I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate lately. After some of the talk here about the sequel, I decided it's time to play through these games that I've had on my shelf a long time.

Anyway, the more I play BG, the more I'm realizing how much a 2D painted depiction of the gameworld enhances the detail in the game. When I look at the pictures of Neverwinter Nights, the 3D Bioware RPG coming next year, I think the scenery is just plain dull. Expanding this to other 3D games, in general I'm finding many of them to have very dull visuals because the geometry and even the texturing is so rudimentary. I know the day will come when 3D can recreate a world as detailed as those in Baldur's Gate's painted backgrounds, but we seem to be very far from it. Even when 3D can do this, there's the issue of being able to generate these detailed objects with little reuse of the same objects again and again.

On top of all this, I'm noticing that the ability of designers to create interesting and fantastic worlds is hampered by 3D. The cries of realism from gamers end up taking away from developers' art teams' ability to create more fantastic and less realistic worlds.

I'm just kind of throwing this out there. Lately I've found myself much more intrigued by something like Kohan, BG, even the upcoming CivIII, because there's something about 2D hand drawn art that seems to still hold an edge over the rudimentary 3D in most games today.

--Dave

I agree with you... almost 100%.
3D was crucial in 3D FPS, Flight Sim, Space Shooter, etc., development, but I'm still not convinced it's "better" for isometric and strategy gaming.

Age of Mythology looks great, but Age of Empires 2 has better-looking terrain (thus far in development). And Baldur's Gate 2 has some startling architechture and 2D details.

But I think the key phrase, and you used it above, is "rudimentary" 3D. It'll come into its own one day and we'll probably get our detail back and wonder why we ever settled for 2D.

Wanna play Chess with scultped peices or are paper counters ok with you? The game remains the same.

-Andrew

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Wanna play Chess with scultped peices or are paper counters ok with you? The game remains the same.

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On a related note, I'm hoping that the 3rd person action-adventure craze is finally over. I mean, jumping puzzles are bad-enough in a 2D game...
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Can I get an Amen from anyone? I'm so uncoordinated that it took me at least a week to truly nail the keyboard/mouse setup for an FPS add on the third person format and my little brain goes pthtthththp. (I'm a relatively new gamer) I even bought a gamepad for my pc. I thought that would help. It didn't. I'm lame.

Sorry 'bout that digression. For now, I like the 2d for my adventure games. In a way, I like the "feel" of it. It looks a little more painted and stylized. Since most of it is Tolkein-ish fantasy, it just seems appropriate. It's like holding an old hardcover book in your hands and really savoring the type choices, the weight of the paper vs. reading an ebook. The content may be the same, I personally like the hardcover better. Another thought for debate... there still is a market for hardcover books, do you think that 2D games may be that way? With all of those NYT articles about art vs. gaming ya know...

3d will probably catch up and I'm excited for the potential. I'm not trying to slam 3D rpgs here and I think that it doesn't necessarily mean the end of an era. 2d vs. 3d isn't quite the same as text-based games being replaced by graphical games. Thoughts?

Rama

The weird thing is isometric games are 3d. The viewing direction may be fixed and there is no perspective fore-shortening but its still a depiction of a 3d world.
You could develop a game using polygonal graphics and have a fantastic level of detail but that would require constraining the viewpoint, in effect disallowing zooming/rotating of the camera. I suspect marketing and the press would see this as a negative rather than a positive feature?

"Lately I've found myself much more intrigued by something like Kohan, BG, even the upcoming CivIII, because there's something about 2D hand drawn art that seems to still hold an edge over the rudimentary 3D in most games today."


I would say Dunjon Seege has me pretty intrigued, especially when looking at this sort of screenie:

http://www.planetdungeonsiege.com/images/photo/index.asp?id=306342

True, the artsy detail may not be there, but I gotta admit a shot like this does grab my attention.

Personally, I'm rather border-line on this topic. All too often, the fact that a game is 3D takes a lot out of the gameplay aspect -- they blew too much of their budget on the engine, and didn't save anything for writing. (Sound like anything we've discussed here recently???) On the other hand, I've played some 3D games that really had me enthralled. (I hate to keep bringing this up, but don't you guys remember your thoughts about Ultima: Ascension the first time you looked at it? Pretty breathtaking.) I'm all in favor of 3D, as long as story and gameplay don't suffer. But, on the other hand, you'll probably never find me complaining about a game like BGII. Man, I love that game...

