Imagination vs. Graphics

[sumodaz]

I've been playing Civ since the early 90's and was recently looking back at some old Civ screen shots and I realised how bad the graphics were (I remember them as being amazing).

The thing is, back then, I remember 'being' Genghis Khan, riding my Mongol hordes across the desert, truly immersed in the role play, a feeling which I don't really feel as much now. I can't really put my finger on the reason I don't feel the same immersion than I used to, other than that the graphics are so good that I don't have to use my brain as much. I guess its a bit like how reading a book can be better than watching a film.

Maybe I have now been spoilt so I don't really get the same excitement from building a submarine and it actually looking like a submarine or maybe my 'old brain' is just lacking in imagination these days?

This is not a complaint, I still love the Civ series and how Civ V looks. I'm just curious to what other Civ players think? Are graphics on strategy games are going to get so good that we are longer going to use our brains? Am I the only 'old fart' who feels like this?

 

[Lone Wolf]

The worst in immersion-breaking is half-done flavour, like in Civ4 BTS, when as, say, Arabia, your Axemen were middle-eastern, but your Swordsmen were European.

 

[zonik77]

Same here, and I think it's our old brain. When I was younger, I had a lot of imagination, not only with videogames, but in hole life too. Pay bills, lot of job, a daughter in my case... in my opinion all those things cause a lack of space in our brain for imagination

 

[wannabewarlord]

Well, I guess you have said it yourself already. The book/film comparison is really what it comes down to. When I used to play pen & paper RPGs, imagination is all I had. Now, these days Skyrim & Co. are showing you the stuff you are supposed to be/see/feel, etc. Same goes for CIV, really.

I personally find that great. I do play PC Games just as much for their graphical value than for their story/content/whathave you. Meaning that without good graphics, the content has to be amazingly strong to make me play and vice versa. I personally find one complements the other and one cannot be without the other.

While I don't really care for a fox chasing another or a unit kneeling down when on alert mode, it is the overall picture that I find pleasing. All these details together form a nice picture. And if Alexander looks like he does in the game, so be it. It does little difference to me if I have to imagine his face or actually seeing it, I still hate his guts

 

[gps]

I've been playing Civ since the early 90's and was recently looking back at some old Civ screen shots and I realised how bad the graphics were (I remember them as being amazing).

Well, to be honest when Civ I DOS came out even at that time I thought the graphics were rather ugly compared to other games of that era. And I think this might be the reason why I never really got deeply into playing it. Although these are no strategy games - I felt much more immersed when flying my Fokker Triplane in Red Baron or my Apache in stuff like Gunship. And - although shallow in strategy itself - but for example Defender of the Crown had raised the level of graphics quality even for a strategy game to other hights than Civ I provided. Even the more or less direct "predecessor" Railroad Tycoon - which I really adored at that time - had better while still minimalistic graphics and for me was much more immersive. May the difference here were the moving trains so you could just sit back and enjoy what you created...
In terms of graphics Civ II for me was a big improvement. Especially the wonder movies which - still today and in spite of their low resolution - for me are some of the most beautiful and immersive features in any game of the series.

 

[snarzberry]

Well I hear you OP, there would have been a greater reliance on imagination back then but I still think there's quite a lot of scope for imagination in civ 5. When you build a hospital it doesn't really represent one building but rather an entire health care system, a university is an education system. Battles between units represent war consisting of thousands of soldiers etc. I do think that civ 5 is somewhat behind civ 4 in this regard, in that game I really felt like the empire I had built was MY empire and if some other civ declared war and tried to destroy it I felt personally offended . I felt like I had to defend what was MINE, what I had made. I don't get that feeling as much in civ 5, but it's still there to a degree. As far as immersion goes I'm hoping religion will help create that a bit more, even though I'm not a religious person, it adds a bit of spice that the game could really use at this point to take things forward.

 

[eris]

You get to imagine different things. I hear troops mumbling about stupid orders and long slogs across marsh lands. There is a not so friendly rivalry between melee and horse units bumping each other aside over 1UPT and who gets there first. Citizens are always griping about one luxury or another and always want one more building.

But I do get a similar reaction to the full screen leader displays. It sets the character too solidly in my imagination and freezes the character into a limited choice of very brief interactions.

 

[Optional]

I think it's a bit of both.

On the one hand, there's probably a section of players for whom Civ I or Civ II was their first experience with a 'real' computer game, and it's kind of like your 'first love' with girls, if you know what I mean. There's something unrecapturable about that.

On the other hand, more and more photorealism in graphics is the general trend in games, and not everybody cares about that. Some of it is about 'imagination' getting lost, as you put it, but a lot is also about pure functionality.
Is it functional to have unlimited zoom and rotate possibilities?
Is it functional to see a real group of warriors on screen instead of just one warrior representing this group?
Is it functional to have 'real' resources instead of some symbol representing those resources?
Almost all those type of questions go with a 'no'. I'm perfectly happy with games that offer more simplistic graphics, and as a rule they're simply easier for our eyes.

Sound does make a big difference, though. Appropriate music and sound effects somehow stimulate imagination. If a game looks a bit more simple, sound does a lot.

All this goes more for role playing games than for strategy games, though. There's not so much 'getting into the story' in a strategy game. Although Civilization is for at least 10 - 25% a role playing game as well. You play the role of some leader, and you have relationships with other leaders.
Looking at that role playing aspect, there are too many generic lines in Civ 5, I mean different leaders saying the same thing over and over again. You get the feeling that the developers gave a lot more effort to the graphics than to the writing in this game. I wish they had spent a bit more attention to the dialogue.

 

[TyBoy]

It could be that a lot of this is tied to how you remember something that happened 15+ years ago too. We tend to remember the way things make us feel and broad strokes a lot more than we remember the specifics. Obviously I can't say much about how immersed you feel in the current versions since that is going to vary a lot from person to person, but it is plausible that the level of immersion you feel now + 15 years of wiping away all the other details = the level of immersion you remember about old games.

I don't care much at all about the level of graphics in games I play, but I don't mind them trying new things as long as it doesn't actively harm the gameplay. Civ is kind of lucky in that sense since it is rigidly tile based and turn based the graphics are pretty disconnected from the actual gameplay and it would be hard for them to negatively affect the game. There have certainly been a lot of games where an eagerness to implement fancy graphics has actively hurt the game.
For example, Some RTS try to use truly 3D terrain these days and it just works out terribly as the buildings and stuff like that are still too rigidly defined to fit well on the terrain. I recently gave stronghold 3 a try and that game was pretty much unplayable because of the collision between 3D maps and building placement. I don't think I've seen any non-first-person game pull off 3D yet.
I also think a lot of the (particularly eastern style) MMORPG you see come out these days actually look, feel and play much worse for all their fancy graphics. Part of that is probably just an uncanny valley thing though as well as personal preference.

@Optional
In the last couple installments the size of the group of warriors has been a kind of health bar for the warrior unit. I think that's a nice system, though I guess I usually end up checking the exact value with the mouseover before I do anything anyway. It's more immersive at a glance than a health bar at any rate.

 

[bhavv]

This is because of how our brains are when we are still younglings, much more imaginative and creative.

Then after you finish growing you lose that imagination, and all you have left is a plain video game in front of you.

I felt the same way about almost every game.