» Tue Mar 29, 2011 11:53 pm
I'd still happily play games on the Infinity Engine if they had a good plot and lots of areas to explore. Graphics are nice, but I enjoyed PnP/tabletop games before I had a computer, there were games I enjoyed on the Spectrum with very basic blocky graphics, there were games I enjoyed on the PC I had back in the early '90s which had a 25Mhz CPU (including "Legends of Valour", which I believe Todd Howard cited as being a source of inspiration for Daggerfall - the combat works the same only Daggerfall is an infinitely better game, and CIV of course), there were games I enjoyed on the PC I had 10-15 years ago (BG, PST etc) which had far from realistic graphics and character animations.
We've come to expect good graphics from games, but if good graphics were the sole reason for a game being good, I'd have never got into computer gaming at all. Although I'm always happy to see great graphics of course, that wasn't what made me enjoy any of the games I mentioned, and many of them I still enjoy to this day.
tl;dr - Gameplay every time.