17 ms·

The tech arms race in AAA games and why I'm abandoning it

189 points by jsnell 11y ago

forgottenacc56 11y ago
What else in his life is he seeing in the wrong way?
- kelvin0 11y ago
  I wonder why the downvotes, it's actually a quite thought provoking question.
  - hvs 11y ago
    No it's not, it's an insult.
    - to3m 11y ago
      Disagree! It's a brilliant comment. Should really be at the top, in my view :) - though as food more for thought than discussion.
      - to3m 11y ago
        I will try to explain, though I think it's obvious - at least, once you've read that comment (which is why I like it so much - maybe to others it was obvious beforehand, in which case I apologise for being dense). Here is an article about this guy discarding beliefs that he's held for a long time. These are beliefs that I suppose you might call his doctrine, in that he held them without really questioning them. Well: great! Unquestioned beliefs, questioned and revisited, changed in the face of the evidence, or whatever. And he seems happy with the result. How many similar beliefs might he hold in total? If changing one set of beliefs for another is worth doing, what about some other set? Would it be worth his adopting this as more active process, rather than simply waiting for events to demonstrate that some arbitrary set of beliefs are worth changing? Is there a wider lesson here? (Etc., etc.)
        ddingus 11y ago
        My thought too. When I read the comment, I thought, "perhaps reevaluating long held beliefs leads to some new creativity or insight."
        kelvin0 11y ago
        That's exactly how I interpreted the 'insulting' comment. We tend to compatimentalize ourselves at a rational level, but sometimes fail to see the 'bigger picture' of our mental patterns and the impact they have.
emirozer 11y ago
Well its rather surprising and terrifying to see a game developer even having the idea "graphics makes games" for even a minute... Ask anyone about their favorite games who are passionate about them and i can bet they will list games that didn't had 3D graphics...
- omegafail 11y ago
  I think it is a great selling point. No matter how crappy the final product is, claiming new or better graphics automatically give more sold units. It is easy to critique a game after you played it. But before you do, the only thing you can do is look. Since you can't interact with the game in any way, what is left is the visuals. And that impression sells the game. Therefore, graphics matter.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - emirozer 11y ago
    I see your point and it makes sense but won't you agree a story line or a rich description of game play won't make the same or perhaps a better impact on the potential buyer ? Of course i am assuming there is a story line or nice gameplay.. To give an example: my favorite game of all times, Ultima Online has at __best__, __meh__ graphics..I remember i got hooked before i even installed it, not because of the screen shots but the way the game magazine editor was telling his own experience how he got murdered while fishing quietly in a small town..
    - omegafail 11y ago
      A good description will impact a small percentage that is already familiar with the genre or that franchise. What will mainstream audience do. Believe the your words or your pictures? Games convey information trough the latter. Game magazines are obsolete and no-one reads long articles anymore. You have one minute to impress your audience. Less if it isn't in a form of a youtube video.
fsloth 11y ago
Tech to games is equivalent to the medium an artist uses. Crappy tools and materials can ruin the experience (i.e. if Michelangelo's David was made out of, say mashed potatoes it would have not survived and it would have looked silly after a while), but good materials do not make an artist (i.e. give a non-visual person marble and give Michelangelo mashed potatoes and what Michelangelo produces will probably be better than what the other bloke produces).
- shimshim 11y ago
  it would have been delicious initially :p
- nosideeffects 11y ago
  I agree. It uses the term "tech" in the article and fails to mention everything that isn't graphics related. Even if you decide as a game maker to forgo 3D for whatever reason, you still have REAL technical limitations when it comes to the game mechanics. Physics, AI, and Feature X can cost just as much processing power as some fancy 3D graphics, regardless of whether it is realtime or not. Major game makers already know this fact, and that is why optimization of the tech isn't optional: not doing so means there is a lot less you can actually do.
  - jsnell 11y ago
    I don't think the article makes that mistake, there are plenty of non-graphics examples: AI / simulation of thousands or RTS units, motion controls, companion apps.
    - nosideeffects 11y ago
      Two lines out of the entire article mention those. I would not exactly call that "plenty of non-graphics examples". There are many more CPU intensive processes besides just those that result in real technical challenges, as well. My point is that since the article doesn't do them justice, it shouldn't be the phrased as the "tech" arms race, but instead as the "graphics" arms race.
MollyR 11y ago
I'm not sure how reasonable it is the way the author mixes demographics to make his point. I don't see the type of person playing sims social, wanting to buy a AAA game to begin with. I think the tech arms race does matter to people. It also acts as a signal of minimum floor of quality,but the specifics I'm not sure myself. I know would definitely prefer HD in movies, tv, and videogames. I definitely prefer movie special effects to cheap television special effects. edit: maybe it also acts a way to signal people in market full of noise (competitors?)
sageabilly 11y ago
At some point it comes down to what gamers want, and that's always going to be "different things to different people." Papathanasis illustrates it himself when he shares the reasons his wife prefers Sims Social over Sims 3. Also a great game with less than cutting edge graphics will probably always win over an average game with amazing graphics- think Minecraft as the most obvious example. I see games like The Long Dark or Don't Starve or even something like Fez, all coming from smaller studios and all about 180 degrees away from an AAA game being more embraced by gamers in the long run than whatever the latest Call of Duty is. Of course if we break it down that far then we start getting into arguments between "serious gamers" and "casuals" and "console vs PC" and on and on and on... Again, circling us back around to "different people like different things and that's OK".
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > Again, circling us back around to "different people like different things and that's OK". Sure, there's always that. However, just commenting on game graphics for a moment, many people have a clear bias towards graphics that are strong aesthetically vs. those which are only technically impressive. Consider, Sonic the Hedgehog was released in 1991. In my eyes, that game still looks good today, and I don't think that's purely nostalgia, I believe it has a striking, cohesive aesthetic style. Compare that with something like Doom 3, which was released about 10 years ago. Graphically, it's not awful, but it doesn't quite have the same timeless appeal. Gameplay matters above everything else, but in terms of presentation the aesthetics are IMO more important than the strength of the graphics engine.
  - mercurial 11y ago
    Just look at Hotline Miami or Gunpoint for other examples. I'll note that it's partly a question of genre, IMHO. While Eldritch got some success, I think FPS are a genre where it's a lot more difficult to go for a minimalistic look.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      Thanks for the examples, I agree Hotline Miami and Gunpoint have strong visual styles, never knew about them before today. Gunpoint in particular looks like a great game too, would happily play that. Hotline Miami visually looks like a trippy neon Alien Breed to me, I like trippy visuals, Rez is a good example of that IMO. I agree FPSes traditionally have been hard to make stylish, but that's not to say it can't be done. Whilst it's not a shooter, Mirror's Edge is a decent example. Eldritch isn't to my taste but I agree it's an attempt to craft something memorable. I also think the makers of Timesplitters were onto something, perhaps it could do with some cleaner lines (easily achievable now), but it could have become something iconic. There was also a FPS game (I forget the name) where bullets only moved fast when you moved, you can probably still find it somewhere, I thought that was stylish too.
vlunkr 11y ago
I thought this was obvious... I've played plenty of great-looking but terrible games in my life, it's not that hard to put it together. On another note, it's nice that indie games are starting to break down barriers by NOT pushing their games to extreme technical limits and focusing on gameplay. AAA games could learn from them.
ghshephard 11y ago
One of the sadder things I read today: "What I was blindly ignoring back in my teen years was games like Elite, Ultima IV, Zork, MUD - games that fit just fine on the tiny possibility space my original PC enabled." I had a (slap back of hand) cracked copy of Ultima IV. No User Manual. No Map. No Potions Guide. I had to create my own maps of the world, and permute ingredients to figure out all the potions. I spent three of the most glorious weeks of my life completing that game, and, to this day (close to 30 years later) I recall the level, (you couldn't restore health in the midst of a dungeon) in which I ran into the mirror image of my party and had to battle myself. And riding the balloon over pirate bay. Oh my, ...