We used to play Trek and a game called Lunar Lander on the printer terminals for one of Ohio State's IBM System 360s. Does anybody else remember those terminals? They looked like an overfed Selectric typewriter, had all sorts of warnings not to get your fingers anywhere near the type ball, and made about as much noise as a pneumatic jackhammer.

Damn, that's the second time in a row I've added a message to the wrong thread. No more posting before coffee!

I agree with the original statement. In appropriate games, 2D looks a lot better. I think Age of Mythology looks worlds less appealing (visually) than Age of Empires II, for instance.

3D has some advantages, though, particularly for developers. It makes animation easier (you don't have to render out animations for every sprite character in the game; instead you can create a basic set of human animations and use them for all the human characters). Pool 2 is getting good mileage out of this by using 3D characters on 2D painted backgrounds (the best of both worlds).

I think that it's ultimately marketing considerations that drive developers to 3D, unfortunately. There are so many games that really don't NEED to be 3D, and in fact would probably look better in 2D, but end up being 3D games anyway because it's "sexier." What was gained by using a 3D engine in Emperor: Battle for Dune, for instance? Nothing.

"I think that it's ultimately marketing considerations that drive developers to 3D, unfortunately. There are so many games that really don't NEED to be 3D, and in fact would probably look better in 2D, but end up being 3D games anyway because it's "sexier." What was gained by using a 3D engine in Emperor: Battle for Dune, for instance? Nothing."

That's it exactly. Steel Soldiers is another new RTS that gains absolutely nothing except system requirements from being in 3D. The gameplay is exactly like the original Z except that now, on anything but a high-end system, you get a slow down when a lot of units are in play. Wonderful.

Four years ago TA gave us an RTS where taking the high ground had some importance. You'd think at least one developer using a 3D engine might find it logical to incorporate that into the gameplay.

Well, to be fair, making a game 3d gives you the ability to use the super-easy special opengl/directx trick library functions. You know, for when you want reflection-mapping in your turn-based strategy game.

3D offers certain other advantages, too. Take Age of Mythology for example. It's got some really super-big monsters. Well, with 2D, the amount of memory an animation takes up is directly proportional to the size of the units and the number of frames of animation. With 3D, animation isn't really related to screen size much at all.

So with 3D, they can afford to have really large creatures with smooth animations without blowing their whole memory budget.

It also allows for some stuff like deformable terrain, which is again of worth only if it's appropriate for your game design.

I think we're not far from the point where 3D is going to give you all the detail 2D will at a given system requirement. Right now, yes, 2D is just far more detailed (though largely static). 3D buys you motion at the cost of detail.

When the average 2-year-old machine can draw 60 million triangles and has gigapixel fill rates without breaking a sweat, we'll get the best of both worlds - fine detail AND lots of motion.

Just imagine if those Baldur's Gate II towns were more animated...signs swinging, flags waving dynamically as the wind gusts and stops, shadows from clouds passing over, rain hitting rooftops and collecting in gutters (and flags whipping fiercely in the storm), occasional shutters opening or closing, doors moving smoothly, and of course proper shadows that stretch out appropriately for the time of day...

"Just imagine if those Baldur's Gate II towns were more animated...signs swinging, flags waving dynamically as the wind gusts and stops, shadows from clouds passing over, rain hitting rooftops and collecting in gutters (and flags whipping fiercely in the storm), occasional shutters opening or closing, doors moving smoothly, and of course proper shadows that stretch out appropriately for the time of day... "

I think stuff that adds that kind of atmosphere to a game would be great. But I'd still be more impressed if 3D was used to have more effect on the gameplay. Wouldn't be great in Neverwinter Nights if standing at the top of the stairs gives the monster an advantage over the fighter who's trying to climb the stairs to get at him?

It's the all-Jason discussion!

You're both correct in that 3d lets you design much-better looking games, of course. I was attempting to make the point that for most games historically considered "2d" such as turn-based wargames, all 3d does is drive up the budget. I really don't think the extra sales Panzer General 3d obtained by virtue of adding 3d made up for the development costs over a 2d version.

If anything, I'd prefer more games with budget on AI and gameplay, and little or nothing on graphics. It's possible the marketplace doesn't agree with me, but I think developer and marketing self-selection is driving the process more than anything else.

