Great reporting! Excellent filming and it's awesome to hear from someone responsible for creating one of gaming's legends. Inspiring! I hope his work flourishes. Thanks Gamespot!
@xeoneex66 Dear Sir, I thought I would write a message to inform you that this reader found your message to be incoherent. I recommend toning down the anger with a few breaths. Then see if you can say something other people can understand. Have a smiley day! :-)
@Waynespread Omgosh oh noes games for normal peoplez! Too mainstream! Too casual! I only play World of Warcraft in my Mom's basement in the dark - thatz how teh hardcorez gamerz play! Ne thn less is too casual bruh.
In other news, readers seem to be confused by an article on Gamespot. In order to clarify their position, studio releases an update to their press release:
"We apologise for any inconvience caused. What we were trying to say was, we're making the next Mario game for Xbox." /s
I think mostly it comes down to programming and art, but certainly QA and all those other faculties increase also.
Sound, I can't really comment on. You could be right, but again it's still difficult to get an engine to manage increasingly complex numbers of assets simultaneously.
Everything art-related increases a great deal with each generation. As ALL of these aspects increase, you need more programmers.
I can see how you might think graphics haven't increased in leaps and bounds in the last decade, but I disagree. They have increased in leaps and bounds - it's just less obvious.
Think of it a bit like an exponential graph with photo-realism as the limit. ie. As we get closer and closer to photorealism, it takes more and more work to see increasingly small gains.
Take Halo:CE (2001) to Halo 4 (2012). The differences are less large-scale and obvious, but more in increasingly complex subtle details, such as (made up examples!) the way the master-chiefs helmet reflects shadows accurately, better lighting on objects in the world, more complex AI, bullet shells ricocheting off objects etc.
The big issue is programming. Making all of these increasingly complex tiny details work perfectly in harmony is a mammoth task. Hence larger and larger QA departments.. more engineers, more everything.
As for your question: "I would have thought the whole point of next gen technology is to allow the same team of people working over the same period of time to make a better game. I guess that hasn't happened?"
Well, technically you're right - that is true. But it's not that simple. Yes, the same number of people/time can create a better game with more powerful hardware. BUT that's only because a significant portion of the time spent making a game is optimizing code, making scripts as efficient as they can to max out hardware. With faster hardware, in theory, less time optimising is necessary, so you can make a better game. You see this effect during a console's lifecycle too - early games represent a leap from old hardware, but are not so refined, but after 2-3 years you start to see games really maxing out the new hardware as developers learn to harness a platform's idiosyncrases.
BUT I digress; there are other forces at work here:
Lets say you make Halo, a AAA+++ franchise. You need to make this game look as good as you possibly can, and to do that you need to max out the hardware as best you can. Why? Because you can guarantee those guys making Assassins Creed are going to be maxing out the hardware - you wouldn't want Halo to "have bad graphics". So, with newer more powerful hardware, the bar is raised ACROSS THE BOARD. What was amazing graphics before, is now horribly ugly on the new hardware.
And to raise that bar? You need more artists, more programmers, more time, more money...
This also creates problems as we approach the limits of photo-realism and economic viability... I think, graphically, eventually we'll reach a kind of plateau where most AAA games are of similar graphical fidelity, and it will be increasingly hard to "impress" gamers with better graphics - REGARDLESS of improving hardware. So you can see why some theorists suggest we're very near the "last" console generation, and why some big developers suggest the current consoles are "fast enough".
@franzito The irony is, the more time people spend on "social networks" the more isolated they become, and the less they interact with people in the real world, reducing psychological wellbeing. (AKA "the internet paradox" in some circles)
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