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Ultima IV was and continues to be the primary reason I do anything with games development.
  - arca_vorago 11y ago
    For anyone who is an Ultima fan, you might want to check out Mortal Online by Starvault (based in Malmo Sweden). It's the closest 3d mmo in the same vein I have found so far (Full loot ffa pvp, guild wars, taxes, generally hardcore) I was very active in the alpha and first years of the game as part of one of the main guilds, which were quite rough due to bugs (and still so), but they have fixed many of their pipeline issues and have fixed tons of bugs and just released an expansion last week. There were no maps so I helped make the main map that everyone uses today for it: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Twm2yJ-ndrg/TymPaFeZbEI/AAAAAAAABh4/Y4q7V017Iqo/s1600/Myrland+Map+-+Regions.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Twm2yJ-ndrg/TymPaFeZbEI/AAAAAAAABh...
    - eropple 11y ago
      Ultima and Ultima Online are very different games, and the fans of each are different. I don't think an MMO can do what Ultima did, by its very nature.
      - 11y ago
VLM 11y ago
"Because of the ongoing pursuit of Hollywood" A better analogy is obviously the best hollywood movie is the one with the most and fanciest special effects. Unfortunately 95% of the population doesn't want to watch a special effects demo reel, not even for free. And the analogy is the same problem with graphics, true the demoscene subculture is fascinated with graphics and its very technologically impressive, but 95% of the population responds with "meh". (edited to add, the truly unfortunate part is the 5% of the population who want special effects reels is financially successful enough to completely prevent all advancement of the art other than the local maxima of special effects, so the 95% of the population who can't stand it are stuck, and are unserved by the monopoly / ogliopoly. The situation with games isn't as bad and the "casuals" are making huge piles of cash for non-3d developers, and the goal of the AAA studios and their journalist hangers on is to create and insert enough blocks in the marketplace to eliminate casual from competition and keep "gaming" a stereotypical pure 3-d WW2 FPS sequel experience, and the problem is technology has pretty much topped out eliminating "better graphics" as a marketing weapon)
- maccard 11y ago
  I think you're dramatically overestimating the number of people who don't want to see demo reels in the cinema. In our tight technical circles, sure, I agree that most people don't. But our tech circles are such a small percentage of the audience of hollywood films. There are plenty of movies that aren't drowning in VFX released every year, yet the numbers don't lie. Avengers, Harry Potter, Avatar, Pirates of the carribean (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films for more)style films blow others out of the water. It's extrememly clear that people want films that are knee deep in VFX. If they didn't, then they'd stop spending 1.5 billion dollars on going to see the avengers, and see something else instead.
  - VLM 11y ago
    I see truth in what you write. However, given that I can't see a movie for less than $15, that $1.5B represents only 100M views, and if you theorize that only 1B of the world population is wealthy enough to occasionally blow $15 to watch a movie, that implies 90% of the population is uninterested in VFX demo reels, which isn't all that dramatically different from my engineering estimate, especially given we could cherry pick examples to "prove" either your claim or mine, or play games with $ per unit time to reach either conclusion. I completely agree that $1.5B is important business, yet it makes my point that appealing to a narrowcasted local maxima of VFX fans also simultaneously means perhaps 90% of the population will be uninterested. And the point I'm trying to make isn't that 10% of the population is irrelevant, but if someone could crack the code and disrupt the industry and instead of narrowcasting, make something of broad appeal that perhaps half the population would be interested in, that mysterious idea would be worth about $7.5B which is actually pretty good revenue for a startup. But it'll never happen if the entrenched oligopoly isn't disrupted. I honestly have no idea how to exploit the market, but "obviously" there's a huge under served market with possibly staggering revenue, for some future startup that can figure out how to make movies that appeal to more than about 10% of the population. Piles of money are sitting out there, waiting to be harvested... There are similar analogies and financials with pop music. Entrenched industries have pretty much figured out how to sell simple mass produced formulaic music to each generation's (each years?) teens. There seems no biological or psychological reason a better industry competitor couldn't sell 3 to 7 times as much if they could appeal to more than young kids. Eventually someone will crack that startup opportunity and make mid nine figures. Finally ditto, kind of, with sports. "Everybody is a baseball fan" but only about 5% of the population actually watches the world series. If you take existing advertising revenue and multiply it by a fraction representing some magic startup pixie dust that gets maybe 50% of the population to watch, that's some serious ad revenue money; in fact its "football" type money, LOL, which is a whole nother topic.
macjohnmcc 11y ago
I don't think that young people today agree that this is a bad thing. I can see where someone who grew up with the older systems and older games would be nostalgic towards them (I'm turning 50 this year) and find the new to be unnecessary and gratuitous.
cwyers 11y ago
For the author's comparison of The Sims to the Facebook Flash game of The Sims -- one thing he doesn't discuss at all is that by using 3D models The Sims allows you a crazy amount of customization in creating Sims and their surroundings, compared to what's possible with the hand-drawn vector graphics of The Sims Social. Which kind of undermines his point. The Sims Social isn't a game that made different choices in graphics, it's a different kind of game with the Sims brand thrown on it. It's not just about MOAR GRAPHICS, what you're capable of doing with graphics informs what kind of gameplay experiences you can create for players.
deleted 11y ago
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lmm 11y ago
> What are the games that people play for years that only have pretty environments or another form of impressive tech to offer? I can't think of any. Well, Final Fantasy VII frequently tops "greatest game of all time" polls, and its visuals were driven by 3D tech (and arguably less artisticly interesting than those of VI).
- xamuel 11y ago
  I think FFVII is much deeper than its graphics and storyline. It was (not quite, but almost) an early Cookie Clicker. Laughably easy, and yet you had fun anyway. It was fun to max out your materia and level your characters up even though you had long, long passed the point where the final boss was a pushover. The graphics/story/popularity/etc. allowed you to enjoy the "Cookie Clicker" without admitting it to anyone else or even to yourself. That's just my subjective opinion of course.
  - tormeh 11y ago
    The thing that defines Cookie Clicker is that it only has improve-stat-get-dopamine mechanics. All games with character progression are partly Cookie Clicker. The interesting thing about CC is its distillation of a particular mechanic.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - xamuel 11y ago
      It's not just improve-stat-get-dopamine. It's a very fine-tuned, well-balanced implementation of improve-stat-get-dopamine. That same fine-tuned well-balance was seen in FFVII, in my opinion. It's subtle (1), but just think what a fine line it is between "grinding hits a plateau" (2) on one side and "grinding makes you grow out of control" (3) on the other. (1) "Good design is obvious; great design is transparent" (2) E.g., FFIV (3) E.g., FFVI
rwallace 11y ago
If what you care about is games for their own sake, that's as valid a perspective as any other. My perspective is very different, because I care about games not for their own sake, but for their spin-off benefits: chips whose R&D was paid for by gamers, are being used to design aircraft, discover life-saving medicines, unravel the secrets of the universe. From that perspective, abandoning the tech arms race in games abandons that which was valuable about the enterprise in the first place.
Shivetya 11y ago
That story about trying to encourage his wife to try the PC version reminds me very much of most experiences I have with or watching console gamers moving to the PC. The complexity at times isn't worth it because it loses sight of what the purpose was, to have fun
dikaiosune 11y ago
I agree with the author that quality gameplay should be more of a focus for teams, and that their choices in graphics technologies should enable their gameplay choices, not the other way around. But, gameplay isn't the only way to enjoy a game. Sometimes I enjoy something just because it's the visual and auditory equivalent of a summer blockbuster where I'm in control. And perversely, I'm willing to pay a lot of money to have the hardware necessary for that. Sometimes the gameplay is objectively worse than other, less graphically accomplished games, but that doesn't make it less aesthetically pleasing. I think it's perfectly valid to enjoy a game for aesthetic vs. gameplay reasons, although it can sometimes be sad when gamers have no concept of the latter.
