakness if the campaign offers something else that interests you?
If your opinion is mixed (i.e. you find some graphical features more important than others, or something), then check multiple answers.
-
For me, consistency beats shininess. A mod that has a coherent sense of style (by using assets that fit together well, either because they were part of a fleetpack, or because the modellers were working with the same style language) will certainly be a more pleasurable experience for me than one that has assets that vary wildly in style and detail.
That being said, I am a sucker for shiny graphics. Post-processing effects can enhance the visual flair of a mod rather drastically, and I would love to see more people using them.
-
I wouldn't worry too much about graphical fidelity for mods. I mean, yes, you want your mod to look pretty and draw people in, but to me, to really hook them gameplay is paramount. Eyecandy can be upgraded easily later with a model upgrade or another prettier ship, but gameplay is harder to upgrade once its done since so much of the mod depends on it.
So lower quality models wouldn't bother me too much. Maybe the only thing that might bother me is if the quality isn't really inconsistent. A Pheonix Rising right next to a GTD Cube O' Doom might be a little weird. But still I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as you're happy with it. Wings of Dawn used ships made by Spoon as he was learning to model ships and texture. The Antagonist used a ship bigchunk made by himself and the rest of the assets were all community ships with varying levels of quality.
-
Axem's opinion is Objectively Correct. (http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-colbert.gif)
-
Good mission designers use high-quality assets to build mission atmosphere. Mission designer is able to invoke a certain response from player to higher quality visuals that would not necessarily be possible with lower-quality visuals. In other words, higher-quality assets don't need to be just eye-candy, they can be built to be functional, perhaps even essential part of a mission.
Case in point, simple mediavps upgrade can achieve much higher emotional response from player when presented with higher-quality visuals:
http://i.imgur.com/FLy2BsE.jpg
http://blueplanet.fsmods.net/E/pics/screen0011.png
And something built from ground-up to be pretty and functional.
http://imageshack.us/a/img821/3300/p8t.png
http://blueplanet.hard-light.net/city1.jpg
And then something little different, yet cool.
http://youtu.be/AwIGhoM-6kE
http://youtu.be/OdYxVKucA1Y
I hate to admit it, but I have yet to play WiH 2, but from what I've seen, the mission do use higher-quality assets to make them work and invoke appropriate response from player. In the future this kind of mission designing will only increase.
So bottom line, I don't care for higher-quality assets just for the sake of them being higher-quality. But when they improve atmosphere of the mission or are even essential part of how the mission works, hell yes. And this was an addendum to what Axem said.
-
I prefer when a campaign has a consistent quality of assets. Seeing an old, blocky, tile-mapped ship next to some HTL shiny goodness is somewhat immersion-breaking for me. On the other hand, WoD's ships are blocky, but that doesn't prevent the campaign from being fantastic, and the general quality of ships is consistent and you can see that there is a consistent aesthetic applied (consistent is starting to be my favourite adjective). So, overall - I would love to see more goodies from the HLP wizards, but it's not the most important thing - aesthetic and mission design would be more important.
I also think that one of the most important things that a campaign must have for me is some new shiny little gimmick that was not implemented previously (controlling a cruiser, interactive dialogues, being horror-themed, non-linearity, awesome cockpits, great cutscenes, good use of post-processing filters, making FS a sidescroller, atmospheric missions, awesome new anis). That or the fact that it's made by one of the HLP fred gods.
EDIT: seeing the posts that popped up while I was writing this one, it would seem that WoD is the perfect example of gameplay>graphical goodness.
EDIT2: AdmiralRalwood: whoops ;)
-
WiD
War in Dawn, the BP/WoD mashup you've all been waiting for! ;)
-
Grapheex ar everthin' bad Grphx = bad campgn ok?
-
I personally believe that Graphics fall under two spheres: Consistency and Stylization.
As long as all the art assets don't differ in quality too much I can get behind it. Tiling-Violations are cosmic crimes on my eyes unless done excellently.
And then there is style; having cartoon-ish/Simplistic (Texture-wise) ships like DimEc's mixed with WiH's ships becomes too jarring a difference in style to reconcile.
