There's an interesting distinction between a game having 3d art assets and a game having 3d game play. A game like Pikman could be done with an abstracted 2d top-down map (I'm not saying we should do it, but rather that the gameplay is not intrinsically dependent on the world being 3d). Nethack oddly enough has a 3 dimensional world where you can tunnel through the floors, levitate, etc. Not that this is a criticism of Pikman (which I enjoyed immensely), it's more of a conceptual benchmark.
It seems like people (or at least myself and some of my coworkers) can process spatial data faster in a 2d format. This means that as the gameplay becomes more 2d it's possible to have a player cope with more complex situations in less time. It becomes a tradeoff, depth for speed. Neither one is "right", but it is something to bear in mind while creating a game.
Posted by matt at July 11, 2003 02:03 AM