When you play a multiplayer game, what do you prefer:
Voted. Also fun crazy characters. Its boring playing as soldiers all the time. Throw some Rabbids in there and maybe Rayman in a bloody game!
Details aren’t really needed, just good character design. A game entertainment should be based on gameplay rather than graphics, that’s from lifelong experience playing video games. 
Hmmm…Well this is an interesting poll and after playing games since Pong I would have to say that there are 2 things that everyone wants in life or in game.
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Nobody wants to run around looking like everyone else…definately have to have customization… maybe even user made customization!
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Eye candy is always nice…Seeing how people sit and play these games for hours on end…I’m not talking photo-realistic but just with a nice eye candy factor.
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The most important factor would be gameplay though.
I always base everything on this scale…first and formost it has to work secondly it has to look cool…If it doesn’t fit those 2 things right off the bat it’s not for me.
Escape
I second all of you. Once I had a cool moto cross game. Little bike and cool stunts. The game as extremely responsive and realtime. It was a blast. Then the next version came out. Ton’s of eye candy, more audio features, but the handling was bad. It lagged. So into the bin it went.
I did a lot of FPS mod’ing for the Valve HL2 Engine and before that for the Unreal Tournament Engine. I know both engines very well. And the HL2 engine, although better equiped with graphic libs, lacks when it comes to the multi player behavior. The UT engine is as smooth as glas compared to the Valve stuff. And game play shows it.
More Detail is nice in the theatrical trailers or when it does not impact the performance. Otherwise the first game is the last success as people don’t buy into it again.
That is also the reason why WII is a success. Less weirdness, more realtime fun. I was surprised to see how well that thing works and the obvious trade off between detail and performance is well balanced.
So, less detail and more fun options seems to be the formula. Same applies to FPS/MP maps. 2 path between the fronts and it’s boring, 4 path is to weird, and three possible paths are driving the mob into a game frenzy. Strange but true. I won a few awards for maps I made and all are based on a hand full of rules. I even wrote a paper on MP Maps… If there is interest I can dig it up…
Cheers
Lemo
PS:Do we get a T-Shirt for voting? Or at least a Poster?
Fewer cusomtisattion possible has more chances of high performances:
If you have to deal with a character customisation system, it makes more textures, more assets…
In gears of war, they have very few variation on there characters so they can have higher normalmaps, better framerate…
I know games where you can customise characters very far, but it dosent make the game fluide a doesn’t bring so much to the gameplay…
arent the first and the last one nearly the same?
well it depends on the game. if it is a 3rd person game (shooter) and i cant see myself its not very important if my char has many customisations or if its detailed.
when i play an rpg and i can see myself i wanna have many options for face and body etc.
I found it cool to be able to replace an entire character as it is possible in the valve engine. Within the engines range of parameters (mesh density, texture size) you can have all sorts of strange things running around. However, it only works in Deathmatch modes. In other modes people have no clue to which party that particular monster,guy, or robot thingy belongs. And that leads to frustration after one team has eliminated itself within the first 3 seconds of a round as they are all banned for team killing LOL. Funny as hell but not very productive when it comes to the fun factor.
I think customization while the general characteristics remain is fun. I made a few cool patches for the standard uniforms. That was already a lot of fun. The admin always had a target cross on his back, and other clan members had equally funny tags on them. That did not disrupt the game play but added fun factor.
Maybe the ability to be able to modify specific texture maps would be something cool to have in a game. Those could be decals which don’t really take performance away. The player could have the feeling of a great achievement when the results of his MSPaint or PS hacking are on a uniform part. Identification and satisfaction with the game title would almost be guarantied while making sure things do not get to far out of hand. A little bit out of hand IS always fun 8).
Just brain storming here…
Lemo
Ever play Time Splitters? Great characters in there and ran really fast too.
I choose first one, becaurse I hate coneheaded artifacted characters, even if they are lots in numbers with legion of customizations :lol:
However, “Story is a King” spoke in Pixar)
Good luck, anyway
intersting poll.
i voted for no. 2. i want more customization as well, but would be nice to have a face randomization system.
for example, all the head could have same uv and mesh, and through coding it would randomly pick eyes nose and lips from different texures through alphas.
i am no coder so i dont know if that is technically possible. but it would be cool to be able to do that. obviously you wouldnt randomize between male and female characters or faces of different ethnicity but you get my idea.
also they dont have to be super detailed. usually we end up lowering texture sizes for memory requirements anyways.
this is a very helpful thread because im making a game but as far as this poll goes: all three choices are as others have illistated, needed for various things. I play games for the graphics and gameplay. Gameplay is essential to whether ill play a game or not because 1. if its too repetitive and stiff, then i cant play it because of carpal tunnel, as more gamers get carpal tunnel this will be more of an influence because of ergonomics. 2. i really dont mind the state of graphics as long as the game is enjoyable a comparasion would be the old black and white tv shows and movies for me. i probably should not be gaming but its a great pastime 