Thoughts on 2D and 3D game design
Lately, I've been playing Planescape: Torment on the PC. I really felt like a more slowly paced game after all the fast-paced action games from this fall. I greatly enjoyed Halo 3, Bioshock, and Mass Effect, and the like, but I felt like playing something a little more thoughtful. This 10-year-old RPG is doing the trick.
I can't imagine how hard it would be to make this game in 3D. The first two areas I've visited have been so lavishly detailed in 2D, but trying to get this amount of artistry in 3D would be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The dialogue is another matter – every character or object has dialogue dripping with detail and emotion, fully drawing you into the world. Anything like this would be utterly impossible in the world of voice acting and polygonal graphics, which is a shame. At the same time, a world built in 3D with proper production values automatically gains just that much more in credibility and immersion with the player, thanks to the medium of delivery. It is abundantly clear, however, that the industry has not yet completed its move to 3D after playing this title again. Until art of this caliber (in 3D with voice acting) can be produced for a comparable price as its two-dimensional counterpart, we have a long way to go as an art form.
March 25th, 2008 - 13:17
Planescape is fairly incredible and I have to admit that when I tried it I was very impressed. I can see your argument that 3D still has a ways to catch up to that incredibly in-depth game… but let’s be fair, no other 2D games are even as in-depth.
I adore Planescape because it actually feels like an actual role-playing game, but at the same time it’s completely overwhelming. There’s so much to read, so much to look into, and so on. I would love another attempt that gradually gets the player into reading over everything but even so it’s wonderful and I want to play more. However, some real character customization would have been preferred.