Hassat Hunter wrote:No, what I am saying is that it was infact possible with the technology of the past to make open worlds. It's not technology of today that made it possible. Improve upon it (depending on your views of improved that is, Morrowind >>>> Oblivion after all), yes, that's modern technology. Custom made worlds exist (see Baldur's Gate) yet still the more-recent Diablo II used randomly generated maps. All to do with preference and intent, not the technology.
Yeah I concede that point. I'd be interested to know how Daggerfall managed that seamless open world though. Modern games have pretty sophisticated streaming and LOD, even with how crap Daggerfall looks, I find it hard to believe they loaded the entire world into memory all at once. They must've done some streaming or something, which is pretty badass for the time.
Not to mention we would have more variety, and less people would be needed with less years of developing per title. Am I the only one who sees benefits of that?
Wrong on the former point, right on the latter. Hey, look - you don't even need computers to make good games. You know what's a good game? Chess. You know what's an even better game? Go. You want stories in your games? Mansions of Madness. Descent. Tabletop RPGs. Instead of stopping the technology in 1998 or whenever you decided that game development was going downhill, why not stop it in 1970 before the first computer game? Holy shit dude, you don't even need a team to make huge board games, you can do it alone.
Technology gives us more options. Computers gave us the option of making digital games, just as advances in physics let us do stuff like Trespasser or Half-Life 2, and advances in animation and graphical power let us do the super-scripted Call of Duty games. You don't like those? Well cry harder, Hassat, there are millions of people who do. Don't worry about whether lots of people are playing games you don't like, just concentrate on the games you do like.
And this thing about making games with less people? You can still do that. It's just that nobody does because the games made with more people are way more impressive. If smaller games with less people were genuinely better games, they would beat the larger games on the marketplace. Instead, they're different games, and good games of either type live on. You got your Calls of Duty and Skyrims and you got your Braids and Worlds of Goo.
But none of the large studios do that! No, of course they bloody don't, that's what makes them large!
What real gameplay benefit has HDR has so far? Do stealthbased games use it and define their light/visibility rating on it? So far I have seen none.
HDR has the benefit that it looks about a hundred times better than bloom. It's a purely visual thing, not everything has to be about gameplay after all.
Do physics really add so much above just random placed strategic destructive tools? What gameplay effect has bump mapping? Do waving trees add more to the game than static?
Most studios don't use their physics beyond making the game more spectacular, which in my mind is totally valid. Some, however, base their entire games around physics. Remember The Incredible Machine? Really simple 2D physics simulation, and the entire game was built around it and literally could not have existed in the same form without it. Trespasser. Half-Life 2. Just because not everyone uses it well, that doesn't mean it has no actual use.
Bump mapping and animated trees? Those are specifically visual effects. What does a flight stick add to the visuals of a flight simulation? Nothing. That's not what it's for.
And yes, I could do without
"Blabla will suck since it doesn't have the latest FPS graphics!"
"It's a RTS"
"Soooo?"
"Are you really suggesting making every vehicle as detailed here as Battlefield III? Seriously?"
"Hell, yeah"
"Goddmn graphic whores kill the industry
"
Are you saying you could do without whiny idiots on the Internet? I think I can get behind that, Hassat. But trust me, there were whiny idiots on the Internet since the Internet was invented. If they didn't have graphics to complain about, they'd complain about something else. In fact they
do complain about lots of other things, but go ahead and focus on your own pet peeve.
One could say that of all games...
Cute
Word-nitpicking aside, as mentioned, during that time where also manually designed RPG's (Ultima, Might & Magic). So it's not by limitation that they made random dungeons but by design (or maybe lazyness).
Argh no this post is already too long, I'm not gonna sit here and try to explain to you why Daggerfall could only have existed back then precisely because its sparsity of content. It wasn't because they wanted it to be largely empty and generic, it wasn't because they were lazy, it was resources
and technology and if you refuse to take my word for it then so be it because I'm not getting further into that.
But fuck it. We can all go back to playing Chess when you're the emperor of the world. It's a fine game, I'm sure nobody will complain for long.
