My only gripe is devs putting in too much HDR and calling it good graphics... It bugs me....

I'm worried about games becoming just 60 dollar show pieces instead of good games.

Graphics definetely ungulf your senses further, and I'm all for better graphics, but I feel a lot of games are becoming way too easy and are trying to invite casuals in.

4 hr linear, simple campaigns, cliched to the core, plus TDM multiplayers. I'm getting sick of it.

Graphics have been both a blessing to game mechanics, and a curse to overall game quality.

Graphics matter, but what matters more is a good art style, "graphicstyle" and the funfactor in games you play. Good graphics without a good art direction is "eye candy", for most casual players. They see only the "crisp graphics" and do not look at the art style of the game, they just find it cool, when it comes to an opinion about the graphics. They cannot separate graphics from art style influences, these can come from lietarture, mythology...
Games like Gears of War don't have a good art style, only these musclecharacters and a shit loadof gore and blood, this isn't art, this is just a "coolfactor" to bring the product to the players. Those who cannot separate, buy these games. Sorry for my bad english, I hope you can understand my explanation. :=(

Many developers conentrate on graphics and not on gameplay mechanics, that is what makes the game boring after the first playthrough. It's only about the "best graphics" out there. That's certainly the wrong way to make masterpieces for players with experience in gaming.

The only "good" games I've played in my life: Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls. I've played many other games, but they bored me to death after the first playthrough. I can say that games like demon's souls and SotC are games for the "eternity". :D They never get boring.

why use this demo for ur whining story...this nowhere near realistic...it's more cartoonish and i think it could be a kick%ss game...it just looks CGI not realistic if it looked realistic u would not know u were looking at a CGI movie. I dig this style it's a futuristic post modern world a bit grimmy and rugged a bit bladerunner and the skin change is really cool and could yield to some good things(reminds me of the skin change of the character called Gamma in the Anime Ninja Scroll...the graphics are awesome and the purpose of this tech demo is to showcase new DX11 FX and tesselation...it isn't meant to showcase gameplay...it has always been like this developers need better Hardware to render better physics which in turn yield to totally new gameplay possibilities.

As long as the game is fun with gameplay and not just ALL graphics.

it has never been that way...i remember the Tech demos of the Unreal Engine 3 for the PS3 on E3 2005 and i never could have imagined a game like Gears would have evolved out of that Engine, sure it had amazing graphics at that time, but the gameplay mechanics and animations in Gears combined with the Graphics were really revolutionary(ya ya Killswitch had the same cover methods but the Gears overhaul and strategy treatment made it into what it is today) and a lot of games followed the horizontal duck and cover gameplay in this generation. Remember these Developers carry the whole Games Industry with their Engines and thank God they keep pushing the technology cause the spinoffs(not only for the games industry)are beyond everybody's comprehension...these are the rare people that make the industry and keep the industry from becoming a casual consumer orientated industry and all their expertise is mainly self taught...these guys didn't learn their skills on schools and that's why they are so good at what they do best..thinking out of the box and innovate...the main reason most games are look a likes right now is because of the greedy business people(not the developers)that keep these innovators from letting loose their new developed ideas in a new generation of hardware.

I'm a graphic designer, and I can say I agree with this article. I've lost interest in realistic graphics long time ago, and I find more substance and effort in a Wii game like Madworld o Muramasa, than in all the COD, Killzone and Battlefield games togheter.

Designers have been more busy lately trying to make more and more polygons, instead of being, well, designing something. Dont get me wrong, things like HD and power are important, it's just that realist games isn't the way games should be going, I play games because I want to escape from the reality, so, why do I want to see realistic things on my screen?

BTW, I really wanna see Child of Eden on 360, it looks really awesome. And Brink, too, that game reminds me that you can make realistic graphics, and still desgin something, instead of take a photo and translate it into a game.

BRINK is just a rip off of Mirror's Edge and Namco's Breakdown...Mirror's Edge is a good example of realistic like graphics meet comics and innovative gameplay mechanics(Unreal Engine 3 also used with different outcomes)...again i think it is a misunderstanding to think that these engines try to mimic reality for the sake of becoming as reality is(if u really want to be able to mimic reality we 1st need to completely understand and be able to simulate ALL the complex processes of real world physics and that is far from a reality...yah there are supercomputers now with simulation programs that render each individual H20 molecule and the complex interactions between them in trying to Really simulate water physics...imagine doing that for all the molecule interactions that occur in real life so we can render Real realworld physics...impossible for the time being)these Engines are like synthesizers in music, they started out trying to imitate real instruments but ended up being totally unique and new sounds. Stop saying things look too realistic because they are not realistic...even in the most realistic rendering u can tell it is CGI and i'm not talking about motion capture...

