The_Raven on 26/8/2008 at 15:49
Amen.
Matthew on 26/8/2008 at 15:57
So why do companies like Valve and Blizzard get this when so many others do not, d'you think? Is it a case of institutional blindness?
ZylonBane on 26/8/2008 at 17:09
I'd wager the problem is not so much the game developers, as it is the game publishers. Specifically, their marketing departments. You know, rooms full of people who don't like games but have somehow ended up trying to sell them.
Matthew on 26/8/2008 at 17:19
True - though I'd have to lay the blame on whoever is responsible for accepting or rejecting pitches as well. Presumably they may also have a say in favouring those 'flashy' looking games.
The_Raven on 27/8/2008 at 01:27
I remember when Deus Ex came out and some of the reviews were harping on the fact that the Unreal 1 engine was getting long in the tooth in 2000.
BlackCapedManX on 27/8/2008 at 05:22
I guess my gripe with the Tomb Raider video is more art and animation than engine related. To begin with, a lot of Laura's movements are really jerky and rough, but the texture mapping is atrocious. I've long considered good texturing to go leaps and bounds further than a disgustingly high poly count, and that low poly models can look much better if they're textured and animated properly (I typically cite MGS1 for pc when I say this, the resolution is high enough in the pc version that you can see how much detail went into the models and how the textures stretch very appropriately with their movement, so there isn't any clipping or awkward clunkiness... or any more than you'd expect from a game made in '98 anyway.) The video had low poly models that were smoothed into looking current-gen and had pitiful texturing on top of it. (for a clear example of this, watch the scene where Laura is talking and it shows her face. She's pretty hideous.)
ZB was mentioning how integral approachable and believable characters will be to the game, and it seems to me that one of the sins of modern game design is to try to compensate for bad art with grotesque bump-mapping, and shiny people don't look like real people, so that concerns me a tad. I'm not too concerned with the environments as I am with character handling, which I suppose might be entirely a function of the team working on it and not the engine, but I'm just saying that what I've seen does not appeal.
