There’s an age-old debate about the role and relative importance of gameplay and technology in computer games. Received wisdom says that too much time is spent on technology to the detriment of gameplay. Developers are obsessed with technology and spend their time churning out glorified technology demos that have little to with the man on the street and everything to do with impressing other programmers. I don’t agree with this view. Technology can revolutionise gameplay - it allows you to create games you couldn’t even have dreamed of five years ago.

The biggest change over the last couple of years has been 3D acceleration. Graphics have been reinvented, although in one sense this change has been cosmetic. Yes, Mario 64 looks fantastic, but does it play any better then the original 2D Mario platformers? But this is just one part of the story. To illustrate my point, consider what we’ve been doing at Elixir. Our technology will fundamentally affect and improve the gameplay in our games.

For the last eight months we’ve been working on a new graphics technology that will represent a fundamental advance over any visualisation engine currently in development. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick and simple explanation of what a graphics engine does (apologies to those of you who already know). Depending on the level of detail you want, each model in a scene will be made from anything between a few dozen polygons to a few thousand. A tree for example would probably be constructed with a hundred polys because it’s relatively unimportant. A character in a PlayStation game on the other hand might be made up of 450 polys. Every time the view in a game changes, the computer has to draw each of these polygons. The more polygons there are to draw, the slower the redrawing process is. This is called the frame rate. So when your computer chugs like a dog when running Q3 Test, it’s because it’s trying to draw too many polygons per frame. In order to keep the game going at a reasonable speed developers have had to limit the amount of detail in their games. We’re about to change this forever.

Ceri, our new artist started a couple of weeks ago. On his first morning I took him through our game. At the end of it, I asked him "how do you fancy working with an infinite polygon engine?" He almost fell off his chair. Next I showed him a tree, which was made of a million and a half polygons. The detail is incredible, right down to the moss growing in the cracks in the bark. I had to help him to his desk. For a games artist, this is a dream come true. Before now, programmers have always told artists "you can only have 200 polygons to make that car with." Now we’re saying to them "give us more polygons, as many as you can handle." This has caused problems though – the professional art package we use on monster PCs simply can’t handle some of the larger models we’re making.

How will technology like this affect gameplay? Simply put, it allows designers to create a world more believable than any that’s ever been made before. Photorealism isn’t just a fantasy any more, it’s a stone’s throw away from becoming reality. There is no limit to the detail we can place in our game. There are no restraints on how objects are modelled. Players might see a forest in which there are a countless high-poly trees stretching to the horizon. This can only make a game more believable. A game that’s more believable is more likely to draw you in, making it more enjoyable. Developers are on the verge of creating games that are the equal of films in terms of their atmosphere. How can this fail to improve the gaming experience?

The ‘cinematising’ of games is just one way of harnessing technology to improve gameplay. There are many other ways. Artificial Intelligence for instance - without innovation in this area you would never have seen a Sim City or a Theme Park. And what about networking? Multiplayer gaming simply wouldn’t exist without the technology. There are also numerous smaller examples of technology improving gameplay ‘on the ground’. MDK for instance made a gameplay feature of the sniper rifle and its ability to zoom into targets. Improved AI techniques will allow players to give formation orders in Age of Empires II. Technology can, without doubt, drive gameplay innovation.

I’m sure that a lot of gameplay zealots will remain sceptical. Improvements in graphics technology in particular are a soft target. Some of my friends couldn’t care less how a game looks. One of the guys here describes playing NetHack in its original ASCII form as the pinnacle of gaming. But the fact is that he’s in a minority. Like it or not, a lot of the PlayStation generation of gamers really do care what their games look like, and NetHack is the perfect example. Bill Roper, head of Blizzard, recently admitted that Diablo is basically NetHack and Angband with pretty graphics. Whereas Diablo was a commercial blockbuster, NetHack will never have anything more than a small but dedicated following of the hardest core gamers. Mass market games need mass market production values, particularly if you’re asking people to pay £50 for them. The days of risible 2D sprites and inadequate graphics are gone forever.

Contrasting technology and gameplay is a bit of a false dichotomy. It’s like asking whether grammar or vocabulary is more important in learning a language. Obviously you need both. Of course technology isn’t the end in itself, but there’s no doubt in my mind that in years to come technology will increasingly allow us to create hitherto undreamed of games. George Lucas says he waited 16 years to make Phantom Menace because the technology simply didn’t exist to do it before. Apply this thought to games and then dream about the future.

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