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CryEngine 3 gives us a glimpse at the future of gaming [video]
- ChuckMcM 15y agoFrom PONG to this. This is perhaps the most accessible way to appreciate just how much the increase in computation (both 'general purpose' and 'graphical') can be done on high end hardware these days. True story, I was a big fan of Empire (ran on terminals, later became known as Bright's Empire) and when I went to Intel and worked on their 'high end' graphics chip (82786, used in exactly one video card from Number 9) we thought maybe someday you would be able to see the units battling cities rather than have your A turn a city '*' into an 'O'. Little did I know ...
- johnohara 15y agoEmpire under VMS through DECUS. You stopped me dead in my tracks Chuck. Fond memories of a heady time when we kids were tasked with building clusters that ran and ran and ran. Thank you.
- Gring 15y agoAll that great tech, and the end result is just another game where you shoot people until they're dead, then repeat with more people. Sad, really.
- cowkingdeluxe 15y agoThis is incorrect. Whether it's the UDK engine or Cry Engine, you can do some amazing things with them if you have the capability. You are only locked into FPS if that's only what you're capable of making.
- baddox 15y agoThat is also incorrect. Making an FPS does not imply that you are incapable of creating another type of game.
- cowkingdeluxe 15y ago"You are only locked into FPS if that's only what you're capable of making." It seems clear to me that I implied that being only capable of making an FPS means you are locked into making an FPS.
- Gring 15y agoIf you look at sales, 95% of Cry Engine game boxes sold were first person shooters. I don't expect anything different for the future.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kaeluka 15y agomight be; but fact is: that's not the only thing, the engine allows you to make
- Gring 15y agoSure there might be an outlier of a good game somewhere. But the current market drives future innovation. And the current market is "crap sells well". Let's guess what everybody is working on...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cowkingdeluxe 15y agoAnd what about UDK, which is similar engine but with more widespread adoption?
- replax 15y agoWhile it's true that most of them are FPS, I don't think it is 95%. Look at Aion for example (MMORPG)
- sp332 15y agoIt's helpful if you don't think of them as telling separate stories. It's more like watching different interpretations of Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet. It's basically the same story over and over, but if it's told well, then it can still be entertaining.
- betterth 15y agoThis is pretty offensive to anyone who actually plays FPS games and isn't just bitching from the outside. There are some great FPS's with amazing stories that make up a large part of the bedrock that is gaming as a cultural medium. They are not retellings of the same story any more than Oscar-bait movies are retellings of other stories. It's like saying "don't look at Harry Potter or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as separate stories, instead think of them as different interpretations of the monomyth. It's the same story over and over, but if done well it can still be entertaining". When all's said and done, I'd like to call them separate stories. Identifying the common plots and tropes doesn't make them the same at heart.
- sp332 15y agoWell maybe I had it backwards. Maybe FPS's are trying to tell different stories but for some reason they all try to use the same tools to do it. Really, shooting people is not the best way to tell most stories. The creators of the Drake's Uncharted series, really great FPS games, are complaining that it's hard to get any serious dramatic emotion in a game that has you getting shot at most of the time.
- betterth 15y agoWhat do you propose the player does in an action oriented, modern, gun-based game? What skill based mechanic can eat up 30 hours of a 40 hour game and is superior to point and click FPS shooting? At the end of the day, your player has to PLAY the game and I guess I can understand the frustration of the grinding and the mechanic, but I fail to see what is superior. Maybe people want more games like Heavy Rain? I loved Heavy Rain, it was an incredibly engaging and emotional story. I had a great connection with the characters and story, but there's only one problem: it's basically a choose your own adventure movie. Lots of watching, some playing, very little skill involved.
- nickik 15y agoCome up with something more fun then shooting down virtual people and earn a lot of money.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- harryf 15y agoSo lets try to really break this one down. Game development costs significant money so gameplay can't take significant risks. Any viable alternative must be able to generate comparable returns. Cynically put, for a game to be a success, there needs to be enough instant gratification for mass appeal. Same lessons from Hollywood... First person shooters a popular primarily because they give us an adrenaline rush, with secondary effects like boosting your ego if you play multi-player. That's why the format works. So what other options are there? You could invent another format that produces similar adrenaline rushes such as Amnesia, which is really just a spin on the FPS. Perhaps there are similar things you could try by simulating, say, a rollercoaster or a jet fighter. But what else is there which provides the same immediate gratification of an adrenaline rush? An endorphin rush... Now here the obvious choice would be sex, and I'm sure the porn industry is watching closely, but there's too high a risk of censorship for the mainstream game industry I guess; our society is much happier with violence than sex. But another trigger of endorphins is relaxation. What about games which, when you play for an hour, you finish feeling relaxed, happy and calm? Take flow for example - http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/ http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/ - there's even a learning element there. Throw in some elements for player creativity, and you have your secondary ego boosts for longer term gratification. I don't think is has been explored enough to understand the potential, so risk is high but at the same time, rewards could also be high if you're the first on the scene.