- corysama 11y ago
  Even though people are giving "The Order: 1886" a hard time for it's linear, QTE-heavy gameplay, I really want to play through it simply because it is so technically impressive. (It might help that I make 3D engines for a living.) http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-rendering-in-order-1886-rocks.html http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-rendering-in-order-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHTJiRQB9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHTJiRQB9o http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/rad/s2013_pbs_rad_slides.pdf http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course...
  - meesterdude 11y ago
    just watched the youtube video (second link) and WOW. That's... crazy amazing cool.
  - eridius 11y ago
    The Order: 1886 is what I thought of while reading this. I read all of the negative reviews and whatnot, and I still enjoyed the hell out of that game. Every couple of minutes I kept stopping and just looking around and marveling at how ridiculously good the game looked, and all the cool effects I was seeing, including such mundane things as looking at my reflection in the many-paned window of a shop (where each pane had its own individual distortion).
  - 11y ago
Wintamute 11y ago
I think sometimes people conflate mid-career personal attitude changes with some sort of profound pan-industry insight. There's obviously money to be made from high tech AAA games pushing hardware limits, and money to be made from prioritising gameplay over polish and visuals.
- FrankenPC 11y ago
  Indie vs AAA. I thoroughly enjoy both.
anonmeow 11y ago
I hope the GPU arms race continues for as long as possible. Without it there would be no GPGPU and modern deep learning wouldn't be feasible.
- davesque 11y ago
  It's true. Arms races often drive innovation in other areas, the Russian/American space race being the poster boy.
- DannoHung 11y ago
  Won't that arms race continue anyway? I guess it wouldn't be nearly as affordable if people weren't laying down big chunks of change for eyecandy though. I dunno, you think the Xeon Phi stuff is ever going to show up in consumer grade?
  - corysama 11y ago
    The development costs of the hardware used in today's supercomputing has been heavily subsidized by PC gamers for well over a decade. If PC gamers all switched to low-tech games for the next decade, the supercomputing industry would find that maintaining the momentum of their tech advances to be much more expensive than they are accustomed to.
- vardump 11y ago
  Last I checked, the arms race seemed to be almost over. GPUs are only 20% faster per year, and the progress seems to be getting even slower. Gone are the days when performance doubled every year. I think we're soon at the point upgrades make only sense every 5-10 years. Same is happening to consoles, 7 years from PS3 to PS4 or Xbox 360 to Xbox One. I guess PS5 and next Xbox are at least 10 years away. Maybe they'll even be the last consoles.
  - kristofferR 11y ago
    4K and VR is going to drive the performance demands up quite a lot very soon.
Arzh 11y ago
AAA games are like F1 cars, they are the extreme that hopefully technology will trickle down from so that 'consumer' indie games can benefit from. Without the huge AAA games pushing the limits of tech we wouldn't have as many game engines for indies to use. I hope it continues because I love TIS-100 and The Witcher 3.
- fr0styMatt2 11y ago
  OMFG the premise of TIS-100 sounds amazing! Thanks for making me aware of it. http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/ http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/
Garlef 11y ago
This debate goes back to the late 1990's.
ajuc 11y ago
I'm still excited for more power for games. For a game that uses CPU correctly see Dwarf Fortress.
- newobj 11y ago
  You mean that game that only runs on one core?
  - ajuc 11y ago
    I mean the game that uses CPU for simulation of world, not for pushing ever more trangles to the GPU. Didn't knew it's single core only, that's a shame.
- Narishma 11y ago
  You mean incorrectly? Isn't it still single-core?
alkonaut 11y ago
This arms race is probably because what I want isn't a new game I just want the same game as the last game but looking twice as good.
malkia 11y ago
Heh, I've got the opposite - a very fast machine for it's day - 386DX 40Mhz but with Hercules (mono graphics chip). What I did was a resident application that has internal 320x200x256 colors buffer, and I would hack each game (looking for 0xA0000 or debugging a bit to use my buffer rather than using the graphics card directly). Then every few milliseconds I would transfer the buffer as monochrome - there was no palette transformation, just use the highest bit or something like this. It worked fine for Star Control 2, Trolls, and few other games - yes it was very weird, slow, etc. - but I got my excitement just for doing it. And some games were not playable - I was taking 10% of the available memory back then, and others were just too damn hard to crack (taking over interrupts, etc.)
rconti 11y ago
"In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion.[1][2][3][4] A title considered to be AAA is therefore expected to be a high quality game and to be among the year's bestsellers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)
- meesterdude 11y ago
  I KINDA knew what AAA meant, but not really. Now I do! Thanks for posting this.
  - bitwize 11y ago
    I still don't know what it means because the term is massively overloaded. Does it mean: * a game with a huge development and production budget * a good game * a challenging game * a game intended to be played competitively online * a game that features adult themes like sex and violence My guess is that it actually means the first, but game industry marketroids speak as if all these criteria were coterminous with one another.
    - Narishma 11y ago
      It means only the first. I've never seen it used to mean the other ones.
      - bitwize 11y ago
        The term AAA implies a sort of rating of quality, which is why it seems duplicitous to me. It's a bit like the term "blockbuster" in film. Originally it meant a movie so good, lines to see it would go around the block. These days what it actually means is a huge-budget film filled with CG and spectacle, and studios labor under the belief that throwing that much money at a production will lead to blockbuster-scale ticket sales. Then they wonder why their "blockbusters" flop catastrophically at the actual box office.
ojbyrne 11y ago
I have a stupid question that I felt the author should have addressed. What's AAA?
- bitwize 11y ago
  Marketroid term for game that has a huge dev team and production/marketing budget. Marketroids which bandy this term about are often under the delusion that this makes for a good game.
meesterdude 11y ago
I recently started playing skyrim - i know, I'm late to the party - and I'm really taken by some of the graphics and gameplay. there aren't too many games i can really stick with (just cause,bioshock,and portal are it) so it's nice to find a game I can ACTUALLY play. I tried deus ex; good game, but got too complicated, and then i tried picking it up months later and simply couldn't remember anything. But, I've also been thinking of making a game. I know next to nothing about games, but bunches about the web. So then it became a question of what could I build with the tools I know? which then lead me to realize: you don't need good graphics for a great game. Some games you want the graphics because it's part of the experience; but others you don't need any. And still others just need some. A game just needs to be fun in the end, and there are a surprising number of ways to get there.
- jerf 11y ago
  There's a lot of opportunity to use your web skills to create games. Consider things like Kingdom of Loathing or something... definitely not "great graphics" but has a lot of fans. Monetization opportunities seem more challenging, if you're inclined in that direction. If not, then, well, don't worry about it.
  - crgt 11y ago
    "A Dark Room" on iOS is another one worth looking at for inspiration - compelling game, and not at all about the graphics..
    - omg_ketchup 11y ago
      It's actually available in the browser, not just iOS. It's one of the best games I've ever played, and I fully consider myself a games connoisseur. http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
  - meesterdude 11y ago
    not even talking that. I'm talking, click a square and it changes colors, or a number counter increases; something I could conceivably build. But, nothing actually cool has come up yet, just gimmicks. But, I wouldn't be opposed to tinkering with something in unity either; but thats obviously a WHOLE other ball of wax. and for anyone else who's curious: https://www.kingdomofloathing.com https://www.kingdomofloathing.com
tormeh 11y ago
>Some AAA studios subscribe to the idea that games can deliver the maximum emotional impact in a similar way Hollywood does: By using actors in heavily scripted sequences to tell the story of someone else that the player/viewer relates to. Instead of playing to their medium's strengths, these studios go through great pains to emulate what Hollywood gets naturally: emotive characters, good looking lighting, spectacular locations. It's a very literal attempt to imitate another established, successful medium, and because it gets some results, it's popular, despite the fact it's very expensive and brushes aside many of the benefits that games get naturally. Games can be much more immersive than movies can. You can much more easily pretend to be the protagonist. By going down this route games lose some of the advantages of, say, arcade games, but they gain others and are generally not at a disadvantage compared to movies.