-
Gameplay is a domain of it's own. It needs to be in perfect harmony with the graphics and audio.
Example of bad audio: Tenebra using the Star Trek Elite Forces 2 shotgun secondary fire sound (I think.) It does not mix with the rest of the audio for the rest of the fighter guns.
-
I don't go back to ugly campaigns. Only those that are pleasant to watch on the second go. On the initial it doesn't matter all that much.
-
Graphics are totally unimportant for me :)
I still play old mods like The Babylon Project 2.0 for campaigns that are incompatible with R3 or Inferno: R1, because there are some very interesting campaigns based on Inf R1 out there.
And they have all retail-looking models and graphics.
-
I think that while they're not the most important part of a campaign, they're important nonetheless. Pretty visuals enhance immersion and done well, they can really help. A good story can carry a game with both poor gameplay and graphics, but a campaign maker should strive to excel all 3 qualities. There's no shortage of great models, effects and sounds available, no reason not to use them.
-
Where are these good sounds!? WHERE
-
Personally, I'm not a graphics person. Though I certainly like the cool graphical enhancements and assets which this community has produced, I value gameplay and other stuff much more. If it came between kewl graphics or new gameplay features, I'd take the gameplay features every time. I like INFR1, sorta BECAUSE of its cheesy old-school tilemap graphics.
In fact, I've been thinking about doing a deliberately-cheesy old-school-ish campaign, with horribly-outdated ships that nobody but newbs or maybe Axem would ever think of using in anything ever nowadays.
I'd been asking about sheer asset quality, but keeping a coherent visual style was definitely a point worth mentioning. Asset consistency does make it harder to assemble a modpack out of loose ships and other effects, though.
-
I think there is a development takeaway here. Anything that keeps you from FREDding is an active evil. I have watched campaign after campaign totter and fail and the reason is always the same: they are not building missions, they are doing other things. Sometimes the other things are necessary, but more than anything else, FREDding is the necessity.
Whatever it takes to produce quality missions, that must come first.
-
Graphics hold most of their impact on initial impressions. After that I find I'm concentrating mostly on gameplay elements and HUD/icon prompting more than environmental visuals, and this is where the gameplay need to be solid to hold my attention. This really goes for any game, not just FSO.
So you could say "Looks open the door, gameplay seals the deal." :P
-
Like several other people, I generally think overall visual style and consistency are more important than raw visual quality, and leave more of a lasting impression. You can see that with a lot of the earliest fully-3D games out there: many of them have aged horribly due to the style they went for, but then you get something like Ocarina of Time which, while technically ancient, is still completely-playable. And at the end of the day, it's always the enjoyability of the gameplay that will win out. I would still be perfectly willing to fire up retail FS now in order to play something that might require it, and while I'd spend a bit of time lol'ing at the ancient graphics, if the playability was there I'd get caught up in it again with no problem.
That being said, I like my shinies too, so if that's something you're able to add after focusing on the core stuff, go for it.
-
Where are these good sounds!? WHERE
Quite a few quality sounds in Steve-O's modpack. Diaspora has a lot of high quality, generic-sounding ones. BP also has plenty, but you probably know that. :)
-
While visuals are certainly welcome, Take wings of dawn for example, they may not be the BEST crafted models, however they certainly look great. However the campaign was fun and the story was pretty good, if a bit standard when it comes to anime.
-
Where are these good sounds!? WHERE
Quite a few quality sounds in Steve-O's modpack. Diaspora has a lot of high quality, generic-sounding ones. BP also has plenty, but you probably know that. :)
The BP team don't seem terribly satisfied with their current sound effects, really.
-
Some of them are really good, some of them demand iteration. The Maul got a lot of work on its SFX and VFX to bring it to a place where it was fun and satisfying to shoot.
-
This thread reminds me how much we enjoy with 50 Polygons :D
(http://i.imgur.com/POvZlnt.png)
-
Aliasiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing...