- huhtenberg 15y agoWhere's Jonathan Blow when we need him? Seriously though, cross this level of graphics with a storyline centered around exploration of a creatively made-up world, and it'd could be a birth of a game genre - an exploration as a game.
- wlesieutre 15y agoBusy working on The Witness. IIRC, they're not using a premade engine for it.
- el_presidente 15y agoSomething like GTA?
- baddox 15y agoWhy is that sad? Should "great tech" only be used to create the kinds of video games you like?
- Gring 15y agoIt's my opinion, baddox. Look at this video (from the atlantic jonathon blow article), then tell me the state of video games is just fine: http://bcove.me/vf4eof01 http://bcove.me/vf4eof01
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- greeneggs 15y agoIt's an interface problem. In the real world, for example, I prefer ultimate frisbee to laser tag, but in a video game we can't simulate anything more than point and shoot.
- gosub 15y agohttp://dear-esther.com/ http://dear-esther.com/ is a good example of using modern game media for story-telling.
- Gring 15y agoYes. Portal was also an amazing use of modern game tech without being destructive.
- archangel_one 15y agoIn some ways the tech encourages that, unfortunately; the huge numbers they quote for the Xbox 360 (which incidentally is 7, not 10) are only achievable with heavily vectorised code which implies heavy graphics work rather than AI. I guess they'd say that's what the market wants though.
- nettdata 15y agoNot true at all. We're currently in the beta testing phase of our game where you get to shoot mechs until they're dead. http://mwomercs.com http://mwomercs.com Totally different than people.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoPerhaps, I don't think we've seen a Crysis powered porno, that would be popular with the kids :-) I think though that you've may have conflated cause and effect. This sort of engine isn't really useful in a poker game. Do you remember the beautifully rendered ChessMaster games on the Amiga? I remember people talking about a 'waste of the graphics' to render chess pieces like that. I don't think anyone has done a good Myst replacement, this might be good for that too. An archeology game? possibly. Remember that the 'engine' and the 'game' are two different things. Perhaps the 'safest' thing to imagine is an FPS, known audience, known play etc etc. Licensing isn't cheap, so if you're paying for it you don't want to risk that capital on a hyper realistic 'angry birds' now do you? Some other thoughts on uses for an engine that does good visuals: 1 Mechanical puzzles - build machines to solve puzzles. 2 Life/City/Population simulators - more fun to watch. 3 Sex games - mentioned above. 4 Sports games - haven't had a decent FP kayaking game 5 Where's Waldo type I'm sure there are others.
- Gring 15y agoOh no, my point isn't about cause and effect. I believe that when they set out to do a great graphics engine, they don't have derivate, tasteless games in mind. They're actually doing innovative, great things well worth their time. The problem is the other half of their studio, which creates games based on those engines. This is where all the problems lie. No taste. And it's not just Far Cry and Crysis. Check out their recently released iOS game "Fibble". It's tasteless horse radish.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoHorse radish is hardly tasteless. Is this a colloquialism I'm unaware of?
- Gring 15y agoNo, but "tasteless horse radish" is a completely useless thing. Which is my point.
- OzzyB 15y ago
- daenz 15y agoIf money from that is what it takes to drive the tech forward, I'm fine with it. Someone has to supply the cash to push this stuff forward, why not young adults that love shooters?
- Gring 15y agoThat's a good point. But the end result should be "lots of great games". And I can't find them. This paragraph best sums it up: “Watch this—it never fails,” he said, bending over his computer keyboard. On one of his twin monitors, Hecker pulled up the movie-trailers section of Apple.com; on the other, he loaded the upcoming-releases page of GameSpot.com. The movies, Hecker pointed out, encompassed a huge diversity of topics and approaches, from buddy comedies to period dramas to esoteric art films. The video games, on the other hand, were almost all variations on a single theme: outlandishly attired men armed with gigantic weapons, shooting things. Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most...
- teamonkey 15y agoIf you have an engine like CryEngine3 you need hoards of people creating content to make it look good. If you have hoards of people creating that content, you need to sell a lot of copies to pay their wages. To sell a lot of copies, you have to make something that appeals to the mass market. The mass market, at least for those who care about the kind of graphics attainable only through top-of-the-line game engines, wants straightforward mechanics where they kill things, providing a black-and-white scenario where they can feel that they have won.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoIts all related to your perception; maybe the constructions falls over you if you hit them hard enough, and maybe there is a part where the place is full of mirrors and you hardly can tell the difference between an enemy and his reflection... but all this little things probably doesn't make it a "new game" for you; but for some people it does.