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  >heavily scripted sequences to tell the story of someone else that the player/viewer relates to. I think one of the strengths of videogames is that you can make your own story. Heavily scripted voiced-acted videogames go against that because they force you to go a certain path.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    Most games guide you neatly through a bunch of hoops; you create your own experience, but not your own story or anything like it, in most cases. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the experience of playing a game like Journey is very rewarding, even emotionally engaging. But you discover the story rather than create it nonetheless, it's just not as linear as heavily scripted games. Games are an interesting storytelling medium, but stories are much more than variations on the order in which plot points are hit. The biggest issue is motivation - why characters (maybe including you) act as they do. In most free-range videogames the characters are very transactional; they want something and enlist the player to get/do something. In turn, players collect items or set game flags that allow them to defeat antagonists in contests of skill or force. But it's not really practical to interact with characters by appealing to love, greed, loyalty, arrogance etc. in order to motivate them to behave differently, so videogame stories can't do dramatic comedy or tragedy at present, although you can of course have slapstick or situational comedy, and you can have sadness or gloom. But the general lack of permadeath and the reflexive nature of AI are still a limitation.
snarfy 11y ago
Atari. Atari pretty much spawned the video game industry, and the average game wasn't more than squares on a screen. Squares. Your game character is one giant pixel. It was all about the gameplay, not the graphics, and sold millions.
- Arzh 11y ago
  True, but at the time those squares were the cutting edge, and cost about $450 today for A game. http://game-consoles.specout.com/q/9/2566/How-much-does-a-Atari-Pong-game-console-cost http://game-consoles.specout.com/q/9/2566/How-much-does-a-At... http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=98&year=1975 http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=98...
- elihu 11y ago
  At the time, those squares were an impressive technical achievement. Many cartridges were sold because the graphics and sound capabilities produced a new experience for many people. (I was, like, five years old at the time, so pretty much everything was a new experience for me.)
- fsk 11y ago
  For Atari, most of the games were written by one person, which leads to lots of potential creativity. Also, there weren't as many established games to copy. For an AAA game, it's a big budget. To minimize risks, you have to make a game that's similar to one that already was a bestseller. For awhile, when games were distributed in stores, the only games WERE the AAA games. Now, with Internet distribution and better tools, it's possible for one person to make a game again. If you work on an AAA game, you're probably working on some tiny piece of the game, and it's going to be boring like any CRUD software webdev job. However, game developers tend to work longer hours for a lower rate per hour, because games are "cool". If you work on an indie game, you have more opportunity for creativity. But, if the game doesn't sell, you risk having no income. If you're looking for games like the old Atari games, it's better to look at small indie games, rather than big budget AAA games.
fapjacks 11y ago
Heh... I'll take this opportunity to post about my beloved MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth) [0], a MUD that's been running for 25 years, and still the best place in the universe for intense PvP. [0] http://www.mume.org http://www.mume.org
badloginagain 11y ago
The author points to Sims Social and League of Legends as points of reducing the technical prowess of games. While it's true that these games are less technically complex than a hyper-realistic 3D game, they are extremely complicated in client-server architecture. The requirements for technical complexity have changed focuses, not disappeared.
fr0styMatt2 11y ago
Lots of interesting stuff in this article. As a tech guy who went to a game programming school, my personal theory about why technical people get hung up on engine development (the old "I'm making my own game and have spent the last year writing my own engine") is quite simple - it's just an easier problem space. Writing an engine has a defined, knowable set of steps that you can answer with if asked "What do I need to do to write a game engine?". On the other hand, how do you answer the question "How do I make a good game?". So people get stuck writing engines because it's interesting and because they can feel like they're making progress on something.
fr0styMatt2 11y ago
A question for those in the know - as a programmer, I've seen a lot of democratization of the game engine side of game programming over the last few years. The price of entry to AAA-level technology has fallen so massively that now anyone can download UDK and start having a go. I'm interested to hear of what's happened, democratization-wise, on the art and music side of game development. This is the bit that I find people don't immediately grasp. While engine technology has gotten cheaper, making assets for those engines is only getting more expensive. So I'm interested from those who are in the art field, have asset tools become more 'democratic'? Or to put another way, are art tools moving to make art asset creation less expensive in the same way that engine tools have made the programming side less expensive? One area I can think of off the top of my head is texturing and shaders - texture-painting tools and physically-based shaders that allow less-skilled artists (and programmer-artists) to still get aesthetically good looking results, without having to become experts in UV mapping or writing shaders. Is there something similar for model and animation creation, etc? Is this even possible to do without making games that look 'cookie-cutter'? (My gut feeling on that last question is that it should be).
- itsybitsycoder 11y ago
  I live on the outskirts of 3d art world and there are definitely a lot of tools to make asset creation easier. You can buy texturing/shading packs, which are usually pretty customizable. There are tools like MakeHuman for humanoids and Marvelous Designer for easy clothing/cloth sim. Maya comes with built-in hair/cloth sim now which is supposed to be quite easy to use, as well as autorigging tools. You will probably want to know a little about 3D to make something decent, but then again you'll want to know a little about programming to make something decent in UDK. I'm really curious about the music. I have a really hard time making music without having a composing background. I've tried a few music generators but the results have been pretty bad so far.
  - fr0styMatt2 11y ago
    I'd heard of MakeHuman but not Marvelous Designer (it looks great). Think I'm going to submit an Ask HN, would love a list of these kinds of tools....
karmakaze 11y ago
One example where tech enables a more engaging (fun) gameplay is Gran Turismo. It simulates real cars on real tracks and the accuracy of driving physics of actual cars is a prime source of pleasure. Driving a different car, or different settings actually makes a difference in the way it feels. I'm still waiting for GT7 to have a reason to get a PS4.
anabis 11y ago
Good games that push the envelope is entertainment and art, It may also be genre creating. Katamari-damacy for PS, Dynasty Warriors for PS2, and Quake comes to mind.
z3t4 11y ago
My thought is that it's more difficult then ever to make high tech games. There's very little games coming out now that push the limits of what's possible. It's almost like complaining there is too much water on the moon.
restalis 11y ago
"The perfect balance of number of units with the amount of things a player's human brain could possibly track at any given moment was completely lost on me." The human brain can actually abstract things away and starts thinking in groups rather than in individual units, regardless if the game mechanics allows the player to treat them as such or not. That units-limit was something I did not particularly enjoyed in those games (and appreciated instead games like Command & Conquer in this regard). I agree that there is more than technical features that make or break a game, but the units-limit in RT tactics games is a flaw and it's not a technical one. For those who argue that units-limit encouraged unit-quality over unit-quantity thinking, I concede. It's a valid point that perhaps contributed to the *Craft success series. That feature could however have been left as an over-ridable game parameter (set on by default, if you will).
restalis 11y ago
"For years the AAA argument for pushing the tech envelope has been that the bigger, better looking, better sounding, more detailed our worlds are, the more believable they are. But is this true?" It is for me! I've enjoyed Far Cry more than the barren speed-oriented environments of Quake III or Unreal (I know, I know, this one never aimed to be "real", but it's a good example in anti-thesis). Now seriously, when I read this: "In politics-heavy environments, there is nothing more effective in pursuing a personal agenda than using "facts" and numbers - even when those facts and numbers are hand-picked to support a certain story." I can not help but think of the cherry-picking that the current article I'm reading does.

