Bits Interview: TWIMTBP, DX10 and beyond

IMHO this article describes exactly what is wrong with games today. more eye candy and less gameplay. they complain when people do not buy the games and in the end they blame it on piracy, when it comes down to all game developers and hardware makers think people want is infinity fps down to the most detailed speck of dust getting rendered. Do not get me wrong hardware advances are good, in fact i love them too, but it seems any more that most companies put gameplay at the bottom of the list. so yeah i could really care less about dx10 give me a game that doesn't actually suck anymore.

 

reinstall fallout 2. i just did

 

I'm sorry if this didn't come across to you in the article, but the developers actually want to create compelling games that are worth playing - it's not just about eye candy; far from it in fact, as you'll see soon with another article that we're working on at the moment.

Nvidia is attempting to help the developers focus on achieving the compelling part, while it helps make sure the games don't look like ass and don't give an awful experience (on the performance/compatibility front). There will be more articles in this series over the next few months - this is merely the first.

 

I think the graphics and increase in eye candy directly leads to better game play... almost by default in some cases.
Take the dust you mention... if the dust is put in the game and the effort is put made to get the physics of down so it looks right when you move through it... That leads to some basic and obvious added game play. If your avatar kicks up dust as they drive through a desert to get to an objective... the enemy can see this from miles away. Plus the tracks you leave leads them directly to your position. Plus you could role in it to increase camouflage, your guns might jam if they get gritted up, you can see where the enemy are from THEIR dust trails, large clouds of dust or a visibly moving atmosphere also can be an indication of wind direction.... it goes on and on. Examples like that can be found for everything once the player is able to see and interact with something in the game world more realistically. In a photo and physically realistic game the technical and tactical complexity of a game pretty much writes itself... it's limitless.
Currently in CS:S shooting through a door is a tactical attack. Once the eye candy is up to it, doing things like shooting or punching out the bricks of a wall to make a sniper hole will be another thing a player could try... or releasing a smoke grenade into the ventilation system so it floods into a locked down room... or pouring petrol into a microwave, throwing in some metal and starting it up to make a rudimentary time bomb.
All that's required is eye candy advances... It's not a case of people putting everything into the graphics and then wondering what they can do with them... it's the other way around. People are waiting and pushing the graphics forward because they have so much they want to do which isn't possible yet.

 

I understand what you and Nvidia mean, but, if you take a game like Red Alert 2, its little eye candy, but soo soo much gameplay, i feel it's a better game than SupCom and C&C 3, even though these two games are fresh of the shelf, and are full of eye candy (C&C 3 more so than SupCom)

The game play in both SupCom and C&C 3 are good, but not as good as that of a game thats 7 years old.

My personal preference though.

Sam