(Rant) More focus on gameplay, less on graphics
 

I am seeing more and more games being released these days that have beautiful graphics, but poor gameplay. Why are so many people on this board so concerned about having even prettier graphics in SH4 when SH3 gameplay was released half finished? There are so many things STILL missing or broken in SH3, I don't even know where to begin. But some big ones are:

-realistic u-boat repair times was left out (1 or 2 minute repair times, EVERY time?)
-poor enemy ship ai
-instant death screens (arcadish)
-instant death screen when compartment completely floods (omg, why?)
-broken collision damage model
-missing Hudson aircraft, which was common (a modder fixed this)
-sometimes cannot sit at the bottom of seabed to repair without taking damage at high time compression.
-u-boat crew rarely wounded, usually killed instead.
-cannot sit on seabed bottom without being pinged and detected (this is wrong, developers!)
-horrible and tedious crew management.
-no ability to surrender in campaign game (I can't believe they left this out)
-STILL no SH3 SDK released (this is a big one) :damn:
-and many other things not listed here.

Us modders have done everything we can to fix this broken game (SH3), but we have had to find half-a$$ed work arounds because UBI has decided to not release the SDK (so we can fix the broken game correctly). Why not, UBI? And a lot of the broken or missing features are hard-coded, so they cannot be fixed without the SDK. Releasing the SDK to allow us to mod- tweak the game would actually increase the popularity and customer loyalty to SH3. Do you not understand this?

Anyone remember Red Baron 3-d or Aces of the Deep? I do. Yes, they had average graphics and also had things wrong with gameplay, but at least Dynamix tried to give the games character and atmosphere. Like if you were killed in action, afterwards it would show a newspaper article showing that your boat was missing. Or in Red Baron 3-d, if you crashed behind enemy lines, there was a chance that you could make it back to your side. Or if you were captured, there was a chance that you could escapre before the war ended, and start flying again. Why all the focus these days on pretty graphics with poor, unfinished, or unrealistic (arcadish) gameplay? I just don't get it.

Pretty graphics mean nothing without realistic, fun, working gameplay.

I remember a vast amount of games with average graphics and poor gameplay during the years. I think your memory is a tad selective. And realism is highly overrated for entertainment value. In some games, such as SH3, yes, it has its merits, but there are plenty of games where realism is an unwelcome dullard at the party.

Now Ill tell you this much: I doubt I would have played SH3 as much as I did without the ability to stand on the tower and watch the waves break over my prow as I stalked another convoy on the atlantic. Graphics are important. Or we might as well just play tetris the lot of us.

I am talking about games like SH3, that are supposed to simulate something in real life. I'll say it again, pretty graphics in a simulation mean nothing without good, realistic gameplay. So many small (but important) details were left out or are broken in SH3. If us modders could have access to the SDK, we could fix the problems. That much is sure.

Well really realistic simulation with poor graphics won't fly either. We want it all.

This somehow reminds me of this very apropros Penny Arcade comic.

**Sigh** I still think you don't understand what I am trying to say. Yes, graphics do matter. But more and more games are being released half-finished because there is too much focus on pretty graphics and not enough focus on realism or gameplay. Haven't you ever heard the word 'gameplay'? Pretty graphics is not the same as good gameplay. ADOM is a good example, where the focus is on amazing detail and incredibly hard gameplay with almost no graphics.

I think it's sad, too. So many people look only at graphics and not game-play.

My favourite games as of now are Pat Proctor's simulations (look for, among other, BCT Commander, Raging Tiger, and The Star and the Crescent www.shrapnelgames.com), Silent Hunter III, Dominions II (still Shrapnel Games), Out of Order (www.hungrysoftware.com), and X-Com: UFO Defence (Microprose).

Out of all those games, only Out of Order and Silent Hunter III have reasonably good graphics. I still like the rest of them.

Take the wonderful Dominions series. The graphics are outright horrible, but after a short while you stop caring, since the game is so massive (Dominions III will have 1500+ units), the atmosphere so incredibly deep and immersive, and the game-play so incredibly good. If the duo creating the series announced Dominions IV would have state-of-the-art 3D graphics, I would be very disappointed, as it'd mean the rest of the game would suffer greatly.

That's not to say graphics don't add to the game. They do. They just don't really add that much. So by all means, make Silent Hunter IV beautiful. But please, let the focus be on game-play. If that means some models have to be low-res like the planes in Silent Hunter III, so be it.

It depends on what the realism is. I'm tired of generalizing people going "Gameplay>Realism". It's like saying "Good food>Chinese Food", it's an incredibly broad generalization that serves no purpose whatsoever.

But do those graphics have to be state-of-the-art?

Too unrealistic:p.

you've got to remember that in order for the game to be successful, it has to reach out to more than the subsim community. without doing this the losses would mean that we wouldnt see a SH4. This is the reason they spend so much time on graphics in comparison to perhaps other features. its unfortunate but hey...this is business:arrgh!:

The balance between graphic quality and good game play is very subjective. I've been making the point in other postings that personally, I'd much rather see SH1V look visually similar to SH111 but have all the important game play items that nvdrifter mentions be working in the game at the time of release. The patch mania on SH111 drove me mad...Installing mods 3 times and then uninstalling them again in order to add the latest patch is very frustrating. I also agree with nvdrifter regarding the SDK. I see no reason that this shouldn't be offered.

The bottom line is that there is a finite amount of production time that Ubisoft will pay for, and how you balance that time between visual enhancement and game play enhancement is the crucial point.

This may not be a very popular view, but for me, give me SH111 set in the Pacific and patched beyond 1.4 at the time of release. Re-think the crew management and give the modders access to the SDK.

I agree with everything you said. It seems to me that SH3 had some serious quality control problems upon release. Simple (but important) features that could have and should have been included or fixed in a patch, but never were.

