How important is seeing the characters in the environment to you?

[S Key]

I've been playing a lot of 3dcg games lately. And I noticed that there's a big focus on rendering the character in the environment. This is in contrast to the traditional two plane solution a lot of 2d VNs use (foreground with characters and a separate background image).

I was wondering if this was just a flex of the technology, or if people actually found this a crucial part of the game.

So, as the title says, how important is seeing the characters *in* the environment instead of in front of it to you?

 

[Meaning Less]

Having a sense of where you are is all you need really.

The reason so many 3dcg games have the character along with the scene is because it is easier to do that than to split them apart like they do with more traditional vns.

To me this is actually a negative and signals lazyness and lack of actual development skills. The best games almost always will split them apart because this saves you a lot of game size and also enables you to create more dynamic interactions, for instance you could have multiple characters in the same scene that would appear and disappear depending on previous choices you've made. This level of interaction is just not feasible for games that only work with pre-baked cutscenes from start to end.

In fact, that's why so many western games are so limited and barely have any branching paths, the way so many devs choose to display their content is just not friendly towards changes in the story at all, because with each possible variation in the same scene the number of renders would just exponentionally grow.

 

[Veileos]

I find that tying a character to a background makes the game feel more alive. Like the characters are actually in that world. I used to be heavily into Japanese VNs till I noticed this and have started to find Western VNs even better then most of the best Japnese ones that just use sprites for 90% of the game. Its gotten to where seeing a floating sprite over a table with text about them eating a meal with the same static pose I have been looking at for the past 30min then doing something else in a different scene with the same exact sprite sucks the life out of the game for me. Even if its just a few different pictures seeing the people actually at the table with food in front of them feels so much better and immersive.

 

[Sphere42]

It really depends on what exactly you mean with "in" the environment. 2D RPGM productions technically do this by default by applying the same blob shadows and illusion of perspective to both characters and environment/background which can actually look more "immersive" than a high-res 3D game with shadows turned off.

But to me it's more about interactions and what you do with said environment. If I just walk around talking to people and my chance of being found out not wearing any underwear is a 1d6 I couldn't care less whether that beautifully rendered 3D environment is a highschool, a corporate office, a log cabin in the Russian winter or the inside of an active volcano. However if you check for typical social sensibilities then even reusing the same static background image can take on a completely different meaning when one scene is titled "company outing" and the other "swimming in the forest lake". A lot of 3D background scenes are generic and meaningless just like their 2D equivalents, and a lot of live 3D environments go to immersion-breaking lengths to enforce whatever vision the dev has in terms of gameplay at the cost of everything else the character should be able to do in the given situation.

 

[anne O'nymous]

The reason so many 3dcg games have the character along with the scene is because it is easier to do that than to split them apart like they do with more traditional vns.

Not only it isn't easier, but it also take way more times.
One can perfectly, and some do, render the characters and background separately. You save a lot of time regarding the scene building, and since you only have to render the background once, you can easily render 10 times more scenes.

To me this is actually a negative and signals lazyness and lack of actual development skills.

When in reality it's the total opposite.

The best games almost always will split them apart because this saves you a lot of game size and also enables you to create more dynamic interactions, [...]

While totally depriving you from a lot of information, and of course constency. I prefer my games to be accurate ; when the girl is supposed to show her back, because she's angry, I don't want her to look at me with a smile, like it happen too often with sprite based games.

In fact, that's why so many western games are so limited and barely have any branching paths, the way so many devs choose to display their content is just not friendly towards changes in the story at all, because with each possible variation in the same scene the number of renders would just exponentionally grow.

While western games are the ones on the scene that have the more branching paths. To the points that way too many abuse of this.

 

[Meaning Less]

When in reality it's the total opposite.

Yeah sure, that's why every lazy game with kinetic stories has them attached meanwhile most interesting games with more dynamic gameplay have them sepparated for the most part except in cutscenes.
Great counter argument...

 

[anne O'nymous]

Great counter argument...

I found so too:

Not only it isn't easier, but it also take way more times.
One can perfectly, and some do, render the characters and background separately. You save a lot of time regarding the scene building, and since you only have to render the background once, you can easily render 10 times more scenes.

While totally depriving you from a lot of information, and of course constency. I prefer my games to be accurate ; when the girl is supposed to show her back, because she's angry, I don't want her to look at me with a smile, like it happen too often with sprite based games

 

[Meaning Less]

Not only it isn't easier, but it also take way more times.

This is the equivalent of saying:
"It takes more time to create 1000 If statements than it takes to create a dynamic single loop that solves everything, therefore it is not lazy..."

Nah, most people know where real lazyness and lack of knowledge lies.

 

[moskyx]

The best games almost always will split them apart

By taking a look at F95z weighted ratings, it's actually the opposite. At least 8 out of the current 10 best games are 3D pre-rendered, with characters and backgrounds posed together (I haven't played Harem Hotel so I don't know if the pics in the OP are from cutscenes; if they aren't, that will make 9 out of 10). And we could keep scrolling down.