Anyone who’s played through Left 4 Dead with some less-than-capable companions knows the kind of physical responses that Gabe is referring to here. But the most intriguing part of the interview was when Newell spoke about the implications of testing the eye movement of subjects; in this case, paying close attention to what parts of the game world they focused on, and which parts they never even glanced at.
“Through combining those pieces of information, we can get a much more accurate indication of player state. So that’s something we’re super interested in. We’ve done some experiments in that space, and feel like there’s some easy wins for customers and for developers.
And then there’s some surprising side-effects that we didn’t expect, like what happens when you expose that information in a social gaming context. It surprises us that how much value there is to the people who are playing. So if you’re in a competitive situation, and you see somebody’s heart rate go up, it’s way more rewarding than we would have thought. And if you see somebody in a co-op game who’s sweating, people tend to respond to that way more than we would have thought.”
This is certainly good news for the people who fear that console graphics can’t get much better, or will become too expensive a proposition. Perhaps this is the solution to the question of how games can get better looking, without having to sacrifice quality to do so. It’s nice to hear that somebody is trying new ways of thinking to solve a new problem, rather than using the problem to promote a newer generation of consoles. It makes sense that it would come from someone in the PC world.
“Your first reaction is, ‘Oh man, we’re not designing these things right, because if they’re spending all their time looking this rectangle on the lower half of the screen. Maybe that should just be the screen?’ So you want to actually provide meaningful stuff on the screen. And even then, if you end up finding that people spend most of their time looking here or here, then obviously you want to allocate your rendering quality or whatever ‘budget’ you have that way.
So I think we’ll move from the era of homogeneous allocation of screen real estate to rendering performance and visual quality, to a much more accurate [system where] the things that you actually look at are the things that’ll be drawn the best.”
Am I alone in being relieved to hear a game developer talk about how they can make their game better by relocating assets, or do you PC gamers bristle at the thought of graphics of any kind being downgraded? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: PC Gamer