-
Good graphics can make an already good campaign seem great, but they IMO can't make a bad campaign into a good one.
-
Game-play first... then make it shiny.
-
Very Important. It's not hard to make something look good with all the high quality community assets out there.
No excuse for making things look like ****.
-
its strange when talking about freespace and graphics, for so many years i played my original copy of freespace 1 and 2, and yes i did at times long for a hd remake of this game (before i found about this awesome project) but this game transcended just graphics, what freespace was able to do is staggering, they built a beautiful universe, great races and characters, a dark and eerie mood, a mysterious plotline all without the need of graphics, yes graphics is important in gaming now, but some games, it goes beyond just graphics
-
The first two questions are not mutually exclusive at all. FSO striving to improve it's graphics is completely independent on the actual implementation of the graphics. Graphics are a visual asset in a storytelling media that is ultimately audiovisual.
To state that the graphics are not as important as the "other" content is either so trivial as to be unnecessary (since the graphics are only a part of the entire emergent experience) or artificially limiting the potential of the efficiency of your storytelling (the only constraint being available time or skill, neither which are relevant to this question).
-
The first two questions are not mutually exclusive at all. FSO striving to improve it's graphics is completely independent on the actual implementation of the graphics. Graphics are a visual asset in a storytelling media that is ultimately audiovisual.
To state that the graphics are not as important as the "other" content is either so trivial as to be unnecessary (since the graphics are only a part of the entire emergent experience) or artificially limiting the potential of the efficiency of your storytelling (the only constraint being available time or skill, neither which are relevant to this question).
To be honest, for modders, available time and skill are QUITE relevant. Graphics, storyline, and gameplay can indeed complement each other, but each element can be examined independently from each other, and modders must choose which elements are most important to focus on. Modders do not work in an abstract environment of idealized emergent experiences; ultimately, they have to set their work priorities, and making high-quality custom graphics may lose out. Though there are a lot of publically available assets, some campaigns may call for graphical assets that do not exist in high-quality HTL form; in that case, modders will have to choose between a time-consuming upgrade/creation of new assets, or just using lower-quality assets (see: the NuINF team using tilemapped ships because properly HTL-ing their MASSIVE fleetpacks would be an onerous task that would sap even more time and push their release date back even further.) Even if, say, the maker of campaign X could enhance an important moment in mission Y by making a kewl new graphical asset, he must choose whether it's worth it to put in the time and effort to make the new asset(s), or whether his campaign would be better-served by focusing directly on storyline or gameplay.
The question I'm asking here, I suppose, is HOW much effort do you want campaign-makers to specifically devote to graphical excellence, vis-a-vis release time, storyline, or gameplay?
-
The question I'm asking here, I suppose, is HOW much effort do you want campaign-makers to specifically devote to graphical excellence, vis-a-vis release time, storyline, or gameplay?
All graphical excellence is for naught if the product is not available. If the question is that then the graphical side should be relatively low on the priority list. The end user only experiences finished products, and graphical improvements are often released in updates and post-release packages.
But look, you ask:
Do you think that the community's asset standards should keep rising, and that new campaigns should strive to have full-HTL modpacks? Or are you willing to tolerate some graphical weakness if the campaign offers something else that interests you?
Those are not mutually exclusive. They are not even comparable. Another one is a long-term community goal in itself; another one is tactical reality dictated by time-constrained resource acquisition and applies to individuals, not to the community.
-
Graphics are nice until they affect gameplay. For action games in particular the primary goal should really be the experience, smooth responsive gameplay with less polygons is preferable to me to lag in the middle of the most response-critical parts of the game. There's nothing more experience breaking than being in the middle of combat and having the graphics and physics engine effectively say 'You don't mind if we borrow your framerate do you?', it ruins the immersion.
Don't get me wrong, I like the shiny as much as the next, but if the game suffers for its own presentation, then things have got too weighted in the wrong direction.