- rollypolly 15y agoThe video reminds me of demoscene demos.
- pinchyfingers 15y agoI probably wouldn't have even watched that video if I hadn't just finished watching Moleman 2.
- datasage 15y agoEven current gaming engines can be used to produce some very amazing visuals, but games still have to be able to run on hardware that is 5 years old. Its not very cost effective to create content at a quality that only a small number of users are going to be able to see.
- aqme28 15y agoStill, I'm glad someone's doing it.
- beaumartinez 15y agoWhat makes you think CryEngine can't run on older hardware? As a demo, they're naturally showing the engine at its best. Games "last" quite a long time, too—by catering first to the high-end and then downsampling to be able to run on older hardware you make things "future-proof". When you release your game on iOS in a decade, it'll still look great :-)
- nihilocrat 15y agoCrytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering... ...but... Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a function of a game's audiovisual quality? I would like to see a "future of gaming" video that shows off highly-interactive (rather than just very pretty) gameworlds and characters. NPCs that notice you are trying to put a bucket on their heads, for example.
- lbj 15y agoVery valid point. In my opinion Crysis 2 sucked ass purely because it was a technical showcase more than an engaging gaming experience, unlike Mass Effect 3 for instance.
- Cushman 15y agoVisual quality is an "easy" problem. We know exactly how it ought to work (ray tracing has been photorealistic for some time now), it's just a matter of tweaking it to run fast enough on the hardware we have. And we're really close to pulling it off. AI is, by contrast, a hard problem. We don't have a very good idea at all of how to exactly simulate a personality, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more complex than the most elaborate physical simulation ever designed. The most intelligent NPC ever developed was really, really stupid. The appearance of realistic characters in games at all is an elaborate stage show. You can spend artist time making the show seem convincing in more circumstances, but evolving it past that at all is one of the hardest problems in computer science. We're nowhere near realism. Now, with that said, in the demo they showed off some of their pathfinding and destructible environment improvements. There are plenty of gamers who care just as much (or more) about that stuff.
- dclowd9901 15y agoI think the fact that strides have been made in the general area of dynamicizing certain actions (like simultaneously rendering mouth movements with spoken language in games) are steps toward that grand goal of games having AI that not only acts smart, but even has dynamic scripting, based on "observances" and other environmental stimuli. Also, hinted/dynamic animation is pretty unbelievable now. Just see how real it looks when a character is tackled in a Madden game. I'm confident even the "hard" problems will be solved in the very near future.
- kmfrk 15y agoThe music made me feel like I was watching a modern Fantasia. Fascinating stuff - although, as people here say, what matters is what it's used for.
- vibrunazo 15y agoIt's funny because it has "future of gaming" and "console" in the same article.
- mcmire 15y agoI'm fine with more realistic graphics as long as that's not the whole point of the game (I'm looking at you, Skyrim). What I really have yet to see is AAA games put effort into making human behavior realistic (in real time, I mean, not in a cutscene). Like, would it kill ya to actually make the sound match up with the mouth once in a while?? This is 2012 and still there are only a handful of games that get even remotely close (Mass Effect, Battlefield 3 and then of course L.A. Noire and other mocapped games - I'm sure there are others, I don't play games but they're all the same to some extent). I think the thing about graphics game companies don't realize is, the better you make the graphics, the better you have to make everything around it to match -- character behavior, gameplay mechanics, etc. -- because the differences between the different parts of games are exaggerated -- you leave out some detail and the magic disappears. Games are just multi-faceted magic tricks, same for TV shows. The better you can hide the magic -- that's where the realism lies. Better graphics is just one part of the puzzle.
- troymc 15y agoThe top paid game apps in the iTunes app store right now are: Draw Something, Angry Birds Space, Clear Vision, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, TETRIS, Bejeweled, Skylanders Cloud Patrol, and Cut the Rope. None of those games would be improved by increasing photorealism.
- Marwy 15y agoWhat is your point? These games are for fucking i(phone|pad), so you can play them in a train while you're traveling to work. This is entirely different kind of games.
- envex 15y agoI think he was making the point that Gameplay > Graphics.
- troymc 14y agoMobile devices are the future, both in terms of total units in use, and total dollar spent on software. Therefore, the top paid games on the iTunes app store are a good indicator of where the true "future of gaming" lies.