Digging up the past for good game design

Yep - as great as Doom was - with Doom (and the Voodoo cards) started the whole 3d/graphic mania.

2d games were suddenly out of fashion. The creativity of game designers went since then into 3d engines. New game ideas (existing in in abundance in old C64, Amiga, Atari times) are now a rarity.

HiddenX said:

Yep - as great as Doom was - with Doom (and the Voodoo cards) started the whole 3d/graphic mania.

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That was actually much later - Doom was 1993 and the whole 3Dfx thing was very much central to 1997 - Quake II was a major player in it.

You're right - Doom and Voodoo cards are two stories.

But the 3d mania started with Wolfenstein/Doom.
First signs were Dungeon Master, Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder.

I bought a Matrox Mystique with an addon card (PowerVR M3d) in late 1996 for Quake.

I want to postulate this logic chain:

Doom (and other 3d games) -> need for better 3d hardware -> developing of better 3d hardware (Voodoo for example) -> more 3d games with more hardware hunger-> man power goes more and more into the graphic development -> ...

And, and with all that a gradually decline of story-driven adventure games.
Meanwhile the FPS genre rose and rose ...

HiddenX said:

man power goes more and more into the graphic development -> ...

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Exactly, and when you talk to developers now, it is all abou the cost to produce art assets limiting everything. If they allow branching it will cost more and more ...

On the other side that means that the end product is eventually a graphically shiney thing totally devoid of any story (I had almost written "or immersion", but that's not entirely true. You can do a lot of immersion with the visual display).

Though there are certainly milestones in the development of "3D" engines, it has been a slowly developing trend for MUCH longer.

The very first "3D" commercially successful games stem from way back in the early 80s (likely earlier than that), with arcade wireframe games like Star Wars and stuff like that. The pursuit started long, long ago.

While Doom was most definitely one of the truly impressive games of its era, you can hardly mention it without giving credit to Wolfenstein 3D which was id's first mega hit, and of which the Doom engine was an evolution.

It should also be mentioned, that Doom wasn't a true 3D engine, because you couldn't look up or down, and much of what you saw as 3D were in fact "tricks".

The first generally accepted true 3D gaming engine (with textures) was actually Quake, though a few things like parts of torches were still sprites. System Shock (1994) had a very elaborate 3D engine, but used sprites for enemies and certain other stuff.

A couple of games were instrumental in promoting video cards with dedicated 3D acceleration hardware, and among the biggest of these were Tomb Raider and Quake. Quake 2 came later when 3D cards already had made their major breakthrough.

3DFX (makers of Voodoo cards) were the first "victors" in the 3D card war, but they were not the only ones producing cards. I personally had a 3D Blaster (Rendition chipset) card a while before the first Voodoo card was released, and I remember how much in awe I was running Quake with accelerated 3D hardware.

That was before the term "GPU" was invented or at least commonly used, by the way.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

You can do a lot of immersion with the visual display.

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With the right design principles and art direction it can be fantastic. The first time I gazed down upon the Valley of Mines in Gothic it induced a sense of wonder in me I hadn't experienced since childhood. However it's a double-edged sword. The less abstract graphics become the less input the player's own imagination has and the harder designers have to work to fill that visualisation gap. Back in the 8 bit days I could flesh out entire CRPG worlds with my own imagination doing all the heavy lifting, whereas in games like Oblivion everything exists in real time right in front of the player the burden of immersion shifts towards the efforts of the design team.

Personally I don't feel modern CRPGs are correctly utilising all the immersion building tools available to them. They're far too focused on graphics alone. Morrowind is an exception for successfully melding various elements together such as writing talent and art direction.

Personally I don't feel modern CRPGs are correctly utilising all the immersion building tools available to them. They're far too focused on graphics alone. Morrowind is an exception for successfully melding various elements together such as writing talent and art direction.

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If only they had included an interesting character development and combat system.

Then again, the same core flaw is prevalent in all Elderscrolls games.

MudsAnimalFriend said:

Personally I don't feel modern CRPGs are correctly utilising all the immersion building tools available to them. They're far too focused on graphics alone.

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I have a similar feeling goung to the opposite side with games like Far Cry.
The visual display is just beautiful (I mean the Island as a whole), but it isn't used at all. Only tactics count, NOT the visual display as such.