A new rant for all!
You walk in to you local EB Games and watch a person playing a Halo 3 demo,
the person who just walked in comes up beside you and watches, next he blurts out: “Look at those graphics, sure beats the crap out of the Wii.” If I was the first guy, I would want to either turn around and knock him out, or start the debate of Graphics vs. Game-play.
Many people including myself praise “Crysis” for being so realistic, and visually appeasing. However, because of this reason certain people (not including myself) automatically think the game is great for it’s great visuals. An example would be the PS3 vs. the N64. Many games on the PS3 look amazing, yet most of the games that look amazing fail to immerse me in their game-play as much as the prehistoric N64 game “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” which relatively bit the dust in terms of graphics. Specifically “Lair” for the PS3, the hype for the game was amazing, boasting real-to-life graphics, but turned out to be a “beautiful disaster” (Gamespot) because of horrible controls, cataclysmic camera which zooms everywhere you don’t want it to be, and most importantly shallow and unimpressive game-play. This would be a prime example of a beautiful looking game which fails because no effort has been put into game-play.
So we’ve established that gameplay is number 1 in importance in a video game. However when do bad graphics make a negative impact of the quality of the game? There is a very dimple answer to this question, graphics make a distinct negative impact on game quality when they make the game unplayable. Example: When you play an FPS with such horrid graphics when you cant tell where his head begins and it ends or where the heart is. Or when you play a game where you must find a specific object, and the specific feature of the object cannot be displayed because of horrible graphics. However there are games where graphics do not matter per se, such as Pong, when would you need high definition where you are hitting a square over a straight line and using rectangles are rackets. Therefore, horrible graphics make a negative impact on the game when the graphics interfere with the objective of the game.
In conclusion, game-play is extremely important as it is the game, and the underlying purpose of the game. However graphics are not as important as gameplay but they are a necessity depending on the objective of the game.
Now discuss, you are allowed to disagree and also when you make an argument on the comments explain your opinion. NO PROFANITIES (comments containing such material will be removed).
Discussing age old topics,
-AT16
I think that they are both equally important, like even though, as you say, “horrible graphics make a negative impact on the game when the graphics interfere with the objective of the game”, and that is true, but even if doesn’t interfere with the game, it can just be an annoying experience. For example, you’re playing some racing game, and when you just stop the car and look at the crowds, you see a bunch of flashing 8-bit people waving their hands. That’s annoying, but doesn’t interfere with gameplay.