Now to make a conclusion, I needed to understand the relation between 'the importance of environments ("environment really is secondary to gameplay")' and 'the variation of environments ("Variation is quite important me thinks")' in your post, but I can't relate them... are you even contradicting yourself? \:D
Split personalities? \:D
No and not really.
I don't see how it's contradicting though. I was talking about the different kinds of gameplay environments (space, surreal, cartoon, realistic and so on) and the different styles of variation within the choosen kind of environment (snow, sunny/rainy, green grass, dessert and so on), so basically two slightly different things.
You won't find many games where at one point you are in space fighting aliens in a spacecraft and at another point you are fighting pirates with a sword in the 13th century... that's what I meant. Of course theoretically it's possible to combine those two "worlds", but then you'd mix them into something sci-fi steampunk kind of thing rather than having two really distinct styles of art and environments.
might it be because 'kind of game' does not necessarily relate to an environment
My point is that it sort of does relate to certain type of environments. I'm not saying there's something totally inevitable about choosing the kind of environment, but you really can't choose any random environment for most kinds of games.
