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Do you value narrative, gameplay, or visuals most when it comes to a game?
Can one or two of these combined make up deficiency of another? If a game plays really well and has an immersive story, but looks like shit, can you still play it? How about if it plays well and looks good, but the story is a jumbled mess? What if it looks nice and has a nice story, but plays like shit?
What makes a game a deal breaker to you, and which of these aspects can be a savior to an otherwise deal breaker?
Story and gameplay are equally important to me. Without those, I can't really get invested in a game for long. I can play a game like Fortnite or Minecraft, but it will get dull pretty fast.
Visuals are secondary. I don't need good visuals to play. That being said, the visuals should at least be acceptable for playability purposes. Hell, I still play old PS1/2 games.
That's one of the things I keep noticing again and again when I go back to old games that I enjoyed playing (and still do), they look terrible by todays standards. In my mind and memory though they still look amazing and I remember the satisfaction of playing and completing them.
I feel I'll be in the same boat with modern games, not matter how much more graphics and details increase in the future. I still enjoy the original Max Payne even though the most recent one is leaps and bounds ahead of it in graphics. The thing that draws me back is the gameplay and atmosphere it creates in my mind.
Personally gameplay and narrative are more important to me than visuals. If a game plays well and has an engaging story, I can forgive lack luster visuals. I think gameplay is what I value the most, because if the story is shit and the game looks like shit but it's still really fun to play, than I'm gonna play it.
Case-in-point, Earth Defense Force 2017 on the Xbox 360. It looks like garbage, the animations are very silly, the environments challenge your imagination and the story boils down to 'Aliens!', but man the game is hella fun. Sit down with a buddy and play every level five or six times.
I have a friend who has sung that franchises praises for damn near a decade now. I should probably pick it up eventually. Hell, that'd be a game I'd love to see hit backwards compatibility on the Xbone. If the newer systems allowed it to run properly it might be something special.
I know there have been more in the Twelve Years since EDF 2017 came out, but I know little about them. I just remember spending hours with a buddy way back when, laughing and enjoying ourselves. It really is a treat.
This is a tough one for me. For a long time I think that mechanics were king for me, if a game had great mechanics, it didn't need to much else (think Gunpoint on PC and Super Smash Brothers Melee). But last summer I got sucked into the Mass Effect original trilogy, and that was an emotional roller coaster. Graphics matter to the point that they detract from immersion, like having a high res character face with a very low res outfit. But other than that, I think story and mechanics are both good, and can each make a game good if done well.
I played through the ME series recently on PC. There are texture packs that solve the texture resolution mix-match issue. The textures are so good that they actually cause problems of the textures being too large and being aliased at a distance. I remember thinking the game looked so good when it came out many years ago, and adding the texture pack managed to preserve my memories.
I'm almost done with a second play through now, and I have been using the texture packs. Those, along with a quality of life mod here and there like faster elevators in ME1, have really improved the experience for me. Glad to hear they worked well for you too!
"They say graphics don't matter, but every game I've ever played has had them."
—Stuart Brown
I value different things depending on the game. I believe it is unfair to judge games equally, when every game is made with a slightly different purpose in mind.
Gameplay is everything. I play roguelikes almost exclusively these days, so clearly graphics aren't a priority for me.
Love Rogue games and all variations of it. However, lately, the flood of titles to the market has kind of saturated the place a bit and made it hard to find the gems.
I value all of these, but I also value something a lot of games forget about: HAVING FUN.
I see any art (paintings, photos, movies etc) as needing at least two of three things:
Games for me are similar. Sure it's good to have all 3, but I can still enjoy it if only two of them are there and they're particularly impressive. Although, I might give a little more value to gameplay here, as broken or boring gameplay is just frustrating to get through and can tarnish my enjoyment of the art or story.
Well it depends on the kind of game. In a puzzle, I care a lot about gameplay, since that's the entire point: graphics and especially story are not important. Bring on a RPG, and all of a sudden story is significantly more important. In general, I think a game of most genres can stand well with only two of these three legs. Call of Duty shows nice graphics and good gameplay with a weak story, Pokemon shows a decent (if you're young) story with enjoyable gameplay but usually quite simple graphics, and there are even games like Two the Moon with an outstanding story and charming (if simple and retro) graphics, but the actual gameplay is honestly not that great. Trying to stand on only one leg, however, rarely works out well.
Oh man, I go along and say these things since forever.
It depends :)
There are so many factor and depends by the game genre.
Speaking personally I probably is a special case as I grew up in a house in which I managed to get a computer when no one else of the kids my age had any interest in one. The problem was that I didn't receive it because my parents were into it but just because my father got a spare from a delivery he was doing (i'm still quite perplexed by this version but i'll roll with it).
