The games industry continues its inevitable slide to a world where games are all 3D all the time. The conventional wisdom is that 2D games are losers that won’t sell in the new world, and games like Age of Empires, Starcraft, and Diablo are dinosaurs that snuck in below the wire. So it wasn’t a huge surprise that both HoMM V and Civ IV both showed at E3 with full 3D visuals.

Going 3D isn’t automatically a negative for a license, provided that the gameplay is king, and that you don’t stray too far from what the license is really about (I’m looking at you, Advance Wars). Still, there is definitely past examples of games not handling the transition well. Greg Costikyan, in particular, is concerned about these storied licenses.

[In Heroes V], instead of having iconic forests, we now have literal trees. Thus, a forested area between two cities now also looks vastly out of scale–like the distance between the two is a short path between two suburban houses. And yes, moving a hero seemed to take forever.
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[In Civilization,] the map represents the whole globe, everything is going to be out of scale; my phalanx unit will be as tall as the mountains. Moreover, my phalanx unit will presumably be an individual Greek soldier, and will no longer feel like an iconographic representation of a phalanx; imagine combat between, say, a phalanx and a fighter jet. The Greek soldier thrusts his spear at the plane, the fighter’s machineguns sputter. It’s ridiculous.

Apparently, Heroes IV was to blame for Greg’s trepidation, and he’s correct when he points out it was a pale shadow of it’s predecessor, the glorious Heroes III. Most of his complaints are dead-on accurate – but there’s a catch.

In order to display nice view of their detailed 3D models, units were, I believe, at least 64 pixels across, and maybe larger. At 1024×768, this meant you were getting, in effect, 16×12 tiles on a screen–even less than Heroes III on my old monitor, and the contrast with Heroes III on the newer monitor meant that instead of getting the nice, large portion of the world I was used to, I was getting what seemed like a cramped, tiny portion.
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[I]n the world view, the units you move are iconographic; its a hero, really representing the hero plus all the units under his command. In a 2D game, this felt natural; in a 3D game, you had a literal hero striding over the landscape, and that no longer really felt iconographic. It felt like a single guy, not a representation of an army. Additionally, everything now felt out of scale; a hero standing by a city made either the city look tiny, or the hero like a giant. It felt wrong–as if we were moving, in a sense, into uncanny valley territory. The literalness of the 3D representation made everything seem out of kilter.

The catch, of course, is that Heroes IV was not a 3D game. It was definitely 2D. But it was designed to look realistic, with visuals much closer to true 3D than the classic cartoony visuals of yesteryear. Which suggests that 3D is perhaps not the problem, but rather a frequent accomplice to the problem.

The real problem is one of level of abstraction and self-consistency. Warcraft 3 and Etherlords are both strategy games that did 3D well – they were very holistically designed, and as such, you don’t even notice that the units are as large as the buildings they’re defending. Heroes IV, on the other hand, had gameplay designed for small, cozy maps with a graphics philosophy that ran counter to it. As such, Heroes IV had none of the quick tactics nor visual charm that made Heroes III so endlessly addictive.

As an example, look at the moat in this screenshot. It looks like any of the attacking units should easily be able to jump right over it. In Heroes 3, the moat is equally insubstantial (one hex thick, the same size as a unit), but because of the overall stylized look of the game, your mind much more readily accepts the abstraction.*

Let’s look at the issue from a completely orthagonal point of view: Midway’s Mortal Kombat. I still feel like the early MK games were the best fighting games of their time (sorry, Street Fighter fans, I like having a block button). But Midway’s first foray into 3D, War Gods, was a wretched gameplay experience. Control was difficult, movement unrealistic and the animations wooden and uninspiring. MK fans could only be thankful that Midway didn’t slap the MK license on that travesty. It would be easy for a designer to come away with the notion that fighting games can’t work in 3D. Of course, this assumption would have been utterly wrong.

Wyatt Cheng’s criticisms of Guild Wars, a game he otherwise seems to be enjoying quite a bit, informs this discussion in some interesting ways.

You can’t tell where you can walk and where you can’t. You might be walking along a path, the ground changes color, and suddenly you can’t walk anymore. Or maybe you’re walking along some grass and it suddenly gets a little steep. Suddenly you’re faced with an invisible wall. Not being able to look at the background art and intuitively know where I can and cannot walk detracts from the feeling that I am an avatar in a game world – because the world doesn’t make sense to me.

David Wong brings up a similar complaint in his recent manifesto, the complaint specifically about EA’s game adaptation of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

[T]here’s actually a “run out of a crumbling building” level and where stones rain down on your head and block your path. So the biggest difficulty in the level is that you can’t jump over a knee-high stone because THERE IS NO FUCKING JUMPING IN THE GAME.

Immersion, ultimately, is not about realistic graphics or great sound. Immersion is ultimately about whether or not you have a gameplay experience so compelling that you look out the window, realize it’s 6 AM, and figure, hey, as long as you’re still up, you might as well play a few more turns before you head off to work. But full 3D, realistic graphics can both move you towards this lofty goal, or it can move you away at lightspeed.

It turns out, there’s an uncanny valley concept with gameplay as well as visuals.** The closer your graphics get to realistic, the less the user is going to tolerate invisible walls and hills they can’t climb for any apparent reason. The more your games look like other games on the market (which is ultimately where a ‘realistic’ look and feel takes you), the more important it is for your game to have the features they have – like the ability to jump.

Games that look distinctive, on the other hand, have the ability to set their own rules however they want. For example, in Darwinia, you have no expectations as to whether you can run or jump. In Viewtiful Joe, you have no expectations of being able to move towards the camera. The visual wierdness of Rez frees you from all expectations. And Katamari Damacy wouldn’t be the same game if the people you were rolling into your giant ball were all so realistic you could see the screams coming out of their perfectly bumpmapped faces. All four games are 3D, but all four games strive away from realism, and that enables their abilities to take design chances. It turns out that games that want to take bold design risks also must make bold visual risks, or they risk their designers being handcuffed by what ‘realism’ brings to the table.

Articles about E3 this year kept focusing on the new consoles, throwing around the term teraflop as if anyone outside of Tom’s Hardware really can quantify what it will bring to the gaming experience. But the guys I know who went to E3 are talking about Ultimate Spiderman, Stubbs the Zombie and Okami, games they felt had strong, unique visual identities that were well married to the gameplay that the designers were trying to provide. And, oh yeah, all three games are 3D.

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* I have high hopes for Heroes V. Not just because I’m a shill for my publisher (Ubisoft), but because the game is being done by the same guys that did Etherlords and Silent Storm. These are developers I earnestly believe ‘get it’.
**Greg discussed the uncanny valley in his blog post re: the visuals in Civ III, which led directly to this revelation