CliffyB: Epic Must "Drag" the Industry Into the Next Generation

[Therumancer]

To be honest unless the engine can actually do more than the look prettier than the current ones, I can't say that I'm impressed. If we still see the same exact games coming out with new coats of paint, that isn't all that impressive since people expect visuals to mover forward.

I'll also say that right now it seems like the games industry seems to be wanting to trot out a new console generation and sell new hardware as an attempt to solve some of the financial woes I've been hearing about. Microsoft is involved in some interesting suits over the 360 and releasing new hardware would help them sidestep that, and Sony's PS-3 has always had it's problems. The problem is that I'm not sure if the current economy is really able to handle another console generation, this console generation has gone on for quite a while, BUT how many people are going to be able to drop $500-$600 or more on a new deck? Enough to get the kind of penetration they need? I'm not so sure if it's supportable, though I imagine the industry doesn't much care about the viability.

That said, I also feel that despite the amount of time it's been going on the current console generation never really hit it's stride. I'm not seeing the kind of amazing accomplishments and uses of technolgy that we did towards the end of the PS-2 era, making me think that we're really ready to move on. I don't think the current hardware has been exploited the same way. What's more, I still think the generation of games before this one, especially the PS-2 has a pretty strong prescence.

I'll also be brutally honest in saying that while I could dredge up a few hundred dollars for a new console, I'm increasingly wondering if it would be worth doing. There seems to be no interest in backwards compadibility, and I still play games from the PS-2 and even PS-1 era. With my investment in games, I do not want to wind up having to scrap a lot of them or have like 3 differant Playstation systems all hooked up just to play my library. Not to mention with all of this "online" and "DLC" stuff, not to mention "Arcade" type downloaded titles, I have a vested interest in the current infrastructure continueing. Basically, unless they find some way to let me access all my games/content on a new system, this seems more like a headache waiting to happen than a revolution in gaming.

I'll also say, that I expect things to get very nasty with the industry even continueing to think in this direction without more planning and reassurances. I look back at the whole fiasco with them cutting off XBL support for older titles like the "Halo" games. They move forward and start basically wrecking the gamability/support of literally hundreds if not thousands of titles, especially if new systems require updates to systems like XBL or PSN that invalidate the old code, it's going to be almost biblical. One thing I'm not sure if the gaming industry grasps is that being legally covered in doing something, doesn't mean there aren't going to be repurcussions. We saw this with the whole Lulzsec attack on PSN which cost Sony a bit of money over their practices. You cost millions of people, hundreds or thousands of dollars apiece, and your going to see more of this, and maybe even real world violence. Piss off enough people, and some of them aren't going to care what the law says when you do something to hurt them.

Interesting news about the new engine, and how it ties into "next gen" plans, but really, as "insane" as some people might think I am, I think the gaming industry has a lot to hash out, and a lot of responsibilities they need to acknowlege before they even start seriously considering that. Backwards compadibility is going to be a start, especially now, as are a lot of details on how they are going to retain support for all of this DLC, and digital products they convinced people to buy. Even in the "best" situation, if they pull that rug out from under everyone, losing everything each generation means people are going to be a lot less likely to buy this stuff, especially for the premium prices the industry winds up demanding. Even if people choke down their losses without incident, they aren't going to invest again.

 

[joe-h2o]

I give his ideas an 8 out of 10.

Sorry Cliffy. What really makes a good game is gameplay, story and immersion. While graphical fidelity plays a part in that, there has been *far* too much emphasis on graphics in recent years, to the point where we're just playing engine demos, not games.

However, I assume whatever new, amazing engine you come up with will be able to render even more subtle shades of brown. I can't wait!

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Anything that gets us away from the long line of crappy PC ports of UE3 games that have no anti-aliasing without forcing it externally through video card control panels and horrible texture pop-in (despite my computer having enough RAM to cache the entire game in memory) is ok with me.

You're right! This is an issue I've meant to bring up for a long time! I mean, at the moment, developers are just dying to throw more money into games budgets, especially on something like graphics. We've clearly reached a point in our industry were graphics are acting as a bottlenecks for all other productions and preventing the creative revolution we need. I mean, it's impossible just to render even a simple room with a man in it, without telling what it's like at the moment. We just can't tell what's happening anywhere, because the graphics are so terrible that they make it impossible to understand gameplay or story. I mean, all games at the moment are such wonderful, sparkling diamonds of creativity, help back only by those insufferably bad graphics. I mean, Cliffy B himself has created the gears of war creation, a masterful creation of storytelling with wonderful gameplay, ruined by poor graphics. I would call for push, push, push-ing graphics as far as we can at the expense of everything else.

