Monthly Archives: January 2012

Never mind the graphics, feel the gameplay

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This post was created in response to some thoughts I had after a tweet or two exchanged with @Helloween4545. Helloween is a YouTube (and Penny Arcade) let’s player – his YouTube channel is here – Helloween on YouTube. I like watching his LPs both because I like his commentary, and thus find them entertaining, but also because he tends to LP the kinds of games I don’t like playing that much but enjoy seeing someone else play. Having said that, I do have F.E.A.R 1, DLC and 2 in my Steam library (unplayed as yet, from Steam sales) thanks partially to his Let’s Plays making me realise I probably would enjoy the game.

Anyway the tweets in question that started this off were him asking if low framerates bothered people, or do people (i.e. gamers) generally prefer higher framerates above all else – “60fps or don’t bother” was the gist of it I think. My reply was along the lines of I tend to reduce graphics quality (i.e. turn down the settings from high or ultra) to give good framerates, which he agreed with. That in turn has lead me into thinking about gameplay versus graphics in games, hence this post.

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on how pretty games are, and how good the graphics are. People on forums saying that they ‘can’t run Battlefield 3′ when what they mean is they can’t run it on the highest graphics settings without framerate loss. People spending £500 or more on a new card (then a new power supply, etc.) so that they can run the latest games on the ultra high graphics settings. I am sure the hardware manufacturers (e.g. AMD/ATI and Nvidia) love this! I am not having a go here, if you love very pretty high res graphics, with all the physics and particles and what not turned on then great! The games are made to be able to do this, the graphics card manufacturers turn out high end cards so that people can turn up the graphics on their games. A lot of current games look spectacular indeed.

But for me – and I emphasize that this is just me, just my personal preference – I am quite happy to run games at medium graphics quality to get a good framerate. I enjoy a game if it has good gameplay (i.e. gameplay that I personally enjoy, again this is all about personal preferences) even if it doesn’t look incredibly pretty and sparkly and ‘oooh look at the individual leaves on that tree moving individually in the sunbeams sparkling off of the water and …’. You get the idea. As long as the graphics are good enough for me to be reasonably immersed, and understand what is going in in the game world, I can have great fun playing a good game.

This cannot be an unusual attitude, look at the popularity of handheld consoles – the Nintendo DS and the like. The first computers I played games on were obviously (this was decades ago) a lot less ‘pretty’ in the graphics department too. I have a mediocre graphics card in my current computer (Nvidia GT 545) and can get away with it because I don’t mind turning down the settings. I still enjoy Half Life 1, and the early Tomb Raiders, even though the graphics are mediocre at best by modern standards. For the time of course their graphics was excellent!

This post doesn’t have a point it is trying to make, just some exposition on my preferences in gaming – i.e. gameplay and smooth framerate before pretties. I am interested though in the proportion of PC gamers who think like I do somewhat, versus those who must have ultra super pretty high graphics and realism in their games or it spoils it for them. There must be a significant proportion in the latter category to drive the high end graphics cards sales, and for the game developers to create such amazing looking games that come out these days (Skyrim scenery on high anyone?).

Don’t get me wrong, if I can improve the graphics I will – for instance Morrowind is a great game, but I play it with high res texture packs installed and it does look and play a lot better. Well, the combat is a bit ‘wave the sword in the air vaguely and the enemy will unexpectedly fall over at some point’. So maybe most people are in the middle, liking both gameplay and nice graphics, and if they can have ultra high settings they will, so will get the graphics card to run that. But how many people refuse to turn down the graphics settings from high in order to play the game, and thus state that they ‘can’t run the game’ and won’t play it at lower settings? Or even put up with choppy low framerates and client lag just to get the pretty scenery? I have no idea, and it would be interesting to find out if they or I am in the minority.

Beating or finishing?

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Introduction

I am in the middle of composing a rambling blog post about the Humble Bundle at the moment, and in that post I am talking about ‘beating’ a game versus ‘finishing’ a game. I realised that I am using these words with a certain meaning that is possibly just my own – I am not certain what other people necessarily mean when they say they beat a game or finished it. I am probably being a bit too strict on my meaning, and quite possibly am at odds as to how others use those terms. So I thought I would set out a quick blog post about that very subject. I am also trying out headers in the blog post to see how it looks.

Beating a game?

What I mean when I say I have beaten a game is that I have followed the main questline to the end, beaten any final boss, and seen the final credits roll. Or if a puzzle game I have beaten all the puzzles or levels, even if I haven’t got a maximal score (all gold stars, all prize pumpkin ornaments, whatever the criteria are) on all the puzzles. I have ‘done’ each puzzle and solved it in some way.

With some games there is no concept of beating it (or finishing it) – for instance this could have been said about Minecraft until the recent updates (when it got out of beta) and the Ender Dragon was introduced. In some ways defeating the Ender Dragon is ‘beating’ Minecraft, although you can never ‘finish’ Minecraft (in terms of how I use ‘finish’, see the next section).

Finishing a game?

My concept of finishing a game involves doing everything in the game, seeing and playing all the game has to offer. With straightforward games this might be the same as beating it. But at the other end of some sort of content spectrum finishing a game like Fallout 3 or Skyrim involves an awful lot more than just beating the main questline. In the case of Skyrim with its radiant AI system and repeating generated on the fly side quests it is possibly not possible to strictly finish Skyrim, though I suspect things might get very repetitive after a few hundred hours of gameplay. I don’t have Skyrim yet so that should be borne in mind as a caveat.

Then there are cases such as Mass Effect 1 and 2. You can finish the game as one variety of Shepard – but a different early history (colonist, earthborn, spacer) or psychological profile (sole survivor, war hero, ruthless) will give you different side quests. Also different classes (vanguard, infiltrator, etc.) with different squadmates will mean missions proceed somewhat differently, although that really is getting down to playstyle and tactics, rather than truly different content. Or is it?

So how much do you have to do to declare Mass Effect finished, as opposed to just beaten? That is totally subjective and up to you. I, and I assume most gamers, play games because they are fun (I wonder if game devs, beta testers and so on actually stop having fun at some point and the gameplay becomes a boring chore of a job!). Thus, play the game until you start to have less fun. Then declare it finished for now – at least that is what I do.

Final thoughts

I don’t know if I have ever truly finished a game. Decades ago I certainly played the living daylights out of my favourite Amiga titles – but Elite? That is a game that would be very tricky to finish. I know I never even beat It Came from the Desert. I have played Morrowind a fair few times, but never beaten it – I always get sidetracked into the world, and the side quests, and then I make a different character because there is so much choice in Elder Scrolls games, and so on. I have the Oblivion GOTY too so once I beat Morrowind (not finish!) I can start that. By the time I beat Oblivion Skyrim will be cheap so there is at least that silver lining to my lack of time to play games as much as I want, and my habit of getting sidetracked a lot

My problem with getting sidetracked is actually the main point of my Humble Bundle post, which started off this post. Not sure when I will get that out as it is a bit of a ramble at the moment (well more so than normal). However, and apropos of getting sidetracked, I have just discovered when Googling that entry for It Came from the Desert that the game officially counts as abandonware and is available to download for PCs (it says it even works on Windows 7). This is a converted version of the DOS version of the game, which in turn was a port from the Amiga version. The Amiga version apparently had much better graphics (at the time the Amiga did have much better graphics than contemporary IBM style PCs). I haven’t downloaded it yet – but if I do I will get sidetracked some more and the ‘main’ games I ought to be beating will languish for a bit longer – but that is the subject of what will probably be my next post.

Oh, and I remember It Came from the Desert being hard so I expect to get frustrated a lot. Possibly rage some.