The Neverwinter Nights example of height giving combat advantages is a perfect example of how to use a 3d engine to improve gameplay, though.

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Just imagine if those Baldur's Gate II towns were more animated...signs swinging, flags waving dynamically as the wind gusts and stops, shadows from clouds passing over, rain hitting rooftops and collecting in gutters (and flags whipping fiercely in the storm), occasional shutters opening or closing, doors moving smoothly, and of course proper shadows that stretch out appropriately for the time of day...

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"I think stuff that adds that kind of atmosphere to a game would be great. But I'd still be more impressed if 3D was used to have more effect on the gameplay. Wouldn't be great in Neverwinter Nights if standing at the top of the stairs gives the monster an advantage over the fighter who's trying to climb the stairs to get at him?"

Well, exactly. 2D is a very limited representation of the world. It can be as "detailed" as you want it to be, but it's ultimately just a pretty painting.

On the other hand, if developers don't capitalize on the things they can do with 3D (eg, physics), there's really no point in doing it. I think that's the crux of the discussion here.

My favorite pet example of this is starcraft vs. total annihilation. Starcraft is fun in a bitmappish, 640x480 sort of way, but Total Annihilation gave me something more visceral, more violent... the planes, tanks, ships and bots all reacted similarly to their real-world counterparts in so many subtle ways. And that simply isn't possible with tiles and bitmaps.

You know, I'm pretty sure that clouds do leave shadows in BGII -- and I'm pretty sure I remember flags blowing, but not to the degree that you mentioned...(Also, that was one thing that wowed me with Tropico, as crazy as it sounds. The clouds left a shadow.)

Say what you want about gameplay -- which is admittedly the main factor -- but if a game doesn't look good, it's not gonna sell well. But, really, you shouldn't have to choose. Occasionally a game comes along with good graphics and good gameplay. That should be standard. (So should good writing...)

Tropico is a very unique example as is its graphic engine counterpart Railroad Tycoon II. Tropico is true 3D with hand-drawn (from photographs) sprites overtop of the 3D landscape. Myth used a similar setup but was zoomed further in. Tropico really presents the best of both worlds, the detail I'm craving in the buidings, people, foliage and much of the important gameplay features as well as the 3D terrain with real elevation and the nifty clouds that Michael mentions. Notably though, the boats are 3D objects.

Railroad Tycoon II used the same engine to great effect. The trains are gorgeous and detailed but the terrain allows you to enjoy elevation in 3D.

I may be alone in this, but I think Phil Steinmeyer is a friggin' genius. His games are some of the most fun to play, always easy to learn but hard to master and yet always use technology and art design in unique new ways. That includes the fabulous music present in all three of his most notable games, Heroes of Might and Magic II (Opera), Railroad Tycoon II (Bluegrass) and Tropico (Latin rhythms).

As great as Heroes III is, it really shows just how influential Steinmeyer was to the Heroes games. Heroes III is really just more and less of a game all at the same time. Heroes II is by far the better of the two. I am anxious to see what New World will do with Heroes IV since it's a complete redesign minus Phil's input. By the same token, I'm anxious to see Age of Wonders 2 since Phil is apparently consulting on it.

--Dave

BTW, since wumpus brought up Total Annihilation, has anyone else played TA: Kingdoms lately? A friend and I broke it out and played it with all the patches a couple weeks ago.

WOW

I mean, I really enjoyed the game early on despite the trouble with performance, but on a GeForce2, even with only a 450MHz processor, the game screamed along at 1024x768 with hardware acceleration on after the 3.1 patch. It's also absolutely stunning with gorgeous hand-painted maps. Some of the 3D models are beautiful such as the dragons and other flying creatures.

We played it multi, and it was a really good time. It's got its own feel which I still think contributed to the lack of reception at retail and with gamers. They really shouldn't have called it Total Annihilation at all. The game stands on its own. It's a damn shame it wasn't quite done when it was released. Had it performed this well back then (even without the GF2, software mode is great now), it may have been just the hit game Cavedog needed to get something like Amen, Elysium or Good and Evil done.

Even without Chris Taylor, there were some great ideas percolating in that company. Just another to add to the growing list of visionary design groups disbanded to the four winds.

--Dave

"If it doesn't affect the gameplay, it really has no place."

This is a whole different can of worms, but I'd argue that atmosphere DOES directly affect gameplay, or at least the quality of the game experience (which amounts to the same thing).