-
Graphics are a visual asset in a storytelling media that is ultimately audiovisual.
quoted for truth
-
Voice Acting>>>>>>>>>>>>Writing>Gameplay>Graphics
Seriously, early on when I was exploring all the user-made campaigns, I refused to touch anything that wasn't voice acted. However, as things go, making fleets of high quality assets almost seems easier than doing voice acting for a campaign.
-
However, as things go, making fleets of high quality assets almost seems easier than doing voice acting for a campaign.
There's no almost about it - high quality assets are unquestionably easier.
Think about it - at worst, you need maybe four people to do a high poly model - a modeller, a texturer, and maybe separate UV mappers and convertors. In many cases though, one person can do all those things. Thus you often only need to coordinate one or two people to make a ship. Voice acting, even on a simple campaign, will require dozens of people most likely, and coordinating all of them is painful. Additionally, the most time consuming phases of making a ship are modelling and texturing both of which are creative (and therefore fun), and the creator can immediately get feedback on how it's going, because the ship creates its own context. Voice acting, by contrast, is relatively non-creative (there's obviously the "acting" part, but ultimately you're reading from someone else's script), and feedback is often difficult outside of the context of the mission, and all the other elements around a particular line (including lots of other lines that may not have been recorded yet). That means that the motivation for voice actors is going to be much harder to maintain, especially for larger roles that can easily require hours of that kind of work.
So yeah, no doubt whatsoever that it's easier to make awesome ships than awesome VA. If you need even more proof, look at the list of voice acted campaigns vs the list of high quality user made ships. The difference is pretty staggering, and for good reason.
-
Why are people acting as if there's some sort of tradeoff going on between "good writing" "good gameplay", and "good graphics"? These are not mutually exclusive in the least.
You could make the argument that all of the above represent time investments, but really, due to the differences in skillset for the three - it's often the case that they get handled in parallel by different people, thus making it so that there's really no competition between them. Additionally, Graphics are fairly easy to make good - requiring not so much investment in terms of manpower/hours, as highlighted above, so you really have no excuse.
[A]re you willing to tolerate some graphical weakness if the campaign offers something else that interests you?
Campaigns by definition should offer things other than graphics, if it doesn't then it would be an asset pack (with missions?), not a campaign.
Now that we've established that some sort of good storyline and/or gameplay is required, and that this is not mutually exclusive with having good graphics, let's rephrase that question:
"Will you tolerate graphical weakness (in exchange for nothing that shouldn't be there anyway)?"
The answer is pretty obvious then - no, I won't tolerate graphical weakness because there's no reason I should. There's not reason something should be graphically weak, when you look at its competitors which will all have "other things of interest" anyway, and are graphically stronger at the same time.
Voice Acting>>>>>>>>>>>>Writing>Gameplay
I donno about that, man.
I don't think all the voice acting in the world will save ****ty ass writing.
Or gameplay that's broken or just plain boring.
Given, it's not likely for something that falls into either of those categories to get voice acted, but you never know - someone might have more money than sense, after all.
Sure I'd accept that it comes before graphics, but as stated above, the effort required to get good voice acting is immeasurably greater than that required to have good graphics, and seeing as again, the two do not compete for talent pool etc. - if you're going to get something voice acted, you might as well put in the effort to make it look good too.
-
I just pushed through by far the toughest voice acting job in Hard Light history in ~3 months. I'd rather do it three times than wait for somebody to try to HTL a fleetpack.
High-quality visual assets are harder than voice acting.
-
As this medium is about being able to interact, you know video games, gameplay should be first and foremost always. Exceptions abound obviously (ie Transcend or is it?), but in the end, my feeling in general is that interactivity needs to be first and foremost with storyline (as it can provide meaningful context that motivates and drives the player) being a distant second with the rest being an even more distant third. The game should and must be entertaining in some form but need not be always fun.
-
You're making two separate assertions there, one of which is right (gameplay should come first) and one of which is incompatible with the first, and wrong (interactivity should come first).
-
You're making two separate assertions there, one of which is right (gameplay should come first) and one of which is incompatible with the first, and wrong (interactivity should come first).
