I disagree. Graphics add nothing to the immersion, unless perhaps on the most shallow level possible, where the entire premise of the game depends purely on the graphics.
In that case I wouldn't call it a game, but more of a tech demo or an interactive experience.
Graphics add more than nothing. At a minimum, they are an important part of UI, just like on a web page. Colors, affordances, etc. are all important to games. Games like ASCII roguelikes exchange obvious visible indicators for speed/flexibility/pixel size/complexity. Graphics set the tone of the game and have the ability to visually influence the player.
Cramming more graphic textures or perfecting water algorithms might be secondary (or tertiary) to the game, but they can still influence the gameplay directly. Take Team Fortress 2, where a lot of care was put into making each character class have a distinctive silhouette, so at a glance you can see who everyone is from a distance or from different angles - this isn't what most people talk about when they discuss "graphics," but it is the element of graphics that matters most.
The entire premise of Portal is based on the ability to use 3D rendering technology to create the effect of opening up portals between surfaces. I don't think anyone would argue that Portal is a shallow tech demo. Narbacular Drop maybe was a shallow tech demo, but that same tech-based premise, when used by a masterful game design team, created one of the best video games of all time.
Likewise, the entire premise of Minecraft depends purely on the simplicity of a voxel-based world - a technique for defining a procedurally-generatable, deformable landscape. Maybe Minecraft is only a tech demo or an interactive experience, but... it's a damned successful one.
Narbacular Drop maybe was a shallow tech demo, but that same tech-based premise, when used by a masterful game design team, created one of the best video games of all time.
What has the story and design of Portal to do with graphics? Nothing, because story and design are independent of it. Would Portal be an equally great game if done with the engine used in Narbacular Drop, but with the same design and story. Yes, again graphics has nothing to do with story and design.
So to reiterate. What made Portal great has nothing to do with how many pixels you fit on the screen or how many shadows you can render. What made Portal great was story, design and the tech( portals ).
Well, not quite. StarCraft and WarCraft II used 2d sprites, but those 2d sprites were generated from 3d models - its what gave them so much depth for their time (and also made them look muddy compared to hand-drawn sprites).
If I recall correctly, in WC2, the entities were modeled in clay/plasticine, photographed from several (8?) distinct fixed angles, and then artists hand-painted cels over the photos. The cels were then scanned and digitized into 2d sprites. The maps were flat images with hidden metadata layers to define land and water boundaries.
I also recall that you could replace the peons' wood-chopping sounds with fart noises, which was hilarious for almost 30 whole minutes.
I think it is a great selling point. No matter how crappy the final product is, claiming new or better graphics automatically give more sold units.
It is easy to critique a game after you played it. But before you do, the only thing you can do is look. Since you can't interact with the game in any way, what is left is the visuals. And that impression sells the game. Therefore, graphics matter.
There's a thing I call Amiga Game Disease. It's a thing on many platforms, especially now, but it was prevalent on the Amiga way back when. It's when a game is pretty much a tech demo with a thin game wrapped around it. Take something like Shadow of the Beast. Beautiful to look at, and really showcased the Amiga's power. Nothing looked or sounded quite like the Amiga version of Shadow of the Beast, and the various ports to lesser systems certainly couldn't keep up.
But it was pure, frustrating, junk from a gameplay perspective. The controls were clunky and shit was always popping out of nowhere and killing you. I kept dying at the first "boss", a skeleton thing on a throne that looked like it was made of some bigger creature's jaw. What I didn't know at the time was that there was a gryphon I had to defeat by punching the crystal orb it was bouncing; defeating the gryphon would temporarily grant me the power to shoot hadoukens, and the skeleton thing was only vulnerable to the hadoukens. (If you used up your hadoukens before defeating the skeleton thing, well, sucks to be you.)
And it's just full of stuff like this. The game doesn't tell you ANYTHING about how to play it or what its goals are. Plus it was a pioneer in unskippable cutscenes: moving from one place to another -- like going in a door or something -- entailed staring at a still image while adventure-game-style flavor text scrolled by and no key or button press could dismiss it. And once you die, that's it. You have to start all the way from the beginning. The game could be cleared in half an hour -- IF you knew where everything was. I guess it got replay value by surprising you with deadly enemies and obstacles you couldn't see coming and making you start over each time a new thing bit you in the ass.
But we all remember Shadow of the Beast -- indeed Amiga users look back fondly at it -- SIMPLY BECAUSE OF ITS GRAPHICS AND SOUND.
Sword of Sodan was the same thing: clunky and repetitive, but WOW LOOK AT THOSE HUGE SPRITES.
So yes, "good graphics = good game" is a thing, and it's because of the market, not because of the execs.
I was an Amiga gamer, I played Shadow of the Beast 2, I remember the graphics and audio fondly but I don't ever remember thinking it was a great game. The situation was similar for Shadow of the Beast, was an interesting setting but the gameplay never appealed.
