Is your gaming experience affected by quality of image and resolution?

As you'll see from the date I joined Hexus, some 12 years ago, I've been around a bit and as a long time gamer, a self PC builder, I've seen the rise in the graphics quality in that time.

In the olden days (cough) you would be looking at upgrading your PC in a rough cycle of around 18 months as technology marched onwards in order to keep up with new titles and enjoy all the new effects whilst maintaining the all important 90FPS on CRT monitors. A new graphics card was one of those moments where the increased power would allow you to game with a higher image quality and wow your friends with the extra visuals. I bought a discounted ATi 970 pro and the difference was remarkable at the time and it did allow a greater immersion in games, however, when playing with others I wasn't concerned with how pretty the environment was!

Some gaming titles would introduce features that would make the environment far more "realistic" and yet in an online gaming environment such as UT2004, the graphics quality would be dialled down a notch or two for online and multi-player sessions in order to keep frame rate high.

Gone for me are the days when I'd actually "stand" in a game and simply marvel at the stalactite dripping water into a pool, watching the ripples from the drop and then realise my character was actually reflected in the pool and the ripples were affecting the reflection! Gone is the appreciation of the ability of my hardware to render hordes of enemies coming at me (and my friends) whilst immersed in a bigger environment (Serious Sam!). WoW was a game that I became addicted to, but the marvel wasn't the image presented on the screen, but rather the detail in the environment and the fact that there were hundreds of people kicking about in the same virtual environment and the ability to interact with any of them.

Some titles (Far Cry) pushed the boundaries so much that even the most expensive hardware wasn't capable of getting close to the ability to play at anywhere near the maximum settings. Did people not enjoy playing it? Nope, they raved about it.

We are now on the cusp of 4K gaming for the masses, which will ultimately become de-rigour just as 4K TV will become the defacto standard as prices drop. The step up from 1080p, at the moment is costly, however, I don't think my gaming experience is as much affected, because I got as much of an immersive and enjoyable experience from playing South Park - Stick of Truth, as I did playing Metro 2033 Last Light and Bioshock infinite.

Is your gaming experience affected by quality of graphics?

Yes and no. It has to be good enough that I can clearly see things. But I still love Battlefront 2, as well as older games like quake and even fallout.

I don't care if the graphics for Fallout were the same as 3, because it's likely that the game is good, and that's more important to me. Crysis 3 has great graphics, yet I don't enjoy the game, personally.

Double barreled answer, Yes & No, graphics for myself don't make a good game but can add and in some cases are necessary to achieve what is being aimed for and a prime example as you posted is Metro 2033 this was hailed at the time of release as one of the best looking games on the market without the graphics i don't feel it would of had the atmosphere it aimed to achieve. At the opposite end of the spectrum i hated Crysis i found it a highly shallow game albeit pretty but this wasn't enough to keep me interested.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iranu

Is your gaming experience affected by quality of graphics?

---

Yes, to a large part, I love the eye candy, but the game still has to be worth playing, being a pretty game with no gameplay means there is little of interest for me. Though I have found that the time span between upgrades increases as the value of the upgrades increases, so take GPUs for instance, I used to spend up to £200 on a GPU and keep it for 12 to 18 months or so, now I spend about £500 and expect it to last 3 to 4 years.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jasp

Double barreled answer, Yes & No, graphics for myself don't make a good game but can add and in some cases are necessary to achieve what is being aimed for and a prime example as you posted is Metro 2033 this was hailed at the time of release as one of the best looking games on the market without the graphics i don't feel it would of had the atmosphere it aimed to achieve. At the opposite end of the spectrum i hated Crysis i found it a highly shallow game albeit pretty but this wasn't enough to keep me interested.

