This thought has come to mine just recently when I was thinking of creating a game that comes "alive." I was thinking about making an RTS with waving grass tiles, changing weather, day/night, waving palm trees, animated waves on shores, hundreds of units battling on screen without sacrificing frame rates. Corpses left behind instead of disappear, smokes and fires all over the battleground. Oh wait, do computers today can do that? isn''t that gonna require a lot of processing speed and memory? That made me realize that we have been spending the speed of our computers for the graphics alone. We don''t even think of using that speed to add more elements to the game, to make it better in design. Think of Starcraft, with all the elements that I have described. But what do we have? a fully 3D Warcraft III that doesn''t allow you to have more than 100 food count, that gets really slow if you see more than 40 units on the screen. Though it has more animated terrain and "better" graphics, some important elements are still missing. If Blizzard were to add these elements to Warcraft III, only really fast computers with huge memory could play the game. But add those to Starcraft, I believe the game would suddenly have improved replay value. I wouldn''t question games where 3D really improves its design and gameplay such as in FPS games. However, the "why am I invisible" thread proves my point. Some people mentioned that adding one full 3D player object will slow the system down, because it takes time to cull the object. OK, maybe it is, but only in games with superior graphics such as Doom III. Try adding that feature in CS or Duke Nukem 3D, or some old FPS game, and play that game on today''s computers, do you think it''s gonna sacrifice any framerates? Well, maybe adding one least viewed object isn''t gonna add that much value the game, but you can see my point. Everytime a new processor/video card is released, we always go "OMG, let us increase the poly count!" especially in FPS games, explained better in "Evolution of FPS" thread. Instead of adding more elements to 2D games, we make them 3D with lesser elements. We are forgetting the design, we are forgetting of using that extra speed for something else that can really make the game better in gameplay/interactivity.

Yep. At least a first (maybe not so much now), switching to 3D was a step DOWN in graphic quality because the poly-counts were so low that you wound up with really angular graphics. I''m thinking of the switch from Monkey Island 3 to 4 (I think that was it; not sure, but they had a really nice 2D animated one and then went to 3D). The switch to 3D looked bad and lost a lot of character in the animation. The characters no longer looked and felt "alive." I suppose eventually that will work itself out as hardware improves. Of course the desire to feast the eyes will probably not go away anytime soon, and in truth the 3D perspective DOES feel more immersive. Trouble is it often plays havoc with game play; things are often more difficult to control due to the addition of, quite literally, a new dimension. 3D has promise, but it''s used too often right now. We shouldn''t abandon it, just weigh it''s use carefully, as with 2D.