And not to mention the fact that prices for high-end graphics cards are at an all-time low [http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32442-6.html], meaning that everyone's queuing up to buy cards that can run this sort of thing. Not to mention the fact that P.C. game sales are crushing console sales at the moment.

EDIT: oh and this goes out for for everyone else saying "we can't have 6-year old tech holding back graphics"

You ready?

***Just because you shelled out hundreds on a new GPU, does not mean that the industry has an obligation to kill itself in the process of making everything run to your high-end graphics card. It's not something we can afford, and good graphics do not make a game good.***

Believe it or not, I actually agree with most of what you're saying. One of my favorite games from the past few years is AI War [http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-features] which is far from pretty and has hardware requirements of slightly higher than a potato on the video end of things (although it will crush any CPU you throw at it if you play on a big enough map with high enough numbers of units). As far as games that actually have stories going on in any significant amount, Bastion was easily my GOTY from last year, and that will likewise run on almost anything (although it looks amazing because of the style used). I've been playing video games since the 80s, along with plenty of tabletop and pencil and paper stuff like D&D, so I'm quite familiar with how good gameplay and good storytelling don't need good graphics, or even any graphics at all.

It's just getting kind of frustrating that even my mid-range video card that I got for $100 in mid-2009 has been able to run nearly every UE3 game (of which there are many, because it's relatively easy to use for cross-platform development) completely maxed out at 1920x1200...except the built-in limitations of the engine keep it from being what it could be. It's not that I can't enjoy games that don't have all the latest shiny things in them (and in fact many of the ones I end up liking most are the "least shiniest"), but if they are going to take the AAA route and throw in all the flashy, expensive stuff they can, it does kind of grate on me and gets distracting when there are obvious, basic features missing that would've been relatively trivial/cheap to add or fix.

Really when it comes down to it, I just want the engine to stop being gimped not so I can have super expensive games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars just for the art department's salaries but so the textures actually load when they're supposed to display instead of three seconds later and I don't have to manually force anti-aliasing for every game. Other than that, I'm more interested in people trying more creative/varied art styles instead of the same old crap with MOAR POLYGONS and wouldn't really care if the overall power of console video hardware didn't increase all that much. Give them more CPU power and plenty of RAM to work with instead. That's more useful for making a world and/or characters you can interact with in new and different ways, instead of doing the same thing as usual only prettier.

 

[viranimus]

Well,

A: He is absolutely right. It makes sense for the people designing what is going to be the predominant game engine in the industry to help dictate hardware demands and needs. The software should drive the hardware, not the other way around.

B: Its what should be. If most developers are going to license one engine for their products, then it stands to reason that engine should be what dictates generation cycles. What point is there to upgrade to a new generation if the tools needed to maximize that generation do not exist and doing it early simply forces developers to use old tools that cant maximize the effects of the new freedoms of the new engine, then forces them to relearn the new engine mid generation.

C: Just because your absolutely right, and justified in what you say, does not mean you have to be an unbearable arrogant twatwaddle when and how you say it.

 

[8bitlove2a03]

I love xbox, I love playing games with a gamepad, and I'm a broke mofo who doesn't have the time or money to build a gaming PC and thus uses his xbox for any game made after 2005. And speaking as someone whose favourite games are Minecraft (which looks like it was made in 1993) and Team Fortress 2 (which is a five year old game and looks nothing like all the samey hyper-realistic gray and brown shooters Epic churns out), I have this to say:

Screw pretty, just make it play well.

Too bad no one will ever hear all of us who have been yelling that for years now. I may end up getting out of console gaming all together if the next generation doesn't clean up its act.

 

[woodaba]

Well, someone has a massive fucking ego.

 

[careful]

"It needs to be a quantum leap."

People keep using that phrase... I do not think it means what they think it means...

