I’m not saying every single game has better art than what came before it. But better technology gives a greater ability to have better art. Look at games that are both technically good and also have a world building, art focus. A good example would be system shock, system shock 2, and bioshock. They were all technically advanced for their time, and both had an art focus - which game creates the more immersive, impressive, art-filled world?
But having better hardware does not inherently force you to focus more on the technology side of graphics. It gives you the option to create better art. If a game fails to do so, then that’s a flaw of the game developer. Artificially handicapping technology is not a good way to solve this problem. Otherwise we’d have some Atari 2600 games where, sure, there were only 16 colors and 200 pixels on the screen - but they were exquisitely selected.
And actually, the technology has been moving towards making the technical side easier so that you can focus on other stuff. A big part of the goals for DirectX 10 and 11 are standardizing hardware and render paths so that you can more easily craft high tech graphics that run on a variety of systems. Advances in graphical APIs actually mean that you can get a better looking game for less coding effort, which leaves more resources available for making AI, designing worlds, art, etc. But consoles are sticking us in DX9ville for a decade, so we won’t be fully realizing those benefits.
You can come up with counter-examples to any trend, but art design in games on average have been advancing as the technology allows them to be more detailed.
Yeah, SenorBeef pointed out that prior to the original XBox consoles were essentially custom designed hardware. I had known that and I remember reading some articles back in the day comparing the specs between the PS2, XBox and GC, that talked about how Microsoft had bucked the trend in that area. My info was a little out of date. Ignorance fought.
However, I think your second point is salient as well. Right now, personally, as someone who obviously isn’t up on hardware progression, the games that are coming out look phenomenal to me still. I just recently picked up Infamous and Ultimate Alliance 2 and I have no regrets. Now when I see what an XBox 720 or a Playstation 4 is capable of maybe I’ll feel differently since I have nothing to compare it to, but right now I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.
Hell, I just started playing Persona 4 for the PS2 as well and I think that game looks gorgeous. Maybe I’m not the best one to judge.
Well, did you feel like you were missing out on something when you spent most of your life watching SDTV? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean we should reject HDTV and handwave away the benefits. You’d understand the benefit if you experienced it.
I fundamentally disagree with this assertion. Immersive <> better Art. 3D <> better art. I would pick the likes of say, Odin Sphere, which is positively gorgeous, over any of the titles you reference from an art perspective.
Saying that more polygons etc means, or even _enables- better art is absurd. Does modern digital art allow the artist to surpass the Mona Lisa? The medium has very little to do with the quality of the art.
But not on the bleeding edge. You don’t need to ruthlessly and madly push technology forward to improve art at this point. In fact, doing so ties up money and resources that could be used otherwise. I’m sorry, but modern video cards are overkill.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, Jihi, Persona 4 has excellent art. It’s not technically impressive, however.
Additionally, can someone cite a cite to support the assertion that titles like Lost Odyssey, which claim “HDTV 1080p” as the resolution, to be upscaling images? Obviously, yes, many titles run at lower and upscale to fill the screen (duh) but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t titles that DO run at full resolution. I find the claim that there aren’t to be a little questionable.
Well, that’s strictly true, but within a given class of media one can argue that art (at least, representational art) is improved by better tools–certainly, Odin Sphere’s graphics would not have been possible in the EGA/VGA era, for example.
We’re just approaching on the PCs now the ability to do for 3D art what things like the PS2 did for 2D art–that is, we’re only now getting to the point where artists are not necessarily feeling constrained by the tools they’re working with.
Really, I think the improvement of technology is not the reason for the continuing dearth of good exemplars in art direction (or gameplay styles), it’s really more traceable to the homogeniztion of the audience for gaming–as mentioned above upthread, when gaming was regarded as a business of niches, you had titles like Odin Sphere and Out of This World (now THERE was a game with artistry that transcended the platform’s limitations) but you also had several quality flight simulators, various niche games. Nowadays the middle tier of studios that produced such things are either big studios, bought by big studios, or have gone away, and the current indie tier hasn’t really shaken out the next generation of middle-sized innovators. The big studios are competing for the mainstream dollars, and that means tacking meaningless graphical nudges onto established formulas that are maximally popular.
It took me several days to digest the fact that when some people talk about, say, WoW being “not realistic enough” and other games where for example characters run with their arms extended stiffly to the sides being “extremely realistic,” what they mean is usually that the second one has a palette like the one Argent Towers described:
Well, quite frankly, this is just snobbiness to a certain degree. You’re saying "my little independent film where a one legged lesbian reads nihilist philosophy and communes with nature is way better than those 150 million dollar blockbuster movies you unsophisticated lugs like so much!
New games with better graphics are not preventing quirky, art-driven games from being created. If anything, they give them new and better tools to express the artist’s intent.
Different types of art. Is Crysis better than the Mona Lisa? It doesn’t really make sense.
Of course having more technical abilities - from the ability to have bigger textures, more types of filtering and lighting effects, etc. enables better art. Your position is ridiculous. It’s not like we ever lose technology, so if you wanted to make the exact same artsy game you wanted to make 10 years ago, you could still do it now, and people could still play it. Or you could make a version that looks even better, with newer capabilities that modern technology lends you.
What is lost by the advancing technology? What can you no longer do?
Besides that, the vast majority of games are not quirky art-driven titles. In any sort of simulation they are improved by better technology because it allows a clearly more immersive experience. Shooter and action games clearly benefit from having better graphics. Even stuff that you wouldn’t think of as graphics-driven like RTS games benefit. The character models of the units you’re controlling can be much more detailed, with more animations, and more effects from their various abilities.
Quite frankly, your whole argument falls apart. Advancing technology does not prevent anything. You can still create these games you like. And for pretty much everything else across the board, it has gotten better.
You make it sound like the fast advancement of computer technology is something that we’ve had to suffer through, rather than something we’ve had to celebrate.
It’s a good thing that my current desktop can probably outdo a hundred desktops of last decade technically.
Besides that, the trend in video card hardware and video API development has actually been simplification and unification - it’s actually easier to make a high tech, modern game than it was 5 years ago in a lot of ways.
Besides that, games are always built to run at a variety of settings. You can run most current games playably on a computer made in 2004. It won’t be the top of the line experience, but games have always been developed to be adjustable to the hardware available to you.
Great, so what’s the problem? It uses as much technology as the game designer wants, without attempting to say it’s a bad thing that the latest flight simulator has the ability to let the viewer see mountains from a hundred miles away.
I don’t think that I claimed that no xbox 360 game can run at 1080p. It’s uncommon for graphically intensive games, but for games that require less rendering power - sure, why not? I made a specific comparison to call of duty 4, which is one of the most popular if not the most popular game of this generation, and it ran at 600p. As far as I know there’s not a hard limitation of 720p. I wasn’t able to find the info specifically on Lost Odyssey with a quick googling.
