14th April 2005, 12:42 PM
Quote:The thing is, though, that it's easier to tell the difference between a 100-poly model and a 10,000-poly model than it is a 10,000-poly model and a 1,000,000-poly model. As they say, you can put a billion polys into a ball but it won't look any better than a one million poly ball. I don't think we're quite there yet, but we will be pretty soon. The gen after this, I'd say. And games are just going to become more and more expensive to make until there's only the big guy and the (very) little guy. You'll be seeing a new EA Bond game that looks exactly like a movie that costs more than five Bond movies to make, and you'll see innovative little games like Katamari Damashii that cost barely anything in comparison to produce (I don't know if that's actually true, but it's certainly the type of game that could fairly easily be done by a nobody developer). Some people think that the rising costs of games are going to make it so that no one but the big dogs will be able to make a living off of games, but I feel the exact opposite. Because games will cost so much to make, studios will be even more afraid to take risks. And the public will eventually get bored of the same kinds of games. Then they'll look for innovation, and you don't need billion-dollar budgets to make innovative games. Graphics are going to become less and less important, I think.
And this is what's important, not the pure numbers. It's definitely true... now, graphics won't be finished advancing until they look exactly like real life, and that requires more than just polygons. Who knows what is needed to do THAT... but there definitely are diminishing returns, and there definitely is a point where you just can't tell the difference between poly counts and we need more than that (like EverQuest II, high poly counts but "plastic" people...).