189 points by jsnell 11y ago

forgottenacc56 11y ago

What else in his life is he seeing in the wrong way?

kelvin0 11y ago
I wonder why the downvotes, it's actually a quite thought provoking question.
- hvs 11y ago
  No it's not, it's an insult.
  - to3m 11y ago
    Disagree! It's a brilliant comment. Should really be at the top, in my view :) - though as food more for thought than discussion.
    - to3m 11y ago
      I will try to explain, though I think it's obvious - at least, once you've read that comment (which is why I like it so much - maybe to others it was obvious beforehand, in which case I apologise for being dense). Here is an article about this guy discarding beliefs that he's held for a long time. These are beliefs that I suppose you might call his doctrine, in that he held them without really questioning them. Well: great! Unquestioned beliefs, questioned and revisited, changed in the face of the evidence, or whatever. And he seems happy with the result. How many similar beliefs might he hold in total? If changing one set of beliefs for another is worth doing, what about some other set? Would it be worth his adopting this as more active process, rather than simply waiting for events to demonstrate that some arbitrary set of beliefs are worth changing? Is there a wider lesson here? (Etc., etc.)
      - ddingus 11y ago
        My thought too. When I read the comment, I thought, "perhaps reevaluating long held beliefs leads to some new creativity or insight."
      - kelvin0 11y ago
        That's exactly how I interpreted the 'insulting' comment. We tend to compatimentalize ourselves at a rational level, but sometimes fail to see the 'bigger picture' of our mental patterns and the impact they have.

emirozer 11y ago

Well its rather surprising and terrifying to see a game developer even having the idea "graphics makes games" for even a minute... Ask anyone about their favorite games who are passionate about them and i can bet they will list games that didn't had 3D graphics...

omegafail 11y ago
I think it is a great selling point. No matter how crappy the final product is, claiming new or better graphics automatically give more sold units. It is easy to critique a game after you played it. But before you do, the only thing you can do is look. Since you can't interact with the game in any way, what is left is the visuals. And that impression sells the game. Therefore, graphics matter.
- deleted 11y ago
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- emirozer 11y ago
  I see your point and it makes sense but won't you agree a story line or a rich description of game play won't make the same or perhaps a better impact on the potential buyer ? Of course i am assuming there is a story line or nice gameplay.. To give an example: my favorite game of all times, Ultima Online has at __best__, __meh__ graphics..I remember i got hooked before i even installed it, not because of the screen shots but the way the game magazine editor was telling his own experience how he got murdered while fishing quietly in a small town..
  - omegafail 11y ago
    A good description will impact a small percentage that is already familiar with the genre or that franchise. What will mainstream audience do. Believe the your words or your pictures? Games convey information trough the latter. Game magazines are obsolete and no-one reads long articles anymore. You have one minute to impress your audience. Less if it isn't in a form of a youtube video.

fsloth 11y ago

Tech to games is equivalent to the medium an artist uses. Crappy tools and materials can ruin the experience (i.e. if Michelangelo's David was made out of, say mashed potatoes it would have not survived and it would have looked silly after a while), but good materials do not make an artist (i.e. give a non-visual person marble and give Michelangelo mashed potatoes and what Michelangelo produces will probably be better than what the other bloke produces).

shimshim 11y ago
it would have been delicious initially :p
nosideeffects 11y ago
I agree. It uses the term "tech" in the article and fails to mention everything that isn't graphics related. Even if you decide as a game maker to forgo 3D for whatever reason, you still have REAL technical limitations when it comes to the game mechanics. Physics, AI, and Feature X can cost just as much processing power as some fancy 3D graphics, regardless of whether it is realtime or not. Major game makers already know this fact, and that is why optimization of the tech isn't optional: not doing so means there is a lot less you can actually do.
- jsnell 11y ago
  I don't think the article makes that mistake, there are plenty of non-graphics examples: AI / simulation of thousands or RTS units, motion controls, companion apps.
  - nosideeffects 11y ago
    Two lines out of the entire article mention those. I would not exactly call that "plenty of non-graphics examples". There are many more CPU intensive processes besides just those that result in real technical challenges, as well. My point is that since the article doesn't do them justice, it shouldn't be the phrased as the "tech" arms race, but instead as the "graphics" arms race.

MollyR 11y ago

I'm not sure how reasonable it is the way the author mixes demographics to make his point. I don't see the type of person playing sims social, wanting to buy a AAA game to begin with. I think the tech arms race does matter to people. It also acts as a signal of minimum floor of quality,but the specifics I'm not sure myself. I know would definitely prefer HD in movies, tv, and videogames. I definitely prefer movie special effects to cheap television special effects. edit: maybe it also acts a way to signal people in market full of noise (competitors?)

sageabilly 11y ago

At some point it comes down to what gamers want, and that's always going to be "different things to different people." Papathanasis illustrates it himself when he shares the reasons his wife prefers Sims Social over Sims 3. Also a great game with less than cutting edge graphics will probably always win over an average game with amazing graphics- think Minecraft as the most obvious example. I see games like The Long Dark or Don't Starve or even something like Fez, all coming from smaller studios and all about 180 degrees away from an AAA game being more embraced by gamers in the long run than whatever the latest Call of Duty is. Of course if we break it down that far then we start getting into arguments between "serious gamers" and "casuals" and "console vs PC" and on and on and on... Again, circling us back around to "different people like different things and that's OK".

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> Again, circling us back around to "different people like different things and that's OK". Sure, there's always that. However, just commenting on game graphics for a moment, many people have a clear bias towards graphics that are strong aesthetically vs. those which are only technically impressive. Consider, Sonic the Hedgehog was released in 1991. In my eyes, that game still looks good today, and I don't think that's purely nostalgia, I believe it has a striking, cohesive aesthetic style. Compare that with something like Doom 3, which was released about 10 years ago. Graphically, it's not awful, but it doesn't quite have the same timeless appeal. Gameplay matters above everything else, but in terms of presentation the aesthetics are IMO more important than the strength of the graphics engine.
- mercurial 11y ago
  Just look at Hotline Miami or Gunpoint for other examples. I'll note that it's partly a question of genre, IMHO. While Eldritch got some success, I think FPS are a genre where it's a lot more difficult to go for a minimalistic look.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Thanks for the examples, I agree Hotline Miami and Gunpoint have strong visual styles, never knew about them before today. Gunpoint in particular looks like a great game too, would happily play that. Hotline Miami visually looks like a trippy neon Alien Breed to me, I like trippy visuals, Rez is a good example of that IMO. I agree FPSes traditionally have been hard to make stylish, but that's not to say it can't be done. Whilst it's not a shooter, Mirror's Edge is a decent example. Eldritch isn't to my taste but I agree it's an attempt to craft something memorable. I also think the makers of Timesplitters were onto something, perhaps it could do with some cleaner lines (easily achievable now), but it could have become something iconic. There was also a FPS game (I forget the name) where bullets only moved fast when you moved, you can probably still find it somewhere, I thought that was stylish too.

vlunkr 11y ago

I thought this was obvious... I've played plenty of great-looking but terrible games in my life, it's not that hard to put it together. On another note, it's nice that indie games are starting to break down barriers by NOT pushing their games to extreme technical limits and focusing on gameplay. AAA games could learn from them.

ghshephard 11y ago

One of the sadder things I read today: "What I was blindly ignoring back in my teen years was games like Elite, Ultima IV, Zork, MUD - games that fit just fine on the tiny possibility space my original PC enabled." I had a (slap back of hand) cracked copy of Ultima IV. No User Manual. No Map. No Potions Guide. I had to create my own maps of the world, and permute ingredients to figure out all the potions. I spent three of the most glorious weeks of my life completing that game, and, to this day (close to 30 years later) I recall the level, (you couldn't restore health in the midst of a dungeon) in which I ran into the mirror image of my party and had to battle myself. And riding the balloon over pirate bay. Oh my, ...