They do this for Uncharted and that looks great too

Sure we all have said that great graphics don't make a great game but it sure does make a sucky game look pretty.

Graphics in video games need to keep evolving so that game play can evolve with it. The better the graphics the deeper the player can be immersed into the environment. The better the animation the more connected we feel to the characters. The facial animation in Half life 2 enhanced the story made me care for all the friendly NPC's in HL2. Where as in the past without this level of graphical detail I just saw NPC's as blurry sprites that pointed me in the right direction.

back in the 8-bit days i never would of imagined tracking an enemy by following it's foot prints or drops of blood but thanks to evolution of graphics games have that much detail. So all in all graphics are very important to games but yeh you still can make a great one using ancient technology.

Graphics are great and all but i want a breakthrough in Artificial Intellect.

I really don't know what the complaint is, the more power a system has, the more readily it can help realize the developers vision without compromise. Usually complaints about stuff like this is usually reserved to the fanboys of gaming consoles with less than stellar performance (eg: the Wii)

I agree with the author...technology should add new gameplay possibilities that were not possible in the previous generations rather than make a game just look pretty.That's why I never really understood why so many gamers make noise about crysis....what did the crytek with their cryengine 2 ever add to gameplay?Tell you what...value and there use of physics engine in source gave us new and revolutionary gameplay then what people like crytek did with crysis.That's why games like Half life2,GOW3,Heavy rain ect will always be ahead of their time

Any part of the game can be used as a gameplay element, be it textures, lighting, sound, animation, story...it all depends on the developer and how they envision their gameplay model.

why does the author of the article state that "you've probably never heard of From Dust" ?

Does he believe that everybody but him is only interested in Call of Duty or something ?

Graphics are getting better & better....which means GRAPHICS TECHNOLOGY is heading in the right direction you idiot(author). Maybe, judging by your complaint, animation technology should step it up a notch (and U2's was amazing). So if U2's animations were great. maybe the TECHNOLOGY is great...but developers should learn to use it better...hmmm. Reword your title or don't b**ch at all.

This whole article is pointless and stupid.

Voxels are the future. I think Carmack's thoughts on ray casting (or ray tracing) sparse voxel octrees are the direction we will head in the future. There are so many things that come "free" with SVOs that otherwise consume a lot of resources when done the traditional triangle rasterization way. With GPUs getting more and more parallelization and memory bandwidth, SVOs will be the future for sure. SVOs have their own unique issues, but the benefits outweigh their problems.

I've started to code a game engine around SVOs. This is being done in my spare time. Unfortunately, I have to re-learn all of the things I forgot from University. As time progresses and I make headway, I'll post updates for anyone interested. For now, getting the core math concepts worked out and getting the rendering framework built are my main priorities.

Edit:

As the hardware becomes more powerful, the main focus is always going to be on using it to its full potential for graphics first and foremost. Physics effects ride along graphics for the most part, at least nowadays. Game AI is an area that hasn't seen much change and that is partly because AI is such an expansive and difficult field. Pathfinding has been done to death, but things like natural language processing and human decision are still extremely difficult to simulate, even with very powerful hardware. Look at Watson on Jeopardy. That was a natural language processing super computer. $3 million dollars worth of hardware. 90 8 core processors and 16 terabytes of RAM. All of that power to answer a question within 3 seconds. If you watched it, it was amazing, but you could still tell from its inability to comprehend some questions and the answers it gave that it was a computer. Now think about trying to do the same thing in real time in a game. We are FAR FAR FAR away from that kind of capability in consumer level hardware.

i had a wii since launch as in my opinion, that was the real next generation (because of the way you interact with the game). but three years have passed and i was playing games that were really pushing the console (goldeneye wii, monster hunter etc) and started to see the importance of horsepower. so now i have a ps3 to fill that need of aesthetics matching the gameplay experience. the ps3 doesnt always get it right either, a lot of the time its just a ps2 game hiding behind a higher polygon count, higher frame rates and resolutions. so the same problem arises.

and that is what it should be all about, a marriage of the two- graphics/gameplay. going to town on the graphics but having no innovation, is just as criminal as having brilliant gameplay but totally shit graphics. we need to merge the too. sure there are shit games on wii, but there are also brilliant examples of how it is amazing. same goes for the other consoles.

basically, the point im trying to make is, even in 3 generations into the future, there will still be a tone of rubbish games, you will still need to cherry pick your way through the mess to find what is actually a good game.

