Muzman on 2/12/2003 at 05:15
I've often thought lately that a lot of these new graphics engines and rendering tricks seem to be making levels end up more cramped, and the sheer size of the textures, detail of the characters and so forth making game development longer while making games themselves shorter.
And then people still complain about the graphics (is there a game lately that some person hasn't labelled as behind the curve or with 'dated graphics'? Been a while since I've seen one. What the fuck has good graphics? Please don't say Max Payne 2)
ESpark on 2/12/2003 at 05:16
Quote:
Originally posted by Gingerbread Man Okay, I've read that a few times and I still don't understand what the fuck a new engine has to do with the length of the gameplay, or what development time has to do with length of gameplay.
Spector said in the DX postmortem that they were able to focus way more on content (and more content, a longer play length), because 99% of the code in the UT engine at the time just plain ol' worked and they didnt have to deal with changing anything. They built Deus Ex "on the fringes of Unreal".
With DXIW, they had another Unreal engine, but they had to deal with it quite a bit more. More time on the engine, less on the game itself.
JonahFalcon on 2/12/2003 at 05:38
Check out the Deus Ex SDK -- it's basically Unrealed.
Gingerbread Man on 2/12/2003 at 05:54
Yeah, I never thought to check out the SDK.
:rolleyes:
I do spend most of my time inside game engines and editors. ;)
My point was this: There have been plenty of games built on coded-from-the-ground engines (not using slight variants of licensed engines -- and yes, in the grand scheme, the modifications made to the Warfare build are rather minor... The real meat of the engine didn't change, only certain aspects of the renderer etc) and they didn't result in short games.
And anyway, even if you do have to substantially recode a lot of fundamental things in an existing engine, that's why you have programmers and designers and builders and such all working in separate but integrated teams. Obviously there are a lot of things the builders and artists etc can't do (implementation, mainly, especially AI) until the new code is in a workable format, but compromising one stage of development because of a heavy workload in another stage smacks of poor time management, not enough cash to hire enough people, and / or a willingness to chop vast sections of plot / gameplay to conform to an unrealistic deadline.
I don't know. I'm not about to second-guess them.
Or maybe they thought 10 to 15 hours was plenty for a console game. I'm sure, knowing certain people's philosophies, the assumption was that replay would more than make up for a shortgame. I hope they're right.
I just find it hard to accept the "Well we had to alter a lot of existing code" as reason for a truncated game. I would believe "Well, we had to code this puppy from scratch" before that, and I still wouldn't accept it as justification for a remarkably short playing time. I would accept it as a reason to delay release, yes.
Basically, I think I'm saying that if the reason the game is so short (and short on decent voice-acting and AI) is because they had to spend so much time giving the engine dynamic lighting so that the flaming barrels would look l33t, then they made a horrible mistake. I don't buy a game so I can wander around looking at lights. That amount of eye-candy is overkill, destroys framerate in an unnacceptable manner (not that dynamic lghting always does, but it seems to have in this case), and appears to have diverted resources and time from the actual game.
The barrels in the Greasel Pit were cool, yes. But was it a good trade-off to have that level of dynamic lighting instead of a 30 or 40 hour game with good AI?
Blackjack on 2/12/2003 at 08:57
Quote:
The barrels in the Greasel Pit were cool, yes. But was it a good trade-off to have that level of dynamic lighting instead of a 30 or 40 hour game with good AI?
An epitaph?
Morte on 2/12/2003 at 13:58
That Invisible War is shorter than Deus Ex has nothing to do with engine recoding or poor team management and everything to do with a concious decision to make it shorter so more people would finish it.
heywood on 2/12/2003 at 14:21
Sure, there can be parallel development of the engine and game content, at least to some extent. But I think the main issue is probably that they have a fixed budget for the project, so the more they spend on engine & dev tools, the less they can spend on game content.
In addition, as rendering engines & hardware advance, permitting more and more realistic graphics, it takes more and more work to create a level. There is more architectural detail in the areas, more realistic textures, more objects, more complicated lighting and effects, etc. So even though tools improve, it still takes longer and longer to create a level, unless you make it smaller. Load times and memory requirements may also be a factor in limiting the size of levels. And the fancy character models in a game like DX:IW take a ton of artist and animator time to develop. Overall, there definitely seems to be a tradeoff between graphical detail and the amount of content in newer games.
Note that I'm not defending Ion Storm on this. Personally, I could be happy with the same graphics as Deus Ex if it meant more content and better gameplay. But it seems they're making an effort to appeal more to the graphics junky crowd this rather than their traditional fan base.
JonahFalcon on 2/12/2003 at 17:09
You MUST be joking -- if DX2 had the same graphics engine as Deus Ex, it would be LAUGHED OFF THE PLANET.
Period. End of story.
One of the biggest criticisms was that Deus Ex had an antiquated engine WHEN IT CAME OUT!
The Huntsman on 3/12/2003 at 00:20
The thing that bothers me the most about DX:IW isn't the HUD, or the unified ammo, or the crazy physics, or any of that stuff.
It's the fact that they changed the very nature of the game by making it shorter and more console-friendly. In original DX, when you walked into a level like Hong Kong or Hell's Kitchen, the place was VAST and filled with nooks and crannies, areas to explore, side quests, and some stuff that was thrown in just because it looked cool. The game took a long time to play just because there was so much to see and do -- it felt epic.
But now, with "streamlining", the game is 1/3 as long. I haven't played it yet, but it sounds like the levels are much smaller. This was done to make it more appealing to console gamers -- that's not an opinion, it's a fact based on statements from Spector, Smith, et al.
This sucks. I'm disappointed in Ion Storm for selling out on us.
screwed on 3/12/2003 at 00:37
Quote:
Originally posted by JonahFalcon You MUST be joking -- if DX2 had the same graphics engine as Deus Ex, it would be LAUGHED OFF THE PLANET.
Period. End of story.
One of the biggest criticisms was that Deus Ex had an antiquated engine WHEN IT CAME OUT!
If IS used the exact same engine for DX2 and just added new content, I would have bought it in a second. I guess I'm not the type of gamer IS is targeting now.