moron4hire 11y ago
Ultima IV was and continues to be the primary reason I do anything with games development.
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  For anyone who is an Ultima fan, you might want to check out Mortal Online by Starvault (based in Malmo Sweden). It's the closest 3d mmo in the same vein I have found so far (Full loot ffa pvp, guild wars, taxes, generally hardcore) I was very active in the alpha and first years of the game as part of one of the main guilds, which were quite rough due to bugs (and still so), but they have fixed many of their pipeline issues and have fixed tons of bugs and just released an expansion last week. There were no maps so I helped make the main map that everyone uses today for it: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Twm2yJ-ndrg/TymPaFeZbEI/AAAAAAAABh4/Y4q7V017Iqo/s1600/Myrland+Map+-+Regions.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Twm2yJ-ndrg/TymPaFeZbEI/AAAAAAAABh...
  - eropple 11y ago
    Ultima and Ultima Online are very different games, and the fans of each are different. I don't think an MMO can do what Ultima did, by its very nature.
    - 11y ago

VLM 11y ago

"Because of the ongoing pursuit of Hollywood" A better analogy is obviously the best hollywood movie is the one with the most and fanciest special effects. Unfortunately 95% of the population doesn't want to watch a special effects demo reel, not even for free. And the analogy is the same problem with graphics, true the demoscene subculture is fascinated with graphics and its very technologically impressive, but 95% of the population responds with "meh". (edited to add, the truly unfortunate part is the 5% of the population who want special effects reels is financially successful enough to completely prevent all advancement of the art other than the local maxima of special effects, so the 95% of the population who can't stand it are stuck, and are unserved by the monopoly / ogliopoly. The situation with games isn't as bad and the "casuals" are making huge piles of cash for non-3d developers, and the goal of the AAA studios and their journalist hangers on is to create and insert enough blocks in the marketplace to eliminate casual from competition and keep "gaming" a stereotypical pure 3-d WW2 FPS sequel experience, and the problem is technology has pretty much topped out eliminating "better graphics" as a marketing weapon)

maccard 11y ago
I think you're dramatically overestimating the number of people who don't want to see demo reels in the cinema. In our tight technical circles, sure, I agree that most people don't. But our tech circles are such a small percentage of the audience of hollywood films. There are plenty of movies that aren't drowning in VFX released every year, yet the numbers don't lie. Avengers, Harry Potter, Avatar, Pirates of the carribean (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films for more)style films blow others out of the water. It's extrememly clear that people want films that are knee deep in VFX. If they didn't, then they'd stop spending 1.5 billion dollars on going to see the avengers, and see something else instead.
- VLM 11y ago
  I see truth in what you write. However, given that I can't see a movie for less than $15, that $1.5B represents only 100M views, and if you theorize that only 1B of the world population is wealthy enough to occasionally blow $15 to watch a movie, that implies 90% of the population is uninterested in VFX demo reels, which isn't all that dramatically different from my engineering estimate, especially given we could cherry pick examples to "prove" either your claim or mine, or play games with $ per unit time to reach either conclusion. I completely agree that $1.5B is important business, yet it makes my point that appealing to a narrowcasted local maxima of VFX fans also simultaneously means perhaps 90% of the population will be uninterested. And the point I'm trying to make isn't that 10% of the population is irrelevant, but if someone could crack the code and disrupt the industry and instead of narrowcasting, make something of broad appeal that perhaps half the population would be interested in, that mysterious idea would be worth about $7.5B which is actually pretty good revenue for a startup. But it'll never happen if the entrenched oligopoly isn't disrupted. I honestly have no idea how to exploit the market, but "obviously" there's a huge under served market with possibly staggering revenue, for some future startup that can figure out how to make movies that appeal to more than about 10% of the population. Piles of money are sitting out there, waiting to be harvested... There are similar analogies and financials with pop music. Entrenched industries have pretty much figured out how to sell simple mass produced formulaic music to each generation's (each years?) teens. There seems no biological or psychological reason a better industry competitor couldn't sell 3 to 7 times as much if they could appeal to more than young kids. Eventually someone will crack that startup opportunity and make mid nine figures. Finally ditto, kind of, with sports. "Everybody is a baseball fan" but only about 5% of the population actually watches the world series. If you take existing advertising revenue and multiply it by a fraction representing some magic startup pixie dust that gets maybe 50% of the population to watch, that's some serious ad revenue money; in fact its "football" type money, LOL, which is a whole nother topic.

macjohnmcc 11y ago

I don't think that young people today agree that this is a bad thing. I can see where someone who grew up with the older systems and older games would be nostalgic towards them (I'm turning 50 this year) and find the new to be unnecessary and gratuitous.

cwyers 11y ago

For the author's comparison of The Sims to the Facebook Flash game of The Sims -- one thing he doesn't discuss at all is that by using 3D models The Sims allows you a crazy amount of customization in creating Sims and their surroundings, compared to what's possible with the hand-drawn vector graphics of The Sims Social. Which kind of undermines his point. The Sims Social isn't a game that made different choices in graphics, it's a different kind of game with the Sims brand thrown on it. It's not just about MOAR GRAPHICS, what you're capable of doing with graphics informs what kind of gameplay experiences you can create for players.

deleted 11y ago

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lmm 11y ago

> What are the games that people play for years that only have pretty environments or another form of impressive tech to offer? I can't think of any. Well, Final Fantasy VII frequently tops "greatest game of all time" polls, and its visuals were driven by 3D tech (and arguably less artisticly interesting than those of VI).

xamuel 11y ago
I think FFVII is much deeper than its graphics and storyline. It was (not quite, but almost) an early Cookie Clicker. Laughably easy, and yet you had fun anyway. It was fun to max out your materia and level your characters up even though you had long, long passed the point where the final boss was a pushover. The graphics/story/popularity/etc. allowed you to enjoy the "Cookie Clicker" without admitting it to anyone else or even to yourself. That's just my subjective opinion of course.
- tormeh 11y ago
  The thing that defines Cookie Clicker is that it only has improve-stat-get-dopamine mechanics. All games with character progression are partly Cookie Clicker. The interesting thing about CC is its distillation of a particular mechanic.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - xamuel 11y ago
    It's not just improve-stat-get-dopamine. It's a very fine-tuned, well-balanced implementation of improve-stat-get-dopamine. That same fine-tuned well-balance was seen in FFVII, in my opinion. It's subtle (1), but just think what a fine line it is between "grinding hits a plateau" (2) on one side and "grinding makes you grow out of control" (3) on the other. (1) "Good design is obvious; great design is transparent" (2) E.g., FFIV (3) E.g., FFVI

rwallace 11y ago

If what you care about is games for their own sake, that's as valid a perspective as any other. My perspective is very different, because I care about games not for their own sake, but for their spin-off benefits: chips whose R&D was paid for by gamers, are being used to design aircraft, discover life-saving medicines, unravel the secrets of the universe. From that perspective, abandoning the tech arms race in games abandons that which was valuable about the enterprise in the first place.