---

I fully agree that it can add to games which makes them better, but the game has to have that inbuilt in the first place. Metro had that atmosphere which was enhanced by the ability of the graphics to get that emmersed feeling. I'd also say that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series also benefited from having greater graphical enhancement because it built on the mood especially in the darker sequences. Conversely Doom, which was a massive success with one and two (which I loved and played over) suffered from the need for a high end system in a later version, that still left the player very much in the dark (until a mod came out). If people were asking what card they needed to run it at the time I'd often advise them to save the money, buy a blindfold and wander about the house until they bumped into something or were shocked by a family member!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iranu

....

Is your gaming experience affected by quality of graphics?

---

I'll say no to that, but it's a caveated, qualified no.

I see it much as you seem to, but I'd have put it slighly differently.

The law of diminishing marginal returns applies, and I'm long past the point where better graphics makes much impact on my gaming experience. So here's the caveats :-

1) I expect a good graphical quality as a minimum these days, and it'd have to be startlingly better than than to improve on default expectations. Nothing short of something that is jaw-dropping would impact my gaming experience.

2) If a new game had dire graphics, that would affect my gaming experience .... adversely.

3) A game with great gaming but mediocre graphics can still be a great game. A game with great graphics and mediocre gaming is always going to be a mediocre game, and absolutely no level of great graphics will rescue it. Great graphics is, at best, the icing on the cake, but without a great cake, it's just so much sugar .... sickly sweet, and I get fed up with it after a mouthful or two.

I think for me its primarily about gameplay, I still do play the older titles like UT99, UT2004 and I had a blast with Unreal 2 not long ago. I do still play a bunch of older but more recent games too, and quite recently I finally got around to playing the Mass Effect Trilogy after picking it up in an Origin sale a while back, the graphics are lacking to say the least but theyre still reasonable enough to be playable (probably because I played a lot of COD4 until it finally kicked the bucket recently)

Ultimately the gameplay has to be good, good graphics are always a nice bonus after that but if we were to take Crysis 3 for example, I played about 3 hours of that and decided I simply wasn't getting into it and ended up not completing it. Looked great but the gameplay just didnt click for me.

All that said, I do plan to upgrade my monitor at some point I'm still sitting on a 1440x900 VGA only monitor but as I've not had issues (I suspect the cable/VGA port may be on its way out as I've started seeing ticker lines which I'm pretty sure isn't screen tearing) I can't justify the £120 even the lowend 1080P VGA/DVI/HDMI monitors ask for. It may even be that 1440p is standard before I upgrade, though at that point I'll need a new card along with it I think.

Single - Yes, I prefer to have single player games look as "pretty" as possible.

Multiplayer - No, I prefer to try and get the best possible FPS out of whatever game I am playing which is mainly CS:GO at the moment, so I turn a number of the options down / as low as possible to give me the best possible FPS I can get without making the game look like a potato.

Like others, my answer has to be both yes and no. Some games have pitifully poor graphics, but amazingly good game play (like Minecraft, WoW, most other MMO's) and I can and have put many hours into them. Yet some games I do believe are carried by good graphics, however, for me these do not keep my interest beyond the "OMG look at these graphics" phase. Most recently games like Far Cry 4 and Watch_Dogs fit the latter description for example.

I can play most things, so long as they don't look TOO bad... I just about managed an hour of Return To Castle Wolfenstein but I expect I'd get very bored of the Thief series now, even though it was a massive favourite of mine back in the day!

Definitely, I love when games look incredible. I can enjoy games that have subpar graphics, but I'd enjoy them more with highly detailed textures. I also love high quality weather effects in games, particularly rain.

90fps? Ninety? Damn, I remember being happy with over 20 on Quake! Then I got a 3dfx card and the worries went away. Back then (and we're talking 16/17 years ago now (ouch!)) the jump between graphics generated on 2D cards to those available on the new 3D cards was massive. The move from pixelly, jerky and low res graphics to smooth, smooth and high res graphics was amazing - I played Quake all over again once I got my 3dfx card just so I could see how amazing it looked! My point is that back then my gaming experience really was affected by the the graphics quality. Back then... Now, not so much. Ultra realism is meh. Every game has it. Now it's all about art direction. I rarely play FPS anymore as the graphical experience is just so boring. I'm attracted more to games such as Fez and Ori and the Blind Forest which provide a graphically interesting environments.

