As most of us know, 3D bgames has generally been a no man’s zone for the industry. Do you think this is because most attempts at 3D are poorly handled, or is it because bgamers are adverse to the concept of 3D?
If 3D doesn’t bother you that much, what kind of “paper doll” system works for you? Something like IDOLM@STER – something else entirely different? Should the bgame industry just skip the entire 3D idea, and just focus on dynamic 2D paper dolls like in Sakura Taisen? Just go down the “full animation” route like School Days?
I don’t think 3D is a dead end track at all. I thought that Time Leap did the 3D stuff pretty damn well. It’s just that, well… eroge companies need to realise that you can’t just make your title successful by making it 3D, it actually has to have a decent story, good characters etc.
I’m not personally biased against 3D, it’s just that all 3D erogames that I’ve seen are terrible!
Full animation… well, I sort of prefer the the non-realtime-but-high-production-values eroge, with animations and stuff used liberally and appropriately to what School Days’ had (which mainly impressed me from a technical standpoint, because 0verflow sure did back a lot into 7GB or so)
Oh yeah, definitely full animation > 3D.
Honestly, for the time being, 2D is probably the way to go. There’s of course no reason why 3D can’t look as good, and would certainly save a lot of time on drawing a huge number of variable body poses, as well as allowing all sorts of fancy effects. That’s a little way off, though.
The problem with 3D in eroge is that it’s been a gimmick mostly. They haven’t really done anything with it and the quality of the graphics themselves has been relatively low etc. Ultimately a lot of detail is lost in 3D and you get bored of the games real quick. Full animation or cell shading is the way to go I think. I guess the major problem with 3D is that the attempt to diversify and provide erotic content along with a high quality gameplay experience ends up making the actual gameplay terrible and poorly executed. Biko for instance has poor controls and the polish is severely lacking. Ultimately I think most companies operate on a low budget and 3D takes a lot of work and programming to get done right.
If someone can find a good way to compress video footage sufficiently, the best idea is to make School Days style games. I can totally see eroge taking off into the next generation of the vast majority of them jump from interactive novel to interactive anime.
IMHO, only if they maintain the existing visual quality. I definitely don’t want eroge that looks like anime. I don’t like how most existing anime looks; I prefer the still frames and attention to detail in my visual novels.
The still frames are nice, but if you really think about it, quite a lot of it is copy paste with minimal variety except for unique event CGs and fancy fading effects.
While I know nothing about any eroge that has used 3D graphics, I can think of some of the reasons that keep it from being done. First off, is trying to keep the popular anime-like appearance of characters in a 3D environment. (Despite what Lancer-X said, the characters in the games look more like anime characters than manga characters to my eyes.) It is something that can be done, but pulling it off is tricky. Of course, you could go with the pure CG anime-ish look like the opening of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, or even the look of the game Oni, but I think (current) fans of eroge would be most pleased with the cel-shaded look of a game like XIII (video of gameplay here), except tailored to look like a manga instead of a western style comic book. Given the budgets of most of the eroge companies, and the technical hurdles that must be overcome to pull it off right, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Not to mention that given the reactions I’ve seen on this board to animated sex scenes, the companies have even less incentive to try it in a 3D game.
Meiji, have you seen Time Leap? (the title I mentioned before) Mediocre game, but it does the 3D thing (and looks MUCH better than XIII obv. =p) High system requirements to get it to look good, though, but the X360 port should be interesting.
Well, I just watched the opening movie posted on youtube. Is that what the gameplay looks like? As for it looking better, that’s to be expected considering XIII is a few months shy of being five years old, as well as the fact that the western comic styling generally doesn’t look as good as anime or manga.
If i’m not mistake, STUDIO EGO! is making use of 3D to animate characters in their games (eyes blink, mouth moves), without to tell many of their games have 3DRPG / SLG elements.
Other eroge makers like G.J.? and SQUEEZ are using something similar to create animated Hscenes, too.
Hmmm… Just remembered NITROPLUS has been using both 2D and 3D graphics in their hgames for a long time.
They said the same about Blu-ray, and they were wrong.
Although, they still may be right.
However, we’re talking about what would appeal to a wider audiances. Clearly anything that is more visually stimulating to one’s perception is going to attract more than it turns off. One needs only to look at early history of animation to see how and why people prefer simulated movement of static images. However the length of a title such as School Days might not be what they want. Perhaps, if it were like SD done in episodic settings where one could easily save and replay any episodes, in any order, FF and RW, etc. it very well could mitigate any length problems and the gripes about long cutscenes (or watching the game too long between choices) and reading too much text are likely to fade due to the audience expectation of the format.
It would say if School Days went commercial today in the US it could do fairly well. The one big problem for it, beyond it’s enormous savefile size, is it’s resolution and lack of any upscale filtering. That may be the one thing that could put anyone off…beyond the obvious things like price, method of distribution, etc.
That gives 2 other serious problems here: cost on both ends.
Companies and individuals as a rule do not like shelling out money, especially for high-end items unless they can see a serious return. It is a lot harder to program a 3D game than a 2D game of the same caliber. Obviously you can slap together something quite easy, even with good texturing, if you don’t mind clipping, bad camera angles, etc. And obviously you can get (most of the time) the highest-end games to run if you have couple thousand to shell out regularly (even with resale of your old stuff it is still costly to maintain upgrades).
Moreover it is much more resource intensive to design, say Cresendo, as a 3D game of the same caliber in visual quality that would also fit to a 3D environment. This is because of the nature of the environment doesn’t allow for still shots, but requires constant environment action. Yes, a few scenes could be done by talking statues, but most could not be and be taken serious enough for people to shell out the same, or more cash than a 2D game.
So what ends up happening is you have a lot of games like id@lmaster or Artificial Girl series. Very limited plot, if any, focus more, if not exclusively on visual and gameplay (usually visual first, gameplay second).
From my surfing of English message boards discussing Japanese games, there seems to be a keen interest in 3D eroge here in the West at least. Illusion games in particular tend to draw a ton of attention. As several people have said already, the decision to go 3D seems to add a lot of production cost. That’s fine for mega-hits like the Final Fantasy series, but b-game companies have to compensate by slacking in other areas such as length and plot. I still think if PP could get its hands on an Illusion or similar-style game that it’d become an instant hit…not that the type of people that frequent this message board (me included) would appreciate it. I do think 3D games appeal to a different crowd than 2D games–and in Japan the 2D crowd is well established indeed. In the West, the huge popularity of 3D gaming, and the lack of establishment of hand-drawn 2D “adult content”, makes the 3D H-game genre a niche waiting to be tapped.
By the way, I haven’t seen Teatime mentioned in this thread yet–they do a lot of 3D cel-shaded games.