Shivetya 11y ago

That story about trying to encourage his wife to try the PC version reminds me very much of most experiences I have with or watching console gamers moving to the PC. The complexity at times isn't worth it because it loses sight of what the purpose was, to have fun

dikaiosune 11y ago

I agree with the author that quality gameplay should be more of a focus for teams, and that their choices in graphics technologies should enable their gameplay choices, not the other way around. But, gameplay isn't the only way to enjoy a game. Sometimes I enjoy something just because it's the visual and auditory equivalent of a summer blockbuster where I'm in control. And perversely, I'm willing to pay a lot of money to have the hardware necessary for that. Sometimes the gameplay is objectively worse than other, less graphically accomplished games, but that doesn't make it less aesthetically pleasing. I think it's perfectly valid to enjoy a game for aesthetic vs. gameplay reasons, although it can sometimes be sad when gamers have no concept of the latter.

corysama 11y ago
Even though people are giving "The Order: 1886" a hard time for it's linear, QTE-heavy gameplay, I really want to play through it simply because it is so technically impressive. (It might help that I make 3D engines for a living.) http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-rendering-in-order-1886-rocks.html http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-rendering-in-order-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHTJiRQB9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHTJiRQB9o http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/rad/s2013_pbs_rad_slides.pdf http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course...
- meesterdude 11y ago
  just watched the youtube video (second link) and WOW. That's... crazy amazing cool.
- eridius 11y ago
  The Order: 1886 is what I thought of while reading this. I read all of the negative reviews and whatnot, and I still enjoyed the hell out of that game. Every couple of minutes I kept stopping and just looking around and marveling at how ridiculously good the game looked, and all the cool effects I was seeing, including such mundane things as looking at my reflection in the many-paned window of a shop (where each pane had its own individual distortion).
- 11y ago

Wintamute 11y ago

I think sometimes people conflate mid-career personal attitude changes with some sort of profound pan-industry insight. There's obviously money to be made from high tech AAA games pushing hardware limits, and money to be made from prioritising gameplay over polish and visuals.

FrankenPC 11y ago
Indie vs AAA. I thoroughly enjoy both.

anonmeow 11y ago

I hope the GPU arms race continues for as long as possible. Without it there would be no GPGPU and modern deep learning wouldn't be feasible.

davesque 11y ago
It's true. Arms races often drive innovation in other areas, the Russian/American space race being the poster boy.
DannoHung 11y ago
Won't that arms race continue anyway? I guess it wouldn't be nearly as affordable if people weren't laying down big chunks of change for eyecandy though. I dunno, you think the Xeon Phi stuff is ever going to show up in consumer grade?
- corysama 11y ago
  The development costs of the hardware used in today's supercomputing has been heavily subsidized by PC gamers for well over a decade. If PC gamers all switched to low-tech games for the next decade, the supercomputing industry would find that maintaining the momentum of their tech advances to be much more expensive than they are accustomed to.
vardump 11y ago
Last I checked, the arms race seemed to be almost over. GPUs are only 20% faster per year, and the progress seems to be getting even slower. Gone are the days when performance doubled every year. I think we're soon at the point upgrades make only sense every 5-10 years. Same is happening to consoles, 7 years from PS3 to PS4 or Xbox 360 to Xbox One. I guess PS5 and next Xbox are at least 10 years away. Maybe they'll even be the last consoles.
- kristofferR 11y ago
  4K and VR is going to drive the performance demands up quite a lot very soon.

Arzh 11y ago

AAA games are like F1 cars, they are the extreme that hopefully technology will trickle down from so that 'consumer' indie games can benefit from. Without the huge AAA games pushing the limits of tech we wouldn't have as many game engines for indies to use. I hope it continues because I love TIS-100 and The Witcher 3.

fr0styMatt2 11y ago
OMFG the premise of TIS-100 sounds amazing! Thanks for making me aware of it. http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/ http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

Garlef 11y ago

This debate goes back to the late 1990's.

ajuc 11y ago

I'm still excited for more power for games. For a game that uses CPU correctly see Dwarf Fortress.

newobj 11y ago
You mean that game that only runs on one core?
- ajuc 11y ago
  I mean the game that uses CPU for simulation of world, not for pushing ever more trangles to the GPU. Didn't knew it's single core only, that's a shame.
Narishma 11y ago
You mean incorrectly? Isn't it still single-core?

alkonaut 11y ago

This arms race is probably because what I want isn't a new game I just want the same game as the last game but looking twice as good.

malkia 11y ago

Heh, I've got the opposite - a very fast machine for it's day - 386DX 40Mhz but with Hercules (mono graphics chip). What I did was a resident application that has internal 320x200x256 colors buffer, and I would hack each game (looking for 0xA0000 or debugging a bit to use my buffer rather than using the graphics card directly). Then every few milliseconds I would transfer the buffer as monochrome - there was no palette transformation, just use the highest bit or something like this. It worked fine for Star Control 2, Trolls, and few other games - yes it was very weird, slow, etc. - but I got my excitement just for doing it. And some games were not playable - I was taking 10% of the available memory back then, and others were just too damn hard to crack (taking over interrupts, etc.)

rconti 11y ago

"In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion.[1][2][3][4] A title considered to be AAA is therefore expected to be a high quality game and to be among the year's bestsellers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)

meesterdude 11y ago
I KINDA knew what AAA meant, but not really. Now I do! Thanks for posting this.
- bitwize 11y ago
  I still don't know what it means because the term is massively overloaded. Does it mean: * a game with a huge development and production budget * a good game * a challenging game * a game intended to be played competitively online * a game that features adult themes like sex and violence My guess is that it actually means the first, but game industry marketroids speak as if all these criteria were coterminous with one another.
  - Narishma 11y ago
    It means only the first. I've never seen it used to mean the other ones.
    - bitwize 11y ago
      The term AAA implies a sort of rating of quality, which is why it seems duplicitous to me. It's a bit like the term "blockbuster" in film. Originally it meant a movie so good, lines to see it would go around the block. These days what it actually means is a huge-budget film filled with CG and spectacle, and studios labor under the belief that throwing that much money at a production will lead to blockbuster-scale ticket sales. Then they wonder why their "blockbusters" flop catastrophically at the actual box office.

ojbyrne 11y ago

I have a stupid question that I felt the author should have addressed. What's AAA?

bitwize 11y ago
Marketroid term for game that has a huge dev team and production/marketing budget. Marketroids which bandy this term about are often under the delusion that this makes for a good game.

meesterdude 11y ago

I recently started playing skyrim - i know, I'm late to the party - and I'm really taken by some of the graphics and gameplay. there aren't too many games i can really stick with (just cause,bioshock,and portal are it) so it's nice to find a game I can ACTUALLY play. I tried deus ex; good game, but got too complicated, and then i tried picking it up months later and simply couldn't remember anything. But, I've also been thinking of making a game. I know next to nothing about games, but bunches about the web. So then it became a question of what could I build with the tools I know? which then lead me to realize: you don't need good graphics for a great game. Some games you want the graphics because it's part of the experience; but others you don't need any. And still others just need some. A game just needs to be fun in the end, and there are a surprising number of ways to get there.

jerf 11y ago
There's a lot of opportunity to use your web skills to create games. Consider things like Kingdom of Loathing or something... definitely not "great graphics" but has a lot of fans. Monetization opportunities seem more challenging, if you're inclined in that direction. If not, then, well, don't worry about it.
- crgt 11y ago
  "A Dark Room" on iOS is another one worth looking at for inspiration - compelling game, and not at all about the graphics..
  - omg_ketchup 11y ago
    It's actually available in the browser, not just iOS. It's one of the best games I've ever played, and I fully consider myself a games connoisseur. http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
- meesterdude 11y ago
  not even talking that. I'm talking, click a square and it changes colors, or a number counter increases; something I could conceivably build. But, nothing actually cool has come up yet, just gimmicks. But, I wouldn't be opposed to tinkering with something in unity either; but thats obviously a WHOLE other ball of wax. and for anyone else who's curious: https://www.kingdomofloathing.com https://www.kingdomofloathing.com

tormeh 11y ago

>Some AAA studios subscribe to the idea that games can deliver the maximum emotional impact in a similar way Hollywood does: By using actors in heavily scripted sequences to tell the story of someone else that the player/viewer relates to. Instead of playing to their medium's strengths, these studios go through great pains to emulate what Hollywood gets naturally: emotive characters, good looking lighting, spectacular locations. It's a very literal attempt to imitate another established, successful medium, and because it gets some results, it's popular, despite the fact it's very expensive and brushes aside many of the benefits that games get naturally. Games can be much more immersive than movies can. You can much more easily pretend to be the protagonist. By going down this route games lose some of the advantages of, say, arcade games, but they gain others and are generally not at a disadvantage compared to movies.