Atmosphere can have a direct influence on the gameplay, yes. But in the context of the discussion, 3D is often detracting from my immersion in a game rather than enhancing it due to the lack of detail in the game environment.

It is a different can of worms so I'll leave it at that. It also leads to another discussion I enjoy, why are most games focused on story today rather than the act of play? I want compelling interaction, story is simply an added bonus unless the two are inextricably tied to the style of game presented. That argument can't really be done on a "games as a whole" level though and maybe even the 3D vs. 2D one can't either. FPS games rely on 3D for immersion and their very existence.

Still, that's a whole three or more threads. :)

--Dave

>Wouldn't be great in Neverwinter Nights if standing at the top of the stairs gives the monster an advantage over the fighter who's trying to climb the stairs to get at him?

I think it does. Or at least, rules for that are in 3rd edition and I think they're implementing them.

I agree with Ben - people like to seperate visuals from gameplay in some abstract sense, but I think they're inseperable. EVEN in games like turn-based strategy affairs where it's not meant to be visceral or immersive.

I mean really, you COULD boil civilization down to a spreadsheet and command-line parser. But would that be fun? The iconic representations of your units and production and happiness and stuff was key at the time. And improving the visual fidelity of that without changing the concept does indeed improve "gameplay."

Gameplay is served, in my opinion, but a lot more than the game logic. Take sound in Thief, or System Shock 2: you could have had far worse sound engineering in those games and had the same "gameplay" (in the "rules and logic of the game" sense), but it wouldn't play the same. It wouldn't be as fun, or as scary, or as rewarding. And I think graphics are the same way.

"It also leads to another discussion I enjoy, why are most games focused on story today rather than the act of play?"

That's easy--habit. It's because in every other media, the creator controls the story completely. Games break that paradigm (or at least they should), but in a lot of ways it's easier to stick with what we know rather than to blaze new ground.

It's too bad, because the approach that seems most common today uses gameplay merely as an obstacle between you and the next chunk of story. It's like reading a book in which you must solve a crossword puzzle (or kill a bunch of bad guys, or whatever) to turn to the next page. Particularly "groundbreaking" games sometimes mix the story and the puzzles together to make the formula a little less obvious (a la Half-Life), but it's still the same formula, and it still boils down to the developer telling you a story.

I think that's one of the things that makes games such as Civilization so compelling. The game presents you with a premise, but how the story unfolds is pretty much up to you. The game doesn't force you to follow a script. How many of you have shared a "Civ story" with fellow gamer at one time or another ("... then the Americans refused to trade me such and such, so I bombed them into oblivion..."). And how much less appealing would Civ be as a series of scripted missions?

What's so damn strange is that games were completely the opposite in the beginning, Ben. Classic arcade games are truly that, games. There's no story to be told in a Pac-Man, Tempest, Robotron, Defender, etc. though they all have some story-like motivation at their core. Where did we turn the corner to telling stories instead of just making games?

Goddamn that would make an interesting article if you could somehow pinpoint a place in time that designers started shifting toward story over pure gameplay. Maybe it's text-based interactive fiction like the Zork games that started it? Or maybe Sierra's adventure games were the ones that took away the innocence of focusing only on the game?

I don't know if I've mentioned it here before (I think I may have and others too) but if story is the one thing that gamers constantly harp on as the worst part of many games (due to lack of writing talent), why has this become the focal point for many game designs? Why not take a look at the classics of the past and bring that philosophy of design forward to 2001/2002. I'm not saying make a game as basic as Pac-Man (which is where I think Infogrames/Hasbro go wrong with their updates of classics), but focus on finding new and compelling types of play.

I know you all think I'm a Sega Zealot (and I am) but the fellow that created Space Channel 5, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, seems to have the right idea. His new game Rez (for PS2) is taking traditional shooter gameplay and mixing it with music creation with the only real goal to get a better "score". And yeah, you can kind of use the word score in its musical and purely numerical definitions.

These posts probably have me lumped in with those guys at the academic journal of gaming...I hope I'm making sense and staying within the thinking-man's gamer classification. ;)

--Dave

"if story is the one thing that gamers constantly harp on as the worst part of many games (due to lack of writing talent), why has this become the focal point for many game designs?"

That's a good question. I don't know the answer. You'd think that developers would hire professional writers, and that every game would have the equivalent of a screenwriter position. But they don't, and there isn't.