3D in Adventure Games: What’s the Point?
3D in Adventure Games: What’s the Point?
I was just looking at some screen shots of the upcoming Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, and it caused me to ponder the imponderable: why did the developers choose to go with 3D on this game? The characters are just plain ugly even with their umpteen million polygons. Grace looks like a bulldog with her face all mashed in, and Gabriel looks like a teenager. (Of course, none of this will stop me from playing the game immediately when it becomes available.) And the backgrounds look like those in every other 3D game I’ve seen.
I am not very well-versed in the technical advantages 3D has over 2D with respect to games in general besides getting to use those spiffy Voodoo cards that we all paid $200 for. I was always under the impression that 3D only had advantages for games with a lot of movement in that all sides of a particular object, such as a mountain or a house, could be redrawn quickly without a lot of stuttering or skipping on the screen.
Back to the question, then: what’s the point in adventure games? GK3 is not going to have any action, is it? So there’s no need to quickly rerender scenery. And the grass and mountains look like the grass and mountains in every other 3D game, as if all game developers have the same 3D software development package and are using the default textures from the default templates.
It seems to me that the artists can add polygon after polygon in constructing their characters and scenery, but it still ends up looking like a bunch of polygons. This strikes me as a huge limitation in game design and a huge constraint that has to be dealt with by the artists.
The only 3D game I’ve ever seen that didn’t look like all the rest of them is Grim Fandango. There the artists chose to work within the 3D design limitations instead of heaping polygon on polygon in building characters and scenery, and thus they created what to me is a masterpiece of design. The characters only used several polygons each, lending them the appropriate “flatness” needed to fit the style of the game. The backgrounds were rich and not of the template sort that you see in most other 3D games. Could the type of interface in Grim Fandango have been replicated in 2D? I don’t know.
Another nice game, not really 3D but using 3D textures for its backgrounds, over which are superimposed regular 2D cartoon characters, is U.F.O.s. It is an example of an artistic game created by going outside the constraints of 3D (and back to good old 2D), and the juxtaposition of the two styles gives the game a unique and pleasing appearance.
I don’t foresee 3D attaining the richness and freedom of style that 2D offers, at least not any time soon, at least not until game designers quit using their template textures quite so freely, and I fail to see what advantages it offers in adventure games. Another thing: it seems to take so much longer to develop games using 3D than with 2D. I would like to see the big guns in the adventure game business quit jumping on the 3D bandwagon and concentrate instead on delivering quality 2D products more quickly. After all, the story’s the thing, isn’t it? And 3D seems to suck the charm right out of most adventure games.