saint_fiasco 11y ago
>heavily scripted sequences to tell the story of someone else that the player/viewer relates to. I think one of the strengths of videogames is that you can make your own story. Heavily scripted voiced-acted videogames go against that because they force you to go a certain path.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Most games guide you neatly through a bunch of hoops; you create your own experience, but not your own story or anything like it, in most cases. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the experience of playing a game like Journey is very rewarding, even emotionally engaging. But you discover the story rather than create it nonetheless, it's just not as linear as heavily scripted games. Games are an interesting storytelling medium, but stories are much more than variations on the order in which plot points are hit. The biggest issue is motivation - why characters (maybe including you) act as they do. In most free-range videogames the characters are very transactional; they want something and enlist the player to get/do something. In turn, players collect items or set game flags that allow them to defeat antagonists in contests of skill or force. But it's not really practical to interact with characters by appealing to love, greed, loyalty, arrogance etc. in order to motivate them to behave differently, so videogame stories can't do dramatic comedy or tragedy at present, although you can of course have slapstick or situational comedy, and you can have sadness or gloom. But the general lack of permadeath and the reflexive nature of AI are still a limitation.

snarfy 11y ago

Atari. Atari pretty much spawned the video game industry, and the average game wasn't more than squares on a screen. Squares. Your game character is one giant pixel. It was all about the gameplay, not the graphics, and sold millions.

Arzh 11y ago
True, but at the time those squares were the cutting edge, and cost about $450 today for A game. http://game-consoles.specout.com/q/9/2566/How-much-does-a-Atari-Pong-game-console-cost http://game-consoles.specout.com/q/9/2566/How-much-does-a-At... http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=98&year=1975 http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=98...
elihu 11y ago
At the time, those squares were an impressive technical achievement. Many cartridges were sold because the graphics and sound capabilities produced a new experience for many people. (I was, like, five years old at the time, so pretty much everything was a new experience for me.)
fsk 11y ago
For Atari, most of the games were written by one person, which leads to lots of potential creativity. Also, there weren't as many established games to copy. For an AAA game, it's a big budget. To minimize risks, you have to make a game that's similar to one that already was a bestseller. For awhile, when games were distributed in stores, the only games WERE the AAA games. Now, with Internet distribution and better tools, it's possible for one person to make a game again. If you work on an AAA game, you're probably working on some tiny piece of the game, and it's going to be boring like any CRUD software webdev job. However, game developers tend to work longer hours for a lower rate per hour, because games are "cool". If you work on an indie game, you have more opportunity for creativity. But, if the game doesn't sell, you risk having no income. If you're looking for games like the old Atari games, it's better to look at small indie games, rather than big budget AAA games.

fapjacks 11y ago

Heh... I'll take this opportunity to post about my beloved MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth) [0], a MUD that's been running for 25 years, and still the best place in the universe for intense PvP. [0] http://www.mume.org http://www.mume.org

badloginagain 11y ago

The author points to Sims Social and League of Legends as points of reducing the technical prowess of games. While it's true that these games are less technically complex than a hyper-realistic 3D game, they are extremely complicated in client-server architecture. The requirements for technical complexity have changed focuses, not disappeared.

fr0styMatt2 11y ago

Lots of interesting stuff in this article. As a tech guy who went to a game programming school, my personal theory about why technical people get hung up on engine development (the old "I'm making my own game and have spent the last year writing my own engine") is quite simple - it's just an easier problem space. Writing an engine has a defined, knowable set of steps that you can answer with if asked "What do I need to do to write a game engine?". On the other hand, how do you answer the question "How do I make a good game?". So people get stuck writing engines because it's interesting and because they can feel like they're making progress on something.

fr0styMatt2 11y ago

A question for those in the know - as a programmer, I've seen a lot of democratization of the game engine side of game programming over the last few years. The price of entry to AAA-level technology has fallen so massively that now anyone can download UDK and start having a go. I'm interested to hear of what's happened, democratization-wise, on the art and music side of game development. This is the bit that I find people don't immediately grasp. While engine technology has gotten cheaper, making assets for those engines is only getting more expensive. So I'm interested from those who are in the art field, have asset tools become more 'democratic'? Or to put another way, are art tools moving to make art asset creation less expensive in the same way that engine tools have made the programming side less expensive? One area I can think of off the top of my head is texturing and shaders - texture-painting tools and physically-based shaders that allow less-skilled artists (and programmer-artists) to still get aesthetically good looking results, without having to become experts in UV mapping or writing shaders. Is there something similar for model and animation creation, etc? Is this even possible to do without making games that look 'cookie-cutter'? (My gut feeling on that last question is that it should be).

itsybitsycoder 11y ago
I live on the outskirts of 3d art world and there are definitely a lot of tools to make asset creation easier. You can buy texturing/shading packs, which are usually pretty customizable. There are tools like MakeHuman for humanoids and Marvelous Designer for easy clothing/cloth sim. Maya comes with built-in hair/cloth sim now which is supposed to be quite easy to use, as well as autorigging tools. You will probably want to know a little about 3D to make something decent, but then again you'll want to know a little about programming to make something decent in UDK. I'm really curious about the music. I have a really hard time making music without having a composing background. I've tried a few music generators but the results have been pretty bad so far.
- fr0styMatt2 11y ago
  I'd heard of MakeHuman but not Marvelous Designer (it looks great). Think I'm going to submit an Ask HN, would love a list of these kinds of tools....

karmakaze 11y ago

One example where tech enables a more engaging (fun) gameplay is Gran Turismo. It simulates real cars on real tracks and the accuracy of driving physics of actual cars is a prime source of pleasure. Driving a different car, or different settings actually makes a difference in the way it feels. I'm still waiting for GT7 to have a reason to get a PS4.

anabis 11y ago

Good games that push the envelope is entertainment and art, It may also be genre creating. Katamari-damacy for PS, Dynasty Warriors for PS2, and Quake comes to mind.

z3t4 11y ago

My thought is that it's more difficult then ever to make high tech games. There's very little games coming out now that push the limits of what's possible. It's almost like complaining there is too much water on the moon.

restalis 11y ago

"The perfect balance of number of units with the amount of things a player's human brain could possibly track at any given moment was completely lost on me." The human brain can actually abstract things away and starts thinking in groups rather than in individual units, regardless if the game mechanics allows the player to treat them as such or not. That units-limit was something I did not particularly enjoyed in those games (and appreciated instead games like Command & Conquer in this regard). I agree that there is more than technical features that make or break a game, but the units-limit in RT tactics games is a flaw and it's not a technical one. For those who argue that units-limit encouraged unit-quality over unit-quantity thinking, I concede. It's a valid point that perhaps contributed to the *Craft success series. That feature could however have been left as an over-ridable game parameter (set on by default, if you will).

restalis 11y ago

"For years the AAA argument for pushing the tech envelope has been that the bigger, better looking, better sounding, more detailed our worlds are, the more believable they are. But is this true?" It is for me! I've enjoyed Far Cry more than the barren speed-oriented environments of Quake III or Unreal (I know, I know, this one never aimed to be "real", but it's a good example in anti-thesis). Now seriously, when I read this: "In politics-heavy environments, there is nothing more effective in pursuing a personal agenda than using "facts" and numbers - even when those facts and numbers are hand-picked to support a certain story." I can not help but think of the cherry-picking that the current article I'm reading does.