I think I might have typed it out wrong then. I feel the two go hand in hand with each other in ways. Gameplay in of itself is interactive, but the level of interactive depth drives how replayable a game is. I can play campaigns like Blue Planet and Wings of Dawn and enjoy my time there, but I struggle to even desire to play them after the first time. Because I feel like I've already done what I can do in it. Tenebra has missions that feel really replayable though since a few have multiple ways to actually complete the mission.
Now I'm saying replayability is #1 aren't I? Okay, I'll just settle with entertaining core gameplay mechanics being #1 with replayability being a close second. Because replayability means nothing if the game doesn't deliver me value in the first place from the gameplay side of things.
-
Gameplay and playability comes first, but that doesn't mean graphics is not important. A game is a package of the whole thing, gameplay and graphics included and several others as well (such as story, audio, ingame physics, etc). It is the final product that is important.
edit: my post 312 on my 123 day, isn't this just coincidence?
-
You're making two separate assertions there, one of which is right (gameplay should come first) and one of which is incompatible with the first, and wrong (interactivity should come first).
I think I might have typed it out wrong then. I feel the two go hand in hand with each other in ways. Gameplay in of itself is interactive, but the level of interactive depth drives how replayable a game is. I can play campaigns like Blue Planet and Wings of Dawn and enjoy my time there, but I struggle to even desire to play them after the first time. Because I feel like I've already done what I can do in it. Tenebra has missions that feel really replayable though since a few have multiple ways to actually complete the mission.
Now I'm saying replayability is #1 aren't I? Okay, I'll just settle with entertaining core gameplay mechanics being #1 with replayability being a close second. Because replayability means nothing if the game doesn't deliver me value in the first place from the gameplay side of things.
This is a pretty interesting point - and I think fairly true. Of the three you mentioned BP1/BP2r1 rely most heavily on the emotional hue of their narrative to carry the gameplay, which is basically a gated corridor with fairly narrow systems. The player has to pass the gates to enable the narrative to proceed. The design philosophy is one of gameplay and emotional loops with reset states in between, and the big payoffs for player performance are scripted sequences. The game systems are complex and well-thought-out, but they are designed to control the player's emotional state and provide clear rules about what they cannot do. Replay value is contingent on wanting to ride the roller coaster again.
Wings of Dawn has meatier, more developed base systems more aimed at enabling the player to do a wide range of things, but uses the same narrative model of a gated corridor.
Tenebra is a little closer to Deus FreeSpace in that each mission presents a very wide phase space of possible player choices, a handful of systems the player needs to learn, and basically says 'well, go on, figure out an interesting way to put the pieces together'. There aren't many gates except at the very beginning and end of the missions. (This is most true of Everything is Permitted, One Future, and Her Finest Hour.) And as you said these missions were intentionally designed with heavy replayability in mind.
-
Janos:
Sorry if my question wasn't phrased properly. Of course, we all want the community and FSO's graphics to keep getting better. My only real question, to be specific, is how high of a graphical standard you want to see in individual campaigns that you want to play, vis-a-vis effort invested into other areas of the campaign.
Droid:
To clarify, if a one-man team previewed or released a new campaign of theirs today, what is the minimum standard of graphics that you would judge to be acceptable for their project?
-
As far as I'm aware, the minimum standard of Graphics would be Vanilla FS2, because that's where we started, as it were, but then, if the game worked at a lower level then that's good too. Take, for example, if the Starfox mod had chosen to emulate the original Nintendo graphics and just used coloured polygons. It would have changed the visual experience, but not ruined it because those graphics would, theoretically, have worked in that situation (To clarify, I'm not saying they should have done that, the mod looks awesome, but it would have been an option in that specific case).
To be honest, taking any part of a Campaign in isolation and analyzing it is difficult, because a campaign is, at the very least, the sum of its parts.
-
As far as I'm aware, the minimum standard of Graphics would be Vanilla FS2, because that's where we started.
That's not where I started.
I can very confidently say that I wouldn't be playing this game/be part of this community if the graphics were vanilla FS2-level were the minimum standard, or were at the time that I found out about it. Wouldn't have given it a second thought.
