G-pinions

I picked up a copy of the Chaos Theory demo that everyone has been raving about. It does indeed look like something from the next generation of hardware - natural rock surfaces are impossibly complex and perfectly reflective, running water has a depth and movement I've never seen before, and things are pretty photorealistic all around. So while the game impresses on just about every technical level, it's a bit disheartening to see that not only has the gameplay changed very little since the first Splinter Cell, but that it is largely unaffected by the new coat of paint. I'm not a fan of stealth outside of MGS, so I shouldn't be expected to like Splinter Cell, but everything except the look of the game and some bells and whistles (I can cut through cloth - call the media) felt terribly archaic. The awkward combat view, the unintuitive control scheme, the hit or miss A.I.; these things shouldn't have a place in gaming anymore, and it's frustrating that they're still supported in such a fanatical fashion.

Tech wizardry should remedy this, but it doesn't. Looking at my game collection for games whose graphics greatly improve the gameplay, there are only a handful; most games, even the best ones, rely on a simple gameplay concept built around a character, license or theme. It's rare to see the visual and visceral aspects of a game come together perfectly, and even rarer to see them come together and excel. Let's take a game like Downhill Domination, one of my favorite and most overlooked games this generation. The game succeeds because not only does it feel great and move well, but the visual and technical design of the game (plummeting down obstacle-filled mountains at a ludicrous speed) works perfectly with the gameplay. If you were going any slower, or if things were any less visually clear, it wouldn't be quite the game it is. Splinter Cell typifies the opposite end of the spectrum, where the graphics are great and the gameplay is polished (for what it is), but those things don't have anything to do with one another. Sure, it's nice to be able to see exactly where a shadow begins and ends when you're hiding in it, but that's something that's been standard for a while now, and only improves very minimally.

Starting right about now, the balance between gameplay and graphics will start to see a shift, and I'm hoping we don't end up with too many playable tech demos when all is said and done. I understand the relative plateau of ideas in some of the more overdone genres, but things can still be polished to perfection on the gameplay end. This is more than a graphics versus gameplay issue - it's not comparing and contrasting the two, it's seeing how they work together.