As direct consequence I got completely hooked into it. We talk of the time of Cadaver, Commander Keen, Spot!, and so on and so forth. My parents didn't really understood that just because I was invested in games, it wasn't a bad thing per se and tried to send me to someone who would teach me "computers". The guy was the son of the butcher and know just the basic DOS commands. I mean, thank you but I went down the rabbit hole by myself from there (playing with memcache & co to squeeze the last Kb of RAM from my computer).
Anyway, due to this difference in perception of what "doing with a computer" was for my parents and me, I really had to beg and do whatever to get an upgrade. I remember that the very first upgrade was a graphic card and I had to pay for it saving the occasional 1.000 "lire" my auntie would give me to buy some candies. To give you a comparison, back at the time that entry level graphic card was costing around 120.000 "lire". It took months to me to get to buy it.
So, all this story to tells you that I had to grow up learning to appreciate a story and gameplay more than the visual. Even back when 16bit was "seems like real!".
Growing up it becomes more of a "maturing". At least for me, I realise that when I start a game I only want two possible things:
if they have both, eh... not always good. I realised going through Pillars of Eternity that some time I was just skipping the dialogues because I was in the mood of just the challenge of the fights and not to read tons of line in font size 10.
Anyway definitely the visual is not a priority. BUT you company producing the game, better have clear in mind for which visual you can afford to go to. Because a whole game with simple visual but that feel curated, is definitely better than a game with great visual but with drop in FPS and place in which the textures are so low quality that seems to be in a glitch.
Not a popular opinion it seems, but I actually mostly care about gameplay and visuals. I don't play story-only games to begin with, and even in other games story/single player mode stays largely untouched (except for GTA:V, where you need like half an hour to unlock Online). Most of the games I own just don't really have a story to speak of though (Factorio, small arcade-y stuff, various rhythm games, etc).
A good story and pretty visuals can carry bad gameplay, but I'm more likely to opt for a YouTube Let's Play in that case.
If it looks and plays great, I can forgive a bad/nonexistent story as long as it isn't the focus.
Good story and gameplay but being ugly... That depends. If I can't stand a game's visuals I simply won't bother. If it's simply "okay" visually or the other two are outstanding I might play, but it's a coin toss in thant case.
If a game excels at any of the three then it can be a great game, but gameplay is what'll keep me coming back over and over to a game.
FTL and CIV5 I still play the whole time as the games are just so fun to play.
I love me some great visuals but really it's all down to gameplay and story. As others have said though, that doesn't mean visuals don't matter at all. They are very much tied to the other two so they have to compliment the game design and story. I'm trying to think of good and bad examples of this but I'm drawing a blank.
Sorry for answering this on more of a meta level but I’ve come to a point where I think these classic categories might hinder more than help in understanding the full potential of the medium.
For example, Ken Levine had a nice talk on this (and is currently betting his studio on it), arguing that narrative can and should be the gameplay when well implemented. “Narrative LEGO” is how he sells it. Jon Blow mentions books (Invisible Cities, Gravity’s Rainbow) as huge inspirations for Braid but when you ask how, he talks about how the game is about rather abstract things like the arrow of time in quantum mechanics. Then there’s the games that created the “walking simulator” genre (Dear Esther), that fully commit to storytelling and treat the gameplay as merely a pacing/immersion element.
All this is kinda excluded from a strict gameplay “vs” story angle. If you can feel a disconnect between all these things, that’s IMO always a sign of bad design. Even for something like Dwarf Fortress, the ASCII look is kinda symbolic of the game’s focus and not an “accident”.
It depends on what I'm playing.
I mostly prefer more story driven games but love a good platformer too.
The platformer doesn't really have to have much in the way of a story - if any at all. For me "save the princess" is all I need. Controls matter to me in those games. A platformer with shitty controls is just a shitty game, IMO, regardless of the graphics, storyline, etc. On the other hand, I can't sink 50+ hours into an RPG if the story is severely lacking. Controls are still important in these games but maybe not quite as important as they are on platformers were precise control directly relates to the game.
Graphics have never been especially important to me. Obviously I prefer a game to look good than bad but that's very low on my list of priorities. In fact, most modern games that people say look like crap I find to look pretty good. Reddit complains about Fallout 4's graphics nonstop and I think the game looks great.
Far and above, gameplay rules for me. If the main gameplay loop is boring, it could have the best story in the world and the best style and graphics and I would still be bored.
I've only played one walking simulator that I've enjoyed and that was Scanner Sombre (in vr). It was different and interesting becuase I had to discover the landscape and pathways by shooting rainbow dots EVERYWHERE.
Otherwise, I've played and had a great time in tons of no-story,bad art games. Dwarf Fortress, Runescape, need for speed pre 2010 but played last year.