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Not to put too fine a "trolling point" on it--but after playing Final Fantasy XIII I'm inclined for game developers to take a step back in terms of their graphi

Not to put too fine a "trolling point" on it--but after playing Final Fantasy XIII I'm inclined for game developers to take a step back in terms of their graphics aspirations to continue to deliver quality games. It's been speculated (and supposedly admitted to--though being at work I don't have time to dig up a link) that the incredibly linear world of FFXIII was a direct result of being overambitious with the graphics. There just wasn't time to build a more "complete" world to the graphical standard they set. I agree with much else of what is said here about it being a "perfect conditions" demo that doesn't have to deal with any unknowns--and I also echo that it looks exceedingly cool. All that said, great graphics does not a great game make!

potatolicious 16y ago
On the other hand, you have studios like Bethesda - who build great games with incredible gameplay... but graphics performance so sluggish that it really takes away from the experience, not to mention buggy and crashy as hell. There's room on both sides to improve. IMHO Valve is the best at this - their games run on an incredible range of hardware and look good on just about anything. Their engine is also rock solid to boot.
- bcrescimanno 16y ago
  My point was only that there are many ways to fail when achieving "graphical perfection" is included among your goals for a game. Performance sucks, the world is shrunken, gameplay and story suffer; these are just examples. As always, "something's gotta give" and when you decide it can't be graphics, things that are far more core to the game experience end up on the chopping block.
kevingadd 16y ago
Final Fantasy 13's failings were mostly due to a horribly dysfunctional studio environment and a broken development process. They released a surprisingly honest postmortem of the project in a recent issue of Game Developer (you can find a summary of it at http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_The_Scenes_of__Square_Enixs_Final_Fantasy_XIII.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_Th... ), and 'overambitious with the graphics' pales in comparison to the other things that went wrong. My favorite tidbit: They went through a large portion of the project with the game not in a playable state until they realized they needed to build a demo, and only then did they finally get the game playable and start testing it. Perhaps one might say that developers are aiming too high in every respect (including graphics), and that's leading to flawed projects. But in this specific case, I doubt the game would have turned out good even if the graphics weren't given the effort they got. In many cases it's possible for a studio to easily scale up development when it comes to graphics, because with strong enough art direction, you can have 50 or 100 artists working on assets for different parts of a game and have a reasonable chance of tying all that art together at the end. Unfortunately, engineering teams don't scale nearly that well...
- archangel_one 16y ago
  Thanks for the link, interesting read. Reminds me of some similar comments made by Warren Spector after Deus Ex - that it was a big wakeup call to them once they had a single playable level, because you could suddenly see that some aspects of the game didn't work as they were. Possibly this suggests pg's minimum viable product + iteration strategy as being just as applicable to game development too, although I imagine the "minimum viable product" for FFXIII is a hugely significant amount of work in itself.
  - icefox 16y ago
    For FF you have a number of different game "engines". The fighting engine for example can be a stand alone component, same goes for the running around in the world / track. There is always a minimum viable product.

potatolicious 16y ago

On the other hand, you have studios like Bethesda - who build great games with incredible gameplay... but graphics performance so sluggish that it really takes away from the experience, not to mention buggy and crashy as hell. There's room on both sides to improve. IMHO Valve is the best at this - their games run on an incredible range of hardware and look good on just about anything. Their engine is also rock solid to boot.

bcrescimanno 16y ago
My point was only that there are many ways to fail when achieving "graphical perfection" is included among your goals for a game. Performance sucks, the world is shrunken, gameplay and story suffer; these are just examples. As always, "something's gotta give" and when you decide it can't be graphics, things that are far more core to the game experience end up on the chopping block.

kevingadd 16y ago

Final Fantasy 13's failings were mostly due to a horribly dysfunctional studio environment and a broken development process. They released a surprisingly honest postmortem of the project in a recent issue of Game Developer (you can find a summary of it at http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_The_Scenes_of__Square_Enixs_Final_Fantasy_XIII.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30640/Exclusive_Behind_Th... ), and 'overambitious with the graphics' pales in comparison to the other things that went wrong. My favorite tidbit: They went through a large portion of the project with the game not in a playable state until they realized they needed to build a demo, and only then did they finally get the game playable and start testing it. Perhaps one might say that developers are aiming too high in every respect (including graphics), and that's leading to flawed projects. But in this specific case, I doubt the game would have turned out good even if the graphics weren't given the effort they got. In many cases it's possible for a studio to easily scale up development when it comes to graphics, because with strong enough art direction, you can have 50 or 100 artists working on assets for different parts of a game and have a reasonable chance of tying all that art together at the end. Unfortunately, engineering teams don't scale nearly that well...

archangel_one 16y ago
Thanks for the link, interesting read. Reminds me of some similar comments made by Warren Spector after Deus Ex - that it was a big wakeup call to them once they had a single playable level, because you could suddenly see that some aspects of the game didn't work as they were. Possibly this suggests pg's minimum viable product + iteration strategy as being just as applicable to game development too, although I imagine the "minimum viable product" for FFXIII is a hugely significant amount of work in itself.
- icefox 16y ago
  For FF you have a number of different game "engines". The fighting engine for example can be a stand alone component, same goes for the running around in the world / track. There is always a minimum viable product.