It most definitely does not lolz

 

[M0rp43vs]

Jonathon Blow makes a half decent(Mileage may vary) Mario clone, considers himself a messiah, where his master piece shines like a diamond in an ocean of shit.
Cliff B makes fairly fun if un-imaginative game series, believes it falls to him to "drag gaming into the next generation".
Journey creates one (though really good) "game" and believes gaming to be not good enough for adults(Ok, there is a bit of weight there but I still have to disagree)

What is it with one-hit guys like these growing messiah complex making them think they know everything about gaming as a whole?
I'm waiting for the creators of Angry Birds to denounce gaming as whole while proclaiming their game as the pinnacle of all gaming, or for Notch to say "Gaming will only go down hill after Minecraft until my next game" or some such.

Well, since everyone before me has said better than I would;
I think he is a self-absorbed douche.
I don't mind a next generation though if we can get some fun games and not just glorified engine graphic showcases that cost several limbs and first sons to buy.
Graphic doesn't equal good gameplay, and even if these engines allow better AI and such, I doubt Triple-A developers will use them, let alone use them well while indie developers will not be able to afford developing with them

 

[zombiesinc]

Every single time CliffBbbbbbBb is mentioned I stop caring. This is one dudebrah that really needs to shut up.

 

[PrototypeC]

What a cocky- I can't- ugh. I saw the title and thought, "no, no way can he be that arrogant. I don't care how friendly Unreal is to developers, it still has more loading screens than pixels!". But no. I know "douchebag" is kind of his public persona, but he's laying it on a little thick here. Not everyone cares about graphics as much as you, Cliffy, and I've seen enough awful but visually beautiful games to guess that is NOT the future of the industry. If I can't stand the game, I won't care what powerful engine is rendering the horrible story and gameplay from the bottom of my garbage bin.

Then again, with better tools comes better craft, right? At least, in theory. Maybe shovelware will begin to slow to a trickle if more time can be spent on polishing and story. Of course they could still make shovelware just that much faster...

 

[PrototypeC]

You know what I realised, looking through all these posts? Well, 1: I realised people don't read the other posts enough and there's a lot of repeating, and 2: that as negative as I am about the industry and Unreal as an engine (Silent Hill: Downpour, OH DEAR) I suspect that the ratio of shovelware to quality will stay more or less the way it is now.

There are just as many reasons for shovelware to increase as there are for shovelware to disappear, making it more than likely that there won't be a big difference. The main problem I see with all of this is... I don't know how ready I am for a new console. I mean, for the first time in my life I got a current-gen system just a few years after it came out, and now there are already whispers of leaving it behind because "progress = money". Isn't that stupid console arms race more or less over now? Must we ruin this wonderful 9 year streak before we have to?

 

[samaugsch]

[sarcasm]That explains why Kane & Lynch 2 did so well.[/sarcasm]

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Three words: rising development costs. Now go sit in the corner until you solve that problem. And don't pretend to know what I want.

 

[pandorum]

How can he say epic can do that, when the games he turns out graphically are mediocre at best Gears 3 looked only slightly improved over 2 and Bulletstorm looked worse. Games he makes are fun but after two days they get old. They are graphically sub par to others, if his games looked the best in the industry then yes but alas no.

 

[Brett Bowling]

I wonder if Cliff dreams about graphics cards as much as I do

 

[DracoSuave]

It's not MUST it's want to. And why do we need another generation so soon anyway?

Because if you don't change the hardware for something long enough, technology and ambitions go higher but are capped because of the hardware their using.

But HAVE they capped it? It doesn't seem like we're close enough to justify another jump.

Yes, they have. Bro, the common gaming generations up to this point have been about five years max, were going on nine years.

Nine years is a long time, and without new hardware our old hardware is un-sufficient for our need.

9 years ago was 2003. The current generation came out 2006.


Anyways, this is the argument against pushing graphics in a nutshell.

Enslaved sold half a million copies and was considered a disaster, and lost money for its publisher.

Catherine sold half a million copies and was considered the greatest success ever for its publisher, and made them tons of money.

One is a by-the-numbers adventure rehashing game elements and sharing the same story as Dragon Ball with a big budget.

The other was that risk-taking game that made a puzzle game into a metaphor for coming to grips with growing from being a young adult to coming to terms with commitment and one's future.

If you want more games to take risks, you have to encourage the sort of game-production that encourages value for the money. We have the technology to do TRULY innovative things... too bad we're spending money doing the graphics-design equivalent of bitchwork--filling in the extra detail that higher end graphics-engines demand to look passable.