Better Hardware, Lower Quality?
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This year is not just any year for gamers and the gaming industry. It’s the start of a new era, of a new playing field, and a new generation of gamers. But with more power at our disposal, there is less need for deep innovation and more demand for cheap innovation, such as better graphics systems, or “divergent narrative paths” that still lead to the same conclusion; looking at you, Spec Ops: The Line. Art direction was and still is a very significant part of game design, and one can guess for many reasons. But what you may not have considered is that art direction can also be critical for game development because the type and amount of effort put into creating designs and structuring a engine to produce that environment is predicated on art direction. And on older platforms game designer were limited by weak hardware, for their time, and so sometimes concessions were made, and sometimes the art direction made it work for the better; games still looked and played great despite limited capabilities of the platform. The idea is that because developers have more processing power to take advantage of, they’ll have less constraints and won’t be forced to innovate, artistically or mechanically. Case for Visual Innovation & Attention to Narrative: Thomas Was Alone
Thomas Was Alone(TWA) is a puzzle game released somewhat recently on the PS3 and Vita, and later on Steam. Despite the power on available hardware, TWA didn’t concern itself with advanced or high end graphics but rather focused on narrative and gameplay elements. The story is so creative that it manages to effectively imbue a persona onto an orange rectangle; a true testament to the importance of narrative design.
And by narrative design I mean something different from narrative alone. Narrative design refers to the combination and user input and action within the game. Some games have dynamic narrative design, and some have set narrative design. I would say that TWA has the latter, and probably for the better since it’s particularly important for it to establish it’s tone and context for the sake of the game as a whole. In doing so we see characters of similar physical make-up, squares & rectangles, come into the picture with widely varying personalities that drive the narrative forward. And the only points of control available is move left, right and jump.
The creator of TWA did not “sacrifice” good visuals for faster development time, if anything, I would think he did it in order to take a stand against the general nature and opinions surrounding what makes a good game. And that is good gameplay COUPLED with graphics, narrative, music and so on.
Case for Attention to Gameplay & Mechanics: Resogun
Resogun is an interesting case study in that it is being made by an indie developer and has very simple controls and game mechanics, yet high quality visuals and replayability. TWA is a cheaper experience meant only to be played once for the story, and again for pickups and achievements.
. Where Resogun focuses on the elements of graphics and gameplay, it does not have a great emphasis, if at all, on narrative. Resogun has a clear objective: destroy all incoming aliens and defend humanity with your spaceship. The whole game is predicated on this simple premise, and is reiterated through its gameplay by saving humans and defending against aliens. For most gamers this is a common idea to work with, and understand that most of the attention is on the gameplay. Resogun drives this point home by placing your attention on scoring high and surviving for as long as possible. Case for Attention to Visuals: Killzone: Shadow Fall
Killzone: Shadow Fall is a prime example of a publisher-funded project who’s main focus was to not only sell itself, but also push sales of its compliment, the PlayStation 4, which was released at the same time. As such, Shadow Fall, like many other games was made to impress and sell quickly. The mechanics and gameplay that drive it are tried and true, and are very familiar with most of the gaming community, especially the first-person shooter(FPS) community. The FPS community is very vocal and is probably this biggest adopter of new gaming tech, since they are the most prolific, outspoken, and passionate. And while taking risks in terms of art direction or innovating on game mechanics is in the interest of the developer, it isn’t in the publisher’s view, who pays for development, and more often than not the gamer, who buys the game. The last trend however has recently been shown to undergo a transformation recently, due to the boredom of playing different games with the same controls and conventions. I, as well as many other players, want innovation now. It’s hard to do, and while innovating begets spending months to years of testing and failing, the benefits can be extremely profitable. Even so, the financial risk the publishing powers associate with change prevents that from happening. It’s up to indie developers of games like Thomas Was Alone and Resogun to innovate for the greater good of the art form that is game design. |