In short, no my gaming experience isn't affected by quality of image but it is affected by the art direction of the game. I haven't touched on resolution as I play all my games at 1080p and that's good enough for me. 1440p and 4k is a pointless distraction at the moment.

Definitely. Image quality and resolution are far more important than mere graphical fidelity.
For instance, I could never play Wii games because everything in 480p looked unplayable to me. I've always had to emulate those.
I'd say resolution is probably among the top reasons I play most games on PC. I just can't deal with having everything looking pixellated and "not clean".

Texture quality doesn't matter as much as long as the textures look "clean". Anti Aliasing is also important in that regard.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Disturbedguy

Single - Yes, I prefer to have single player games look as "pretty" as possible.

Multiplayer - No, I prefer to try and get the best possible FPS out of whatever game I am playing which is mainly CS:GO at the moment, so I turn a number of the options down / as low as possible to give me the best possible FPS I can get without making the game look like a potato.

---

Pretty much sums up my answer too.
I remember the Quake 3 osp days with r_picmip 5 etc... The potatoes were real

Just got an X-arcade stick, and spent a couple of hours last night playing MAME classics. I would have to say no, not really.

Yes entirely, I'm a total videophile but within reason. I have a fairly limited tolerance for dialing the quality back for the sake of the gameplay.

For example, I've never properly played system shock 2, deus ex, vampire the masquerade, ffvii, although I've tried them all based on reputation. The graphical fidelity is just too coarse for me to get into and it does sadden me that I have that response. However I think it depends on whether you played the game in its time. Half life is an ugly game now, but I could play it again and again due to nostalgia.

It's a shame that most people seam to lack the imagination to fill in the blanks :(

Go watch some old films, or go to the theatre. If you don\'t exercise your imagination you\'ll lose it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by abaxas

It's a shame that most people seam to lack the imagination to fill in the blanks :(

Go watch some old films, or go to the theatre. If you don't exercise your imagination you'll lose it.

---

That's very true, I enjoy the old classics (movies/games), am currently enjoying Bruce Lee' films :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by abaxas

It's a shame that most people seam to lack the imagination to fill in the blanks :(

Go watch some old films, or go to the theatre. If you don\'t exercise your imagination you\'ll lose it.

---

You meant to say "read some books", right? I\'m not sure how watching old films aids the imagination when your brain is on autopilot.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MrDLips

I'm not sure how watching old films aids the imagination when your brain is on autopilot.

---

Often I find suspense/horror movies are way more scary/interesting before the big reveal.

To an extent. More appealing visuals can increase immersion but they don't really affect how much I enjoy a game.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by abaxas

It's a shame that most people seam to lack the imagination to fill in the blanks :(
Go watch some old films, or go to the theatre. If you don't exercise your imagination you'll lose it.

---

Why bother even with that? Why not just sit at home in a chair, shut your eyes and *properly* use your imagination?
Old games have crap graphics because there was no hi-res mo-cap with A-List actors to voice it.
Modern games don't have to be stunning, but given how most gamers have reasonably capable tech, there is a general standard that people can quite reasonably expect.

Similarly, at one time 8mph was more than enough to get a speeding ticket, especially in Paddock Wood... doesn't mean that should be the norm these days.

I would say partially. I still love most old style 2D pixelly graphics (the kind you see in old point and clicks for example), and from time to time I go back and play those games. I actually have a few newer games in that style too.

When the first '3D' type games came out they were groundbreaking, but now I find it very difficult, if not fairly impossible to go back to them and actually enjoy the experience. I guess while 2D hasn't really changed much in the grand scheme of things, 3D has come on in such leaps and bounds that it's hard not to draw comparisons.

