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

http://andreaspapathanasis.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-tech-arms-race-in-aaa-and-why-im.html

by jsnell • 11 years ago

189 191 11 years ago

andreaspapathanasis.blogspot.com

forgottenacc56• 11 years ago

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

kelvin02• 11 years ago

I wonder why the downvotes, it's actually a quite thought provoking question.

hvs• 11 years ago

No it's not, it's an insult.

emirozer4• 11 years 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...

omegafail5• 11 years 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.

emirozer4• 11 years 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..

bitwize4• 11 years ago

There's a thing I call Amiga Game Disease. It's a thing on many platforms, especially now, but it was prevalent on the Amiga way back when. It's when a game is pretty much a tech demo with a thin game wrapped around it. Take something like Shadow of the Beast. Beautiful to look at, and really showcased the Amiga's power. Nothing looked or sounded quite like the Amiga version of Shadow of the Beast, and the various ports to lesser systems certainly couldn't keep up.

But it was pure, frustrating, junk from a gameplay perspective. The controls were clunky and shit was always popping out of nowhere and killing you. I kept dying at the first "boss", a skeleton thing on a throne that looked like it was made of some bigger creature's jaw. What I didn't know at the time was that there was a gryphon I had to defeat by punching the crystal orb it was bouncing; defeating the gryphon would temporarily grant me the power to shoot hadoukens, and the skeleton thing was only vulnerable to the hadoukens. (If you used up your hadoukens before defeating the skeleton thing, well, sucks to be you.)

And it's just full of stuff like this. The game doesn't tell you ANYTHING about how to play it or what its goals are. Plus it was a pioneer in unskippable cutscenes: moving from one place to another -- like going in a door or something -- entailed staring at a still image while adventure-game-style flavor text scrolled by and no key or button press could dismiss it. And once you die, that's it. You have to start all the way from the beginning. The game could be cleared in half an hour -- IF you knew where everything was. I guess it got replay value by surprising you with deadly enemies and obstacles you couldn't see coming and making you start over each time a new thing bit you in the ass.

But we all remember Shadow of the Beast -- indeed Amiga users look back fondly at it -- SIMPLY BECAUSE OF ITS GRAPHICS AND SOUND.

Sword of Sodan was the same thing: clunky and repetitive, but WOW LOOK AT THOSE HUGE SPRITES.

So yes, "good graphics = good game" is a thing, and it's because of the market, not because of the execs.

pmarin2• 11 years ago

Nowadays at least you can see videos on youtube about the game. In the old days with the magazines you only could see the screenshots (with a real camera in front the monitor/TV) and trust the author of the review.

logfromblammo2• 11 years ago

Whenever I start to think graphics are important to games, I think about the differences between the Activision graphical sequels to the text-based Infocom Zork games: Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

Of these, Zork: Nemesis is by far the worst game, even though it put a great deal of effort into its graphics. It was another victim of the Myst effect, but five years later, when everyone should have known better. The plot seemed shoehorned into the set, rather than the locations built to support the gameplay.

Return and Inquisitor felt like Zorks, but Nemesis felt more like a glorified fetch quest. I don't care if the graphics hold up or not after a few years, because the game itself was not particularly fun to play. The only factor preventing me from re-playing the other two is that I can still remember the solutions to their puzzles after 18-22 years, but all I remember from Nemesis is "bring me more red pages... er... I mean pure elements".

Therefore, if graphics matter, they cannot matter more than gameplay.

falcolas4• 11 years ago

You mean like Mass Effect, Thief, Tomb Raider, GTA, Witcher, and Dragon Age: Origins? Or perhaps StarCraft II, Diablo III, Everquest, WoW, or Final Fantasy VII?

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of fun games out there which do not have 3D graphics, but there are a lot of great games out there which do. The added realism that high quality 3D offers can add quite a bit to the immersion. It won't make a bad game, or break a great game, but it will certainly enhance even an OK game.

emirozer4• 11 years ago

Look these games at best can be __good__..

But lets talk about Legendary ones: might & magic series, planescape torment, baldur's gate, day of the tentacle, neverwinter nights, monkey island series, ultima online, warcraft 1, starcraft 1, diablo 1, heroes of mm & Ultima 1/2/3 etc...

The games you are listing can be highly rated, but they will not be remembered..

vezzy-fnord2• 11 years ago

The problem is that 3D often doesn't tend to age well, as polygon count, texture mapping, terrain sculpting, particle effects and other graphics fidelity has been consistently and rapidly improving over the past 20 years or so.

That doesn't mean that it makes the games less enjoyable, necessarily, but certain art styles are just better at conveying timelessness.

At some point we'll probably reach a certain peak level of graphics that can simply be considered "good enough" for most purposes henceforth (Have we already?), but in general investing too much in graphics for production purposes over tech demos and research, is often shaky.

omegafail5• 11 years ago

I disagree. Graphics add nothing to the immersion, unless perhaps on the most shallow level possible, where the entire premise of the game depends purely on the graphics.

