Gameplay/World size versus Graphics

I've been wishing a lot lately that my dream game would come true, as well as wishing that Skyrim was even bigger than it actually is. And it has occurred to me to ask a question: How much work goes into programming wonderful graphics as opposed to adding in more content?

Having asked this, and hoping for an answer, and I must apologize for the seemingly random nature of this OP as it's 3AM and I really wanted to ask this before the thought slips my mind, would it be possible at all for a game these days to have graphics that would've been ok-ish 5 years ago, if the game had a simply massive world, compared to what we get nowadays? (Ie worlds that seem massive, but either lack detail or are deceptively small, such as Just Cause 2 for the former and latter and Skyrim for the latter only.)

I ask because a thought for a game has been in my head, trading graphics for 60fps gameplay with a lot of very, very fancy things in it. I remember hearing in my basic computer class that displaying things was the single largest part of the thing that a computer has to compute for a program.

I'll also point out that this question mainly pertains to open-world or sandbox style games. Some games are better served with a single cohesive experience, such as Braid and Arkham Asylum, and I would not deny these games their charm and joy.

edited 28th Jan '12 1:27:11 AM by Enkufka

Neither one really takes that much more work. And they're really just intertwined, you need more graphics if you have more content, see.

But if it was one or the other, I'd say content. It takes coding, scripting, and planning and all that.

Somewhat relatedly, I'd say that going for quantity over quality is never a good idea.

edited 28th Jan '12 1:40:35 AM by Mukora

I meant much more in terms that I'm not sure I'd be able to say properly right now, but I'll try.

I'm mainly as a reference point for these questions using Grand Theft Auto 4. Most of the buildings, as far as I could tell, were not accessible, and some places felt much more like places you'd run around in order to lose the police. Making expansions to that would be relatively easy, I would think.

I guess I'm also using Red Faction Guerrilla as a reference, in which as far as I can tell, they did a terrain map, added in indestructable foundations for buildings, then for a lot of them, they just recycled the same building repeatedly in each sector of the game. Again, expanding this would be easy.

Though I should probably try to ask this again in the morning.

Though another question I have is why graphics and content are intertwined.

edited 28th Jan '12 1:51:04 AM by Enkufka

Sorry for being Captain Obvious here, but the graphics themselves are not the programmer's job, they are the job of the 3D artists. That said, making the graphics run without lag is the programmer's duty... but it doesn't really take too much to avoid lag.

A programmer would take a lot more time scripting the gameplay elements than working on the graphics.

Do you want a larger world or that the existing one be fully explorable and content filled? Because I some game seem to have a large world that is mostly empty with spots of content here and there. This is a content issue and mostly just requires more work put into during development. To get around memory limitations you either have smaller areas, have some sort of streaming or in some/most cases reduce the detail/shut of AI/physics/scripting when things are further away.

Do you want more things on screen or do you want them more detailed? This is limited by the GP Us memory capacity. Not really my area but let's say a GPU can display 100 polygons, you can either spend those on making more objects or making existing objects more detailed, and since a most game are limited by the consoles capacity of a total 512MB for both graphics and everything else there is a compromise made, quite often in favour of more detailed objects because graphics are believed to sell better than content and it's easier to make something look nice than innovate game design.

A lot of the time developers use tricks to make things seem better than they are for example GTA:SA had air planes that were nothing but navigation lights that flew really high to give the impression of air traffic while also having a few real airplanes on lower altitudes to give context to the lights. There are also things like having houses only be cardboard cutouts with one side if you aren't supposed to be on the other side, of course with open world games you need to create all sides just in case the players use their freedom to get behind the scenes.

edited 28th Jan '12 2:07:30 AM by mahel042

Ah, I remember many similar debates on this.

Generally, a lot of content, if spaced out correctly, is better than hundreds of content with a small place to put it. Likewise, a gigantic world is worthless if there's no content to put into it. Quest 64 is a great example of this problem.

As for Graphics, they only matter if they make it hard to see or affect gameplay. They're not terribly important in general. If you can fit more content into the empty world by not having beyond beautiful graphics, I'd take the content first. As long as they're quality-based, of course.

Content over graphics for me at least. While detailed graphics can look nice, it frequently results in Real Is Brown in my experience. On the other hand, too much content without detailed enough graphics to convey the game world is also a bad combination. Overall, the way to go is probably good enough graphics to show the game world without every single minute detail being visible, coupled with a large but content-filled world.

For example, take Minecraft. While the (default) graphics are only 16x16 pixel graphics for one meter cubes, the game doesn't really need anything fancier. None of the game loses anything by having low-resolution images, as the point of the game is not to admire an existing game world's every detail but to create your own worlds. Similarly, while each map is huge, the different terrain features make each part of the world different, giving completely different opportunities for unique constructions. And of course, since you're the one building the world, you can add whatever content you want.

On average, world size and stunning graphics tend to not really coexist very well. Final Fantasy XII had a really samey look and a massive world, but the world felt really empty. Final Fantasy XIII, regardless of your thoughts on it, had a gorgeous look, but the world was really restrictive, even the part where it opened up.

Those two are what I think are the best examples of this phenomenon. The bigger the game world, the more effort it takes to make it interesting and diverse. Xenoblade Chronicles managed it, and so did Skyrim to a degree.

So are you awake enough to ask the question again? I'm curious of what you really meant.

Hmm. I played Deus Ex Human Revolution last year and loved it. The graphics were lush and I actually loved the whole black/gold colour schema used throughout Detroit and elsewhere. Some folks didn't like them but I could really care less about their opinions as they could care less about mine. What annoyed me though is that most of what you see you cannot interact with. Most buildings cannot be entered, you cannot get in a hovercar and fly around just exploring the world and there were few places to go. Not enough hub locations and things to do in them. This was all due to the fact that the game was developed for consoles as well as proper computers and had thus to work in the piss poor memory space available on the Xbox 360 and Ps3. Both of which I have, and enjoy playing games on, so this is not an anti-console biased rant.

If on the other hand the game had been designed for 64-bit systems, a minimum of 4Gbs of DDR 3 RAM and a graphics card with at least 1Gb of GDDR RAM, we may have had the more hub locations and things to do.

I prefer hubs like Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, and Bloodlines had rather than wide open worlds. Kind of pointless to waste time making hundreds of feet of empty arctic tundra just for the sake of making it take longer to wander your adventurer ass to the next quest. Just have a world map with some random encounters every now and again to spice things up and have hubs so you can actually focus on making fun stuff like quests and characters.

edited 31st Jan '12 4:46:18 AM by Kev-O

If I got a game the size of BG 2 again I'd happily downgrade to crappier graphics.

You just summarized one of the bigger problems with games these days. The computers out today are capable of rendering some impressive stuff, but since creating a multi-million dollar game exclusively for the PC market means missing out on all the console players, a lot of designers simply cannot make those worlds as a result of the limitations.

And besides, one of the games I've recently become addicted to, Terraria, pretty much proves that you don't need much in the way of graphics to make a huge, yet interesting to explore world. But to be fair, everything in Terraria is completely random or created by the player like in Minecraft so it avoids that whole hiccup about requiring areas to be pre-designed.