As most of us old time gamers know, graphics don't make the game. Gameplay makes the game. Good graphics are just icing on the cake.

Why don't you make your own game? You talented guys should not be depending on slobs like Ubisoft to make the core game. :arrgh!: You make the game, let someone else do the hard modding part.

Speak for your self, pretty please. I consider myself an old time gamer. My first subsim was Silent Service. That should qualify. Graphics are part of the gameplay in computer games. When it is about simulation, I would even say that they are essential. A simulator is a very precisely cut attempt of Virtual Reality, and thus the graphics and sound AS WELL as the mechanical simulation should resemble the real object as close as possible. Neglet one part and you inevitably ruin the overall impression.

Why not put a Dev Group together like GW did, but work with UBI like the guys / girls did for The Battle of Britain. They really made the game shine and once Shockwave added the modern day graphics among other things, it's now a superb game to play.

The catch was, that Rowan retained all the rights to anything added or improved on, so if they wished to repackage the game and re-issue it for sale, they could without the headaches.

So the cost is, that you enhance and fix things, but UBI can re-sell the game as a new version without asking anyones permission, if they so choose. It may even be possible for the talented folks here to work out some sort of compensation for their efforts if the game goes on the market again. I think that was also done with BoB, for the second incarnation.

Oh yeah, I forgot that we're not supposed to criticize Ubisoft in this forum. :roll: Nevermind. All the problems with SH3 was just my imagination.

No, you can criticize Ubi, but in my opinion, sometimes it seems like the things done right with a game are overlooked. I guess it's that "glass half full/glass half empty" things, drifter. I think the mods have been utterly fantastic, but I also think SH3 was a true jump forward in subsims. Maybe since you spend a lot of time and work trying to improve SH3, you see it differently than me. :)

Modding a game like SH3 is like editing Hugo or Cervantes. Without the original work, there wouldn't be much to start with.

Of course a lot of things were done right in SH3, and I do realize that there were some groundbreaking things introduced into SH3. I appreciate the hard work the devs put into the game. It's an awesome game that I love dearly (when I try desperately to overlook all the glaring things that are wrong in the game). But that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize the these things that are wrong with it. Should we say nothing and hope they don't make the same mistakes in SH4? :p I guess it has a lot to do with the frustrations some of us modders are having is trying to fix what isn't right in SH3. But unfortunately we can fix very few things because most of the problems are hard-coded. We usually end up hitting a brick wall. Oh how I wish they would release that SDK. ;)

I think it's a balance of graphics and gameplay. If you have wonderful gameplay and lousy graphics, it's not very believable. If you have wonderful graphics and lousy gameplay, it's not very believable. In my opinion, once we got to patch 1.4 in SH111, the game became very enjoyable. Others will have the opinion that there were so many things that never got fixed in SH111 that they could not enjoy the game. But I don't know anybody who was so unhappy with the graphics in SH111 that they couldn't immerse themselves in the game. Other than wave texture and transparency discussions, the consensus was that the graphics in SH111 were pretty good. Relative to SH1V, I'm not expecting a major bump in graphics quality....I am hoping that the gameplay is in better shape than SH111 was at the time of its release.

The "good feeling" of new graphics only lasts so long. Gameplay/Realism, on the other hand, can make or break a good sim...and make you come back and back again.

and just think about how much more time could be focused on new features vise fixing things that havent been fixed a la SH3. Just think if they just could have had a little more time to test and fix SH3. Waiting for more news......

Yeah. I really don't see it as a battle of the graphics guys versus the gameplay guys. Both elements are integral to the enjoyment of the game. I just want SH1V to be a great subsim that corrects the gameplay errors of SH111 and improves the crew management element of the game. If they want to bump up the graphics....fine, but to me the SH111 graphics were fine. I'd rather not have to add more RAM to my system in order to run SH1V.

[QUOTE=TDK1044][quote=Immacolata]I think people are reading too much into this graphics overhaul they are doing in SHIV. They need to create all new ships and subs. Now they are at it, why stop with last years standards? They up the polys, increase the texture res, redo the particles system and perhaps add a few shaderwhatchacallums on the ocean surface. Done deal.

I am positive that the extra eye candy we get is minor compared to the bread and butter work they have to do anyways. You perhaps import basic ship meshes from SH3, but Id bet the graphics designer would rather be found dead than seen reusing SH3s textures and models. At the very least they will make sure to use higher res everything so the game will look more detailed.

Oh, and for graphics - there was a few niggles I had. Forced resolution and the 8000 m visibility range was major problems I had with SH3. The latter part was really nasty IMO, and I am worrying they haven't fixed this for SH4. Unbelievably the interviewer didn't ask about it >.<

Realism is overrated. I might want to make that my sig. Some people have almost a fetishistic view of Realism (lightning strike and thunder, horses whinnying in panic somewhere outside the viewframe). I'd like mine served rather realistic but also pretty and at the very least enjoyable. Sometimes the much lauded Realism (thunder and another bout of whinnying of horses) gets in the way of actually playing the game. I remember for a while that I didn't even bother playing SH3 because I found out about this 8000m range. I suddenly realized that this was a decision made by the devs for some reason. And they had padded this deficit up with giving the player an artificially inflated amount of radio contacts, to compensate for the ridiculously low visibilty.
After I discovered this severe lack in the Realism (thunder and lighting strikes another time and send the horses whinnying yet again) department, I didn't bother playing SH3 for quite a while. NYGM "saved" me after half a year. And I realized that this Realism (thunder and whinnying) obsession had robbed me of a good bit of enjoyment. I could still have played SH3 and had fun, but nooo. I nurtured hurt feelings and a swollen Realism (thunder, whinny) gland instead.

Points well made, Immacolata.:up: