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.