It's been, how many years? Having 15-year old graphics being "acceptable" is setting an awfully low bar.
To clarify, if a one-man team previewed or released a new campaign of theirs today, what is the minimum standard of graphics that you would judge to be acceptable for their project?
Depends. For example, if it uses MediaVPs assets, their custom assets better be similar/match up in quality to at least the older MediaVPs models/textures.
If they're doing something original/different they could probably get away with a bit less as long as it's done coherently.
-
Let's just agree to disagree, I suppose.
For the record, though, one-man newb projects will probably have a hard time either: A: recruiting good modellers; or B: learning modelling/texturing AND building quality HTL fleetpacks. Building high-quality HTL assets is hard and takes a while (for those of us who are not Oddgrim), and it's hard to learn the required skills (as I can testify from personal experience). The higher the community's graphical bar is for campaigns, especially for newbs' first projects, the harder it is for newbs to get into FS modding, and the less new blood we'll have making campaigns. Therefore, I think the community should cut them some slack, compared to the megaprojects with good modellers.
-
Well, I suppose the position I take is that people like Blaize Russel wrote campaigns using Vanilla FS2 assets that are still excellent, playing with the improved graphics may make the experience more aesthetically pleasing, but it doesn't change the fact that the campaign made the mod, not the graphics.
The thing is, this is the whole reason we HAVE the Media VP's which replace Vanilla assets, we all love the shiny, but if people are relying on the shiny to carry the campaign then, to put it simply, they are doing it wrong. So the Media VP's are optional, depending on the ability of the computer you can tailor them to suit you.
I still play games with worse graphics than Vanilla FS2, and they are still good games.
e: Anyone else find it strange how the Vanilla FS2 graphics have changed from 'The best graphics I've ever seen' to 'I wouldn't play a campaign with graphics that bad!'...
-
They've never been "the best graphics I've ever seen' to me, since by the time I first heard of FS2 it was 2008.
For the record, though, one-man newb projects will probably have a hard time either: A: recruiting good modellers; or B: learning modelling/texturing AND building quality HTL fleetpacks. Building high-quality HTL assets is hard and takes a while (for those of us who are not Oddgrim), and it's hard to learn the required skills (as I can testify from personal experience). The higher the community's graphical bar is for campaigns, especially for newbs' first projects, the harder it is for newbs to get into FS modding, and the less new blood we'll have making campaigns. Therefore, I think the community should cut them some slack, compared to the megaprojects with good modellers.
Inherent is this is a giant misconception. Why does your "newb project" need unique custom assets?
There are plenty of freely-released high quality assets, in addition to the MediaVPs, which all have high graphical quality, and if they're incapable of including these, well, their project is pretty much doomed to begin with.
You do not need to build high quality assets to have high graphical quality in your campaign.
If you're going to insist on having/building unique assets, well, then I damn well expect you to do it well, because that's something of a "luxury", not a requirement.
-
Janos:
Sorry if my question wasn't phrased properly. Of course, we all want the community and FSO's graphics to keep getting better. My only real question, to be specific, is how high of a graphical standard you want to see in individual campaigns that you want to play, vis-a-vis effort invested into other areas of the campaign.
If such a trade-off exists - like in the case of huge fleetpacks, which usually die in constructive destruction - then yes, the actual assembling and releasing the product should be a priority, because only the released assets are important to the public. Some fleetpacks have just said "**** it" and dumped all their assets into public use.
However: do such trade-offs exist? Do teams play some zero-sum game where 10 people are FREDding and 1 people is HTLing, and the completion date is completely linearly dependent on the manpower allocated to whatever task requires more effort? Does a completely novel campaign even require a huge load of unique assets? If it does, is it a one-man project where the zero-sum labour allocation actually works?
I think you mean "if the team gets completely bogged down and is constantly lagging behind current dev cycle because they are oddly focused on one single aspect of the game, leading to an ever-increasing gap since voluntary specialist manpower only gets so far - in that case, should the team prefer release the "unfinished" product, or should they keep truckin' on"? In that case I would say yes, the release of the product is paramount.