As for resolutions, a year or two ago I tried replaying Age of Empires (before they brought out the HD version) as they had an amazingly cheap deal on Steam. I remember that game being fantastic when I first played it, but I found the resolution just made it unplayable. I guess the HD version has probably fixed this, but I haven't tried it since...

Aslong as the game plays fine I'm pretty much happy, aslong as textures aren't potato like of course.

Is this a trick question? Ha

For 1 player then yes, I want it to immerse me and look as amazing as possible

For multiplayer I want little lag or tearing and fastest response possible.

Yes, a game feels more real and immersive to me if the graphics are good.

People who come from a low end pc playing at lowest settings tend to be amazed at how good games are at ultra settings. It all changes when they get accustomed to it and they start complaining when there's a bit of screen tearing or if part of the game doesn't look as good.

i love graphics in my games but that is secondary to a good story! if there is a great story there i dont care if its 8bit. I am loving the withcer 3 right now though as it looks beautiful AND has a great story, best of both worlds

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Haxorus

People who come from a low end pc playing at lowest settings tend to be amazed at how good games are at ultra settings.

---

I think resolution has a lot to do with it too, though.
Playing in 1440 with Ultra settings means I'm FAR more accurate in shooters and the like, whereas 1080 on Med-High I suck like a Noob!

Along similar lines, I've been riding for many years but had to take a Hazard Perception test for the car licence recently... I got pathetically low scores, not because I couldn't anticipate the hazards, but because the crappy crappy resolution on the test centre monitors meant I was basically looking at pixels instead of being able to see the actual video!
"What's that white thing in the distance? Is that a van? Is that going to be a haza... wait... oh, no, it's actually a building"...

I installed C&C 3: Tiberium Wars, about a month back. I just wanted something I could dip into now and again. I'd completed "Generals" but don't ever remember completing 3. Obviously graphics are set to max now. That game is 8 years old! It looks great, but what is also nice is it plays well, so much so that a part of my brain kicked in and remembered most of the commands.

I'd prefer to visit an older, original game than get the latest wizz-bang Call of Black Ops clone with it's railroad path and predictable gameplay. Following a yellow diamond and shooting whatever pops up and then waiting for a cut screen all in beautifully rendered HD just doesn't float my boat.

However, an atmospheric game like Metro 2033 keeps me playing for hours with the same graphics quality. Finding the titles is the difficult bit. Whereas in years past you could guarantee that a top 5 game would be worth buying it's not so now. I partly blame consoles and the ports to PC.

I love my eye candy so if a game has nice visuals its always a bonus.

Video, from Latin videō ("I see"), first person singular present tense of vidēre ("to see"). Graphics are of paramount importance to video games. Take any given game and, by keeping everything else unchanged, you can make it worse or better just by lowering or raising the quality of graphics. The worse a game looks, the worse it plays, so you actually can judge a game based on its looks. A truly state of the art game that blows the competition out of the water can even get away with outdated mechanics and still be a great game (see Crysis).

Neah...running all at 3440x1440 at Very-High & Ultra almost all games!

Ten years ago, I was perfectly happy with a tiny 4:3 CRT with a mono speaker.

Now I'm looking at beautiful 16:9 1080p or 4K flat screens with 5.1 surround and could never return.

Never went above 1080p so it's great for me however i'll never go below a 144hz monitor now though, 60hz is simply horrible.

With respect to WoW, a higher resolution provided more space for the UI - Allowing more space in the middle of the screen, information neatly arranged around the outer edges.
It's the game I got most out of a higher resolution.

I do sometimes stop and look at a pretty scene - been gaming for 20 years. Noticing the audio a lot in games now too - I like when you find additional quests / hidden things that you wouldn't have found out about without wearing headphones / listening.

I'd put good gameplay over and above effects and resolution. Gameplay is what holds interest after a first few days. But from a studio's point of view, the effects and graphics is what pulls in the punters. So both are important, but for different reasons!