Well the question itself is pretty straight forward; do you need pictures to enjoy a game? In the strategy game I'm working the interface is going to be very minimalist in terms of graphics but will that turn people off? Two key areas that I am concerned about are facilities are object descriptions. Now at present the facilities will be shown purely as a blue print style layout, with icons representing key objects, such as personal, security devices and computer terminals. This means that there will be no fancy isometric or 3d view of facilities available but then that’s not what I wanted to go for. The second place where I am debating about the images is in terms of objects you can build and research. I think it would be good to have an image to accompany the description of a bio mutant for instance, but I wonder if people would not prefer to instead have a more detailed text description and use their own imagination to decide what the BioMutant look like.

Will poor graphics turn people away from your game? Sadly, yes. But that doesn't mean you can't make a solid game anyway. People were enjoying games long before they had graphics.

Take Elite+ for example. It took me several tries to start playing it because of the poor graphics. But once I took the time and figured out how to play, it turned out to be one of the best games I'd ever played. I mean, it made you dock at a spinning space station manually. The idea was so preposterous to me at first, considering I couldn't even dock by doing a straight u turn, but I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I mastered it. It was a real test of skill, which is something that I haven't had in a looong time.

In short, if you have poor graphics in your game (join the club) you have to make up for it in other ways. You may lose alot of casual gamers who can't spend the time figuring out your graphics, but you may attract a hard core following. And since (I assume) you don't plan on getting rich from your game anyways, I know I'd prefer a small hard core following to a large luke warm one anyday.

If the graphics are functional but the content of the game is immersive, I have no problems playing it. I spent a long time playing games like Stars! and Civilisation that only had minimal graphics. As long as the user interface is good and doesn't hinder me, I can easily use my own imagination to fill in the gaps that are normally filled by flashy graphics.

You should check out Uplink. While very simple, the graphics are neat, and they fit in with the context. It's all "programmer's art". The game's only a few years old, so it's a good example of a game that's popular because of a great gameplay, despite of the simple graphics.

Games don't need beatiful, sparkly graphics if it's fun to play, but ugly graphics can (in my opinion) spoil the experience. So go for simple pictures, and if you could make them just a little stylish and neat to look at, it can help alot.

I still play my old NES games on occasion, so no, I'm not a big fan of graphics at the expense of fun. Sometimes supposedly cool graphics can even detract from the experience. Every time I run into a fairy on Zelda: OoT, I think "geez, what idiot had to put their boob fetish in and corrupt the whole Zelda feel?" I also far prefer the look of the SNES Metroid game to that of Metroid Prime (gamecube), for several reasons. For one thing, I hate 1st person view because you can't tell exactly where you're standing as easy, and for another, the emphasis on realistic looking stuff removes some of the fun of the images on older games. (The little spiky dudes that crawl around ledges were nice & colorful on earlier Metroid games, whereas in Metroid Prime half the time it's too dark to even see them clearly.)

When playing old games, I've been known to think "and we used to call THAT good graphics?" But it doesn't make me enjoy the game any less, providing there's something there to enjoy in the first place.

As everyone says, depends on your target audience. If your target audience is mass public, your game needs to be pretty. If your target audience are people like us, your game's graphics need to be tolerable, but there's gotta be lots of focus on gameplay, balance, and ai...all the core stuff.

I still play Masters of Orion 2 and the original Magic: The Gathering game on my little Pentium MMX laptop. Graphics not so much. =) But still a good time.

NOTHING beats building your own spaceships!!

Your first goal is gameplay. Interface is the name of the game in gameplay. If you make it intuitive and don't hesitate (and I mean that) to adjust your game from the input of the Alpha/Beta testers, then you're 75% of the way there.

After that, you have storyline. Again, this is something where you want to make it good and listen to input from other people. If it's somewhat poorly written, try to find writers to help you polish it up. Not rewrite your storyline, just polish it. Only you can maintain internal consistency. If it gets lost, then you just lost a lot of your players.

Then you have graphics. Yep, I list this third. Is it because it's less important? Nope. However, if you don't have the other two, then you might as well just forget about this one. You'll get some sales from graphics, but in the long run the overall success of your game project (and some might say your career) are largely going to hinge on the gameplay and storyline. If you make a game with amazing gameplay and storyline, a company/publisher is going to recognize this and try to make sure tha your next project you have the tools (read: money) available to get this last piece of the puzzle in place.

Back to listening to input from players: I'd almost say that I'd try to listen to my newer play testers more than the ones that have been around longer. Why? Because they are just like the people who are going to be buying the game. They haven't been testing it for 2-3 months, they haven't gotten used to the 'old' interface, storyline, graphics or whatever. They will be new and basically just like the people who will be reviewing your game and engaging in that all important word of mouth advertising. Make the game good, don't ignore the older players, but definitely listen to the input of the newer testers because first impressions are HUGE. Screw that up and some people won't give you a second chance and they'll let their friends know.

Care to provide a link to "Elite+"? I'd love to check it out myself.

Personally, I do (a very little). I simply can't play MUDs because it is entirely text-based, even though many have what I love in a community of role-players. I think that minimalist graphics like you described would be just fine, though. I'd even be fine with a set of listboxes, a la Progress Quest, if they intuitively revealed data. You'd need a little more content than PQ, though.

There are really two seperate questions:
Would you play a game with bad graphics?
Would you play a game with simple graphics?

I'd have a hard time playing a game with bad graphics, but I can easily play games with simple graphics for hours on end.

What do I mean by bad vs simple? Well, NES and SNES games generally have simple graphics, but only rarely are the graphics in such games bad. Despite using 3-color sprites on the NES (plus transparency), most games still manage to get the point across and you can tell what something is (or is supposed to be) at a glance without any problem.

However, if you go download some freeware indie games, you'll probably get a taste of bad graphics - that is, graphics that don't offer any hint at what they're supposed to represent, or show some resemblance but have no style at all. A boomstick icon shouldn't look like a broom handle on fire, and you shouldn't have a smoothly shaded human sprite along with cell-shaded everything else.

Things need to make sense and they need to fit together. Use some common sense, and even 'beta test' your graphics if you need to (ie send them to somebody and ask 'can you tell what graphic #X looks like?' etc) to avoid bad graphics =-) You could even get a pixel artist to make them if you really need to.

In summary, 3D graphics aren't required and you don't need photorealistic 2d sprites, but the graphics need to make sense, have a little bit of style, and the styles need to match.