The Amiga had a wide variety of games, and certainly didn't cater only for people who wanted graphics over gameplay, but yes good graphics were celebrated. I think part of the reason for that was the whole 'ahead of its time' idea, that a computer released in 1985 with a handful of underwhelming updates could still stand its ground into the 90s. Amiga was certainly not alone with this, applied just as well to the Neo Geo, and the Japanese got lucky with the Sharp X68000 too.
Another part of this was the game magazine culture, hard to talk about how a game plays, but easy to show off how a game looks. Game demos were a much more complementary medium than magazines for showing off the strength of games (though I had a sizeable collection of game magazines at one point, I'm not completely against them).
Whenever I start to think graphics are important to games, I think about the differences between the Activision graphical sequels to the text-based Infocom Zork games: Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor.
Of these, Zork: Nemesis is by far the worst game, even though it put a great deal of effort into its graphics. It was another victim of the Myst effect, but five years later, when everyone should have known better. The plot seemed shoehorned into the set, rather than the locations built to support the gameplay.
Return and Inquisitor felt like Zorks, but Nemesis felt more like a glorified fetch quest. I don't care if the graphics hold up or not after a few years, because the game itself was not particularly fun to play. The only factor preventing me from re-playing the other two is that I can still remember the solutions to their puzzles after 18-22 years, but all I remember from Nemesis is "bring me more red pages... er... I mean pure elements".
Therefore, if graphics matter, they cannot matter more than gameplay.
Nowadays at least you can see videos on youtube about the game. In the old days with the magazines you only could see the screenshots (with a real camera in front the monitor/TV) and trust the author of the review.
I see your point and it makes sense but won't you agree a story line or a rich description of game play won't make the same or perhaps a better impact on the potential buyer ?
Of course i am assuming there is a story line or nice gameplay..
To give an example: my favorite game of all times, Ultima Online has at __best__, __meh__ graphics..I remember i got hooked before i even installed it, not because of the screen shots but the way the game magazine editor was telling his own experience how he got murdered while fishing quietly in a small town..
A good description will impact a small percentage that is already familiar with the genre or that franchise. What will mainstream audience do. Believe the your words or your pictures? Games convey information trough the latter. Game magazines are obsolete and no-one reads long articles anymore. You have one minute to impress your audience. Less if it isn't in a form of a youtube video.
all seem to to indicate that, unless you happen to be Nintendo, pretty 3D graphics are very much necessary (but far from sufficient) if you want to sell a lot of games.
edit: Mobile and social games like Clash of Clans, Candy Crush etc. are of course and exception. If you want make a lot of money in games and don't want to deal with high end 3D graphics, then that is the market you have to get into.
If there are so many exceptions (plus entire classes), is your observation that meaningful?
Many games are marketed and sold based on gimmicks and features, of which, great graphics is one of them and seems to work well. Unsurprisingly, much of the videogame industry has optimized for it. That doesn't mean that pretty 3D is necessary.
I wouldn't mind hitting Quora through Google on occasion, but sometimes they actually have just a stub page, where the question isn't answered at all, so it shouldn't rank so high.
You can see the answer if you go to the page via a google search result. If a friend sends you a link, they block the answer with that annoying login modal.
This is a solution for me. It's not a solution for the hundreds of people I've told about GiMP over the years. Some of whom I no longer have contact with. Those people don't know how to edit their hosts file.
If you have ignored the crapware dialogs of the installer, you should be. But even then there is no telling what they could install without prompting first.
If this is a windows install, do as you would normally do for a spyware infestation.
1. Go through installed programs and uninstall any that you don't want/ didn't know about. Google any you have questions about. (Clicking on date in upper right will sort from newest to oldest.)
2. Get rid of Audacity. We can only assume that this binary is infected as well as the installer.
3. Run something like malware bytes. Do be careful to get the right installer, as the website has many misleading links. Run this.
4. Install in browser: ad block edge for Firefox, or ad block plus for chrome or safari. Quit using IE if you use that.
That should take care of 99% of all problems on your windows machine. I have no clue if you should or should not be worried regarding bad binaries from scamforge. I haven't analyses the binaries.
You got the same download as you'd get from Audacity itself. SourceForge is acting as a mirror. Unfortunately, the Audacity installers are not digitally signed, but they are bit-for-bit identical on the SourceForge download to the Audacity website download.
SourceForge never modified installers of projects. Even of ones like FileZilla participating in the program. They push "download offer installers". So, if you try to download FileZilla, you get a 750K download that shows you offers when run and downloads the actual FileZilla installer in the background and runs that after you accept or decline the offers.
Well assume you now have some malware/spyware/adware on your pc now, and assume you need to clean it off.
Or check the hash of the installer with some reference bin from a trusted source.
Its been over 20 years. You might need a start label before your commands. But I really don't remember that much about the language, at least not without setting up a copy.