In that case I wouldn't call it a game, but more of a tech demo or an interactive experience.

creshal• 11 years ago

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...

And I bet most of those won't be high-revenue games. Flashy, shallow AAA titles make stupid amounts of money.

Goronmon• 11 years ago

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...

Probably because they grew up in games before 3D and our first forays into gaming are generally more memorable than later ones. Plus...nostalgia.

fsloth• 11 years 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).

nosideeffects2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

cognitvesystem• 11 years ago

yes there are many technical aspect in game development

Game Engine Architecture(non affiliated)

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...

pgeorgi• 11 years ago

The author tells a story about being a graphic developer, so that's probably the reason for focussing on graphics.

Telling the AI people that their efforts are wasted on an arms race with little effect on the game play is a much weaker argument than 'hey, I need to revisit what _I_ am working on'.

mathattack2• 11 years ago

I use the Louis Armstrong example. On a mediocre trumpet he'll outplay me on the best. But the added tools will let him transcend into something magical that can't be reproduced.

ZenoArrow9• 11 years ago

Not if that 'best trumpet' takes more effort to play. Every new generation of games hardware brings extra demands on the artists making the games (through expectation of increased level of detail). Their creativity isn't being unleashed, it's being forced into a narrow specialism.

qu4z-2• 11 years ago

But will he outplay you using more notes, or the right notes?

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

Find myself reminded of the late micro era when people came up with all manner of crazy tricks to produce 3D effects and such on the C64 and like.

It may well be that PC gaming producers have gotten "lazy", as they are working with a ever improving platform. Thus they can target "future" hardware rather than attempt to optimize and push what they already have.

This because we see something similar to the micro era in gaming consoles. There games towards the end of a platform generation are more refined and elaborate than those released at platform launch, because the producers have gotten to know the ins and outs of the hardware.

ZenoArrow9• 11 years ago

Refined technically, but not necessarily refined from a gameplay point of view.

Look, I get it, it's cool to see hardware get pushed beyond what people previously thought was possible, it demonstrates ingenuity and can produce a captivating spectacle. But it doesn't make the games better (beyond the wishy washy 'immersion' stuff).

To be honest, this sort of 'pushing the hardware' focus makes me look forward to the end of Moore's Law. When games can no longer meaningfully compete just by looking prettier, when there are no new console generations, I hope there'll be a renaissance of games as a form of expression and interesting experiences.

restalis3• 11 years ago

"It may well be that PC gaming producers have gotten «lazy», as they are working with a ever improving platform. Thus they can target «future» hardware rather than attempt to optimize and push what they already have."

It's not that. There is a lot of optimization going in there and often the reference target is actually the common denominator of mainstream game consoles (lower than what each of them individually-taken have). Only on top of that there are optionally-added (and activated by-default, out of marketing reasons) layers that attempt to use more resources and which gives you your stated impression. And yes, it's true what you say about "the end of a platform generation" because the optimization efforts (including platform-specific ones) are stacked trough time.

shimshim• 11 years ago

it would have been delicious initially :p

MollyR• 11 years 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• 11 years 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".

ZenoArrow9• 11 years 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.

mercurial3• 11 years 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.

vlunkr• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Ultima IV was and continues to be the primary reason I do anything with games development.

arca_vorago• 11 years 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/AAAAAAAABh...

newobj2• 11 years ago

What I remember most about Ultima IV was the blind shop keep who determined if you paid her the correct amount by hearing the clink of coins. So you could buy anything for 2 coins so they clinked against each other. I thought I was so smart, but my 9 year old self didn't realize that the game was about building virtue...

jerf2• 11 years ago

What's particularly fun if you read some of the modern guides, now that the game is thoroughly understood, is how to game the system. Buy stacks of reagents from the blind women, crashing your honesty to the bottom, then boost it back up in the most expedient way possible later. Steal everything not nailed down in the early part of your run-through (if you play honestly the whole way through, resources are actually sorta hard to come by), then use the stolen money to give to the poor for Sacrifice, then later on fix your honesty (or whatever stealing counts against, I forget) in some expedient manner.

I find something quite hilarious about the idea of a MinMaxing Avatar of Virtue. Minmaxing often breaks the mechanics of a game, but it's rare to see it break the morality of a game the way it breaks Ultima IV.

Brilliant game.

bliti• 11 years ago

Oh wow! Thank you for the large sized shit of nostalgia. What a wonderful game that is. Like you, I had to draw my own map. I never did finish it, because it was fun just wandering around.

VLM2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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 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.

VLM2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

cwyers3• 11 years 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.

lmm• 11 years 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).

xamuel2• 11 years 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.

tormeh2• 11 years 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.

rwallace• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

dikaiosune2• 11 years 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.

corysama2• 11 years 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-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHTJiRQB9o

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course...

meesterdude4• 11 years ago

just watched the youtube video (second link) and WOW. That's... crazy amazing cool.

eridius• 11 years 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).

