[MUD-Dev] The importance of graphics

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 01:02:34AM -0400 I heard the voice of
Zach Collins (Siege), and lo! it spake thus:

> I was chatting with some friends last night, and we got onto the
> subject of graphics in games.  One of them made the claim that
> graphics will make or break a game, while another made a very
> interesting point, that it's the *consistency* of the art
> direction instead of just how pretty everything looks.

I'm just going to touch on the 'consistency' point a bit.  I'm not a
graphical kind of guy; I have only the vaguest appreciation for
graphics, and if you go a few steps downward from zero, you'll find
my ability to create them.

I think consistency IS the make-or-break of graphics.  For an
example, take the game "Serf City" (also released as "Settlers").  I
played it on a 386/40.  The gameplay was fun, but extremely limited.
It had support for 2-player games, but only by splitting the screen
and using 2 meece.  The graphics were actually pretty impressive for
the era and computing muscle behind it, but they're nothing
spectacular; a few sprites with a couple variants of each for
walking, working, fighting, etc.

Everything was very simplistic.  The graphics made the game; not
because they were great, but because they were all very consistent,
and they all fit perfectly with the whole tone of the game.  This
was a FUN game, not a SERIOUS game, and the graphics inclined
beautifully in that direction.  So I guess this is 'fit' as well as
'consistency'.

If you have beautiful artistic near-lifelike rendering of carefully
crafted avatars with a few hundred thousand polygons each, in a
cartoon-ish gameplay, it's going to look like crap.


--
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
       "Klein bottle for sale ... inquire within."

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