But all these scenarios rely on quite a few ifs to make them viable. Generally the number of freely available assets and the labour specialization minimize the chances of such trade-offs occurring, and make the particular question (finished gameplay vs. unique supergraphics) very specific and not always very relevant.
-
I think the graphics are quite ok at the moment but there are some things that can effect my immersion - namely ships suddenly appearing in nebulae then realising they are meant to be obscured by fog, and the hard edge disappearing of ships in subspace warp. Also sometimes explosions look weird esp at juggernaught size levels where they really just look like "blown up" explosion ani's (hehe)
That said I will play campaigns with crappy graphics if the story is good, or if the graphics are so bad they are funny ;p
-
~S~
It is not just about the fights, excitement of the battle and getting it right the first time, (meaning I am learning lol) BUT it is the views of what could be in the voids of space that I find most appealing. Here in this game, we can sit in our ship and dream, the views are amazing sometimes I just let all of the days BS drift away. This is the best time of all..... BUT the other side of the coin is bring them on for I can just hit restart ehhehe
When you can see what the game has to offer :) It is all worth the effort of getting it right.
-
This is how important graphics are to me, I played Diaspora on a laptop with Intelgrated grapics chip, I had to dial the settings all the way down for some missions, and even then they still lagged, but I persevered to get to the end..... for the story.
I now have a shiny new laptop with and AMD/ATI graphics chip and I am playing through it again and WOW! the graphics really are stunning! But I played it first with the setting turned now on my old laptop FOR THE STORY!
-
Considering that I spent the last few months playing old games of the PSX era, I would say that as long as the graphics are decent, I'm fine with them. I don't pretend any super uber effects.
-
I think the poll could have done with at least a couple more options, sandwiched between the top 3 options. I chose "Somewhat important; I like seeing kewl new graphics in my campaigns, but there are other things that are more important to me in campaigns." but I would have been more comfortable with an option between that and the one below it.
Gameplay and replayability completely trump graphics and everything else for me, and story also trumps graphics. Good graphics can be a sign that the overall quality is also good, and I would guess that would hold true more for FSO, since nobody's getting paid, than for games outside of FSO, where graphics are the easiest thing to show off when you're working with a 20 second television commercial, and trying to inspire people into a purchase. Graphics are the first thing you see and evaluate before you're able to evaluate anything else. I've seen far too many games where graphics are good, but the rest pales in comparison.
So in general, I carry my view on graphics from outside of FSO into FSO. Great graphics can really improve a gaming experience for me, but not as much as great gameplay, great replayability or a great story can.
-
Graphics are important in a game like Freespace as it helps the player to immerse with the virtual reality. But the sound and story are also very important.
-
We were all pretty immersed in '99. I'm not convinced that graphicking more deferred tesselations into Phong specularity is actually doing much for our subjective experience of games.
-
Graphics are important but gameplay/story are the most important.
The whole reason I got started on Freespace 13 years after it came out is I am low on $$$ and figured I could play some older games with older graphics but had amazing stories/gameplay. Then when I found out about the SCP I was very happy and it got even better when I realized that the graphics have been updated and improved. That being said I was most excited that there was much more to the Freespace world that I had never known about(like all these new wonderful campaigns).
That being said there are so many new games out there with better graphics, but I'd never play them due to gameplay/story cannot match what freespace offers.
To conclude story and gameplay will make or break a game. Graphics can only take a game higher (from good to great).
-
We were all pretty immersed in '99. I'm not convinced that graphicking more deferred tesselations into Phong specularity is actually doing much for our subjective experience of games.
Yeah, I just work on that stuff because it pads my resume and portfolio. (I'm serious)
-
Not arsed, my favourite campaigns use very few graphical upgrades. Having amazing graphics, it's great for screenshots and it looks cool to begin with, but it doesn't really last, equally ****ty graphics are a bit annoying, but you get used to them.
-
Yeah, I just work on that stuff because it pads my resume and portfolio. (I'm serious)
Would work on multilock pad your resume? ;7