Fantastic read on Gamasutra with Tim Sweeney’s interview.
Jill Of The Jungle –which I played an insanely amount of time, very well paced game at that time-, the connection with North Europe coders –Netherlands, Finland-, the Wolfenstein shock etc. There is an interesting quote about the graphic side of games:
“But there’s another problem in graphics that’s not as easily solvable. It’s anything that requires simulating human intelligence or behavior: animation, character movement, interaction with characters, and conversations with characters. They’re really cheesy in games now.”
Cheesy and more and more cheesy because graphically it’s more and more realistic. The last game engine that did shock me was Source with Half Life2 first presentation at E3 2003 for human characters and of course Crysis for the environment stuffs.
Since then every big 3D games seems cheesy in some way to be and as Tim points out, we still don’t have the algorithms to make it better, brute force computing power is not going to solve that.
CPUs technology has really slow down since a year or so and we’re still struggling to use efficiently the horsepower of those dual or + cores. So what’s next? I’d say a focus on experience, gameplay and of course, audio.
This is why we see so much peripherals for games these days, it’s a good way to enhanced experience. The question is to what point?
I don’t know. As a guy doing real skateboard and real music I know it’s for fun, I know Rock Band is fun, that it makes people wanting to do the real thing etc.
But it’s getting silly. Faux-ollie? Faux-Djing which is already a stripped-down version of doing music?
Come on. I have a hard time to believe in those peripherals not only from a gameplay point of view but also from a housekeeper perspective: it takes a large amount of place for a few experiences. Let’s see how it’s gonna work but I feel a disturbance in the peripheral Force.
We’ll see at the E3. I’m even gonna be able to test it!