Too3• 11 years ago

Wow, are those cut scenes rendered in real time? It looks as though when he's actually playing the graphic is slightly worse and that they use a lot of blur to cover it up, still very good but not nearly as good as the cut scenes.

dikaiosune2• 11 years ago

It looks very cool, I just give The Order a hard time because I need a console to play it ;), I often like linear gameplay.

Too3• 11 years ago

aesthetically pleasing != technically advanced

It's all about how you use your tools at hand, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp6DjATqEzg preferably enjoyed with surround speakers on high volume. Today the graphics looks like a joke and even for it's time this graphics was considered mediocre, the gameplay is actually quite boring and the artwork isn't the greatest either. But even today, and by just watching, the immersion is so intense and the tension is still there. I remember when we first played this as kids my heart rate was at max for hours afterwards, everybody at school just kept talking about how incredible this game was and that it was just like playing in the saving private ryan movie. Today you could surely improve the immersion in this scene tenfold but do you really need to? What makes this scene is the intense ambient sounds, the camera shaking effects and the overall feeling of pressure, nothing that requires any new graphics technology.

The article also brings this up with the discussion of artwork in sims 2d looking better than the 3d equivalent.

Wintamute• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Indie vs AAA. I thoroughly enjoy both.

anonmeow• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

It's true. Arms races often drive innovation in other areas, the Russian/American space race being the poster boy.

DannoHung• 11 years 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?

corysama2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

kristofferR2• 11 years ago

4K and VR is going to drive the performance demands up quite a lot very soon.

Tuna-Fish2• 11 years 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.

This is what happens when you try to make too much inferences of a trend in a short time within a step function.

The primary ingredient that fuels continued performance growth in semiconductors, including GPUs, is process shrinks. They are fundamentally what gives AMD and nVidia the additional transistors that they can use to increase performance. The foundry 20nm processes were a bust, meaning that GPUs effectively skipped a shrink. This means that the last 3 years, after 28nm became available, the only way they have had to increase performance was slight efficiency increases and growing the chips bigger.

GPUs will move to next gen foundry processes, the Samsung/GlobalFoundries 14nm and TSMC 16nm late this year or early next year. This will provide the most dramatic single change in the underlying manufacturing process of the history of making GPUs. Assuming no major architectural advances, expect twice the performance.

Arzh2• 11 years 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.

fr0styMatt24• 11 years ago

OMFG the premise of TIS-100 sounds amazing! Thanks for making me aware of it.

http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

Garlef• 11 years ago

This debate goes back to the late 1990's.

ajuc2• 11 years ago

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

newobj2• 11 years ago

You mean that game that only runs on one core?

ajuc2• 11 years 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.

Narishma2• 11 years ago

You mean incorrectly? Isn't it still single-core?

alkonaut• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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)

meesterdude4• 11 years ago

I KINDA knew what AAA meant, but not really. Now I do! Thanks for posting this.

bitwize4• 11 years 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.

ojbyrne• 11 years ago

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

bitwize4• 11 years 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.

meesterdude4• 11 years 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.

jerf2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

"A Dark Room" on iOS is another one worth looking at for inspiration - compelling game, and not at all about the graphics..

meesterdude4• 11 years 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

tormeh2• 11 years 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_fiasco2• 11 years 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.

anigbrowl2• 11 years 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.

scott_karana• 11 years ago

You don't need to be AAA to be interactive. Plenty of indie games have compelling characters and immersion in spite of (or because of?) their lower fidelity.

Hell, many AAA games stray away from interactivity in favour of awe-inspiring, non-interactive movie sequences, railshooter level designs, et cetera.

http://hitboxteam.com/designing-game-narrative

mattmanser• 11 years ago

It's not immersive the moment your character does or says something you don't want to do.

It's the antithesis of immersive. Seconds ago I could strut where I wanted, chop who I wanted and tea bag who I wanted.

And then suddenly I am forced to watch a cut scene with some super slow speaking voice over artist, because no-one gets to the fucking point in computer games.

Sometimes it works. More often, it does not.

That is the point he is trying to make.

I do like getting into the role of the good guy, there are greaat cut scenes, but it's ultimately a cheap gimmick with the game author stealing agency from the player. Every now and then something happens and you're all like, you what?

mreiland3• 11 years ago

That's the biggest difference between WRPG and JRPG.

JRPG's don't tend to try and put you into the shoes of any characters, and instead you just learn to care about the characters the way you would reading a book or watching a movie.

snarfy• 11 years 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.

Arzh2• 11 years 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-At... http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=98...

elihu• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

badloginagain• 11 years 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.

fr0styMatt24• 11 years 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.

fr0styMatt24• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

fr0styMatt24• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

restalis3• 11 years 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).

restalis3• 11 years 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.

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

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