I have a feeling when Microsoft releases the new XBOX, the games will release on PS3 and that new XBOX, and only then will 3rd party games look as good as Sony's first party games.

Nice article, well written. I personally believe that Crytek is taking the right step forward in this area, because while remaining in the top graphics range their engine makes it easier for developers to develop and systems to run. You already see many small developers licensing it, to make low budget high quality games. In the end, the less a developer has to worry about making look good, the more they can focus on content (i.e Bayonetta & Vanquish....If Platinum games ever licences Cryengine 3 we are all likely to shit our pants at the outcome

WOW, I've been saying this to my friends since the days of Playstation 1 1998...nows it's 2011 and it's just all FPS/Ultra Violent games and online multiplayer to justify the psychopathic s#it. Here, want the ANSWER? Stop making every videogame a FPS SIMULATION and just make a friggin GAME with IMAGINATION! I can't believe my fav. platformer game "Ape Escape" has fallen to this HALF LIFE MOD SICKNESS and has turned into a %100 First Person game...I lost all respect for Ape Escape.

Problem is, if the graphics rule, but the animations are shit. Then the game is awkward. This gen games I expected to have good graphics but better/longer/intricate single players. To be honest, not many games delivered. Some, but not many.

graphic isn't the problem here.

It's the dev.

Title Company Game Type
----------------------------- -------------------
Battlefield 3 EA FPS
Homefront THQ FPS
Crysis Crytek FPS
Killzone 3 Sony FPS
Call of Duty Activision FPS
Dead Space EA FPS
BulletStorm EA FPS
Portal 2 valve FPS
Resistance 3 Sony FPS
Ghost Recon Ubisoft FPS
Spec Ops: The Line 2K Games FPS
Duke Nukem Forever 2k Games FPS
F.E.A.R. 3 Warner Home FPS
Socom 4 Sony FPS
Gears of War 3 MS FPS

FPS clones plus online.... all companies want to break the 2 million copies sold in the first week, so FPS + online play = AAA title!, sadly this is their formula!

How is it that so many wannabe journalists mix up graphics technology with artstyle? They're not the same thing, and they never will be.

On that note, the demo was purely technological, i.e. what can we do with the next-gen technology. It has nothing to do, in any way, with "heading in the wrong direction", as there are only two directions it can go into:

- Lower performance
- Higher performance

It's rather obvious which of the two it is.

Disney doesn't exactly have the best rep when it comes to partaking in gaming. They've built studios just to shut em down, not to mention just how much of an over the shoulder nuisance they are. If Epic wants to see Unreal Engine be dismantled and lose its hold on the industry then by all means. Also say goodbye to Fortnite because they will definitely kill it off with all the horrible decisions they'll force onto Epic.

I'll take worst ideas ever conceived for 500, Alex!

I wouldn’t want them to start injecting their agendas and politics in an already charged / filled environment . If they had a track record of offering quality over politics it wouldn’t have bothered me much . But knowing they could buy any big dev out of the blue is kinda scary .

Nah. Might as well as throw other big corporations while we’re at it. Why not Apple? Why not Netflix? Why not ATT?

The implications of this would be earth shattering for the games industry.

UE5 has replaced pretty much all engines at this point and even custom in house engines have largely disappeared in favour of UE5 imagine if Disney come in and pull a Unity move to change per download and that's just scratching the surface

I want to see a day where Disney no longer exists.

Uhm...no ,they should not

My Spidey sense is tingling.

Have you seen how badly they've messed up all the IPs they own? I don't think they need to buy anymore.

I don’t care about Fortnite but I don’t want Disney neat any more video game companies

I do not support this acquisition. Disney has already tried running a gaming division and they shut down Disney Interactive in 2016. Nothing good will come from them buying Epic games as much of the industry relies on Epic games as they are now.

Disney buys up Epic they will just shut them down after a while. Disney shut down LucasArts their motto is just license the character out and have someone like say EA make a game around lets say Mickey Mouse. Epic is better off on their own.