Graphics - 2D or 3D

[candle86]

I believe 3D graphics is here to stay even for games that do not need 3D for gameplay reasons (like Civ). The reason is, it is becoming much easier to create nice and arbitrary looking landscape by using in-built effects like dynamic lighting, shading etc. Animations are much easier to realize in 3D.

2D graphics need either be painted, which is laborous, expensive and inflexible or pre-rendered, which seems kinda unnecessarily inflexible because even low-budget laptops have the graphic processing power to do this real-time.

However, these advantages of 3D invite to pay less attention to the artwork (Models and Textures) which might result in 3D looking considerably worse than 2D - but that is not a problem of the technology but rather of priority in game design.

they cant make the game world, cities and units high poly at all, thats the problem with 3d and games like this. Sure for awhile its fine, but what happens when you have 200 units and 100 cities if the models are more than 200-500 poly? I know your system slows to a crawl more so than it already does. 2d can still have nice looking units for a game like this. 3d in this instance requires less work from everyone concerned

 

[LaRate]

For 3D to look good, the poly count doesn't necessarily have to be high - it's a texture thing mostly. You only need high-poly-models for real close-up views and these are rather rare in a Civ game. The advantage of 3D is that you can use all those nice engine-built-in effects (look at the water in the ciV-screenshots!) that do not cost much design labour and still look stunning.

Animations in 2D are a real pain - Civ3 had little prerendered 3D-movies as units (shot from eight perspectives) that basically looked awful if you happened to be on the wrong zoom level. And this is another problem with 2D: it scales badly. 2D graphics only look good on their original scale and maybe resolutions original divided by a power of two. Okay - amittedly - only Bitmap-2D-graphic scales badly, but I haven't seen any vector-based strategy game as yet (apart from flash games).

I'm not saying 3D is always better than 2D. 3D in a game like Civ is good if it preserves the advantages of 2D (clarity, realism) and combines it with new advantages (smooth scaling, animation, lighting effects). And I don't think that 3D has to mean "cartoony" - not any more at least. I did like the Civ4 graphics and preferred them to Civ3 - not because I prefer the cartoon - like look, but because Civ3 only looked good on one Zoom level and some graphics were not well blended into each other (e.g. the resources).