Gamasutra - What does a great game look like?

Gamasutra's latest article is about Brenda Romero at the at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas week. She attended the event and asked, "What does a great game look like?".

That's the question that game development veteran Brenda Romero asked herself during a talk at today's DICE Summit in Las Vegas.

If you ask 10 game developers, you might get 10 different answers. For some it looks like a work of art. For some it's a pile of money. For some, it looks like innovation, she said.

Before offering up her answer to "what does a great game look like?" she talked about the two measures of quality that games had when she joined the game industry in 1981.

First: the size of the game manual. If a manual was able to make the game's box feel like a ton of bricks, that's a good game. This assertion was met with laughter, from her and the audience, but there was definitely truth to it.

Secondly, and more to the point of her talk, were "amazing graphics." "Amazing graphics" were one of the two ways that players would judge a game's quality, the play itself be damned.

Having worked on Wizardry VII, an RPG that was critically-acclaimed, Romero recalled what she identified as a sea change in game visuals, brought on by Cyan's Myst and id's Doom. The advancement was, in a way, intimidating, in that those games had such an incredible emphasis on those "amazing graphics" (on top of good play).

"I remember seeing those two games and thinking the industry took a massive graphics leap," she said. "It felt like a bomb went off…that graphics were king."

She said players were coming to the point where if the graphics "sucked," they assumed the game sucked as well.