The other side of development of graphics in games

AlveKatt · April 28, 2016

Hi. Graphics has come a long way. But there are game dev issues with graphics getting more and more complex that are rarely touched upon.

At least if you agree with the Reviews of Angry Joe, the latest gen titles that really has focused on graphics has been kinda of lukewarm. As a 3d-animation and modelling hobbyist I predicted this would happen many years ago. Every time the graphics hardware gets better the workload of the modellers, riggers and animators working on triple a titles get bigger, and with it the part of the budget that needs to go to that department. There were inevitably going to come a time when we passed the threshold and the gameplay and amount of content in triple a titles would start to suffer because of this. It seems to me we just went over that threshold. It's probably going to get better again, when they have created algorithms for auto-weighting and rigging 3d-scanned models and procedural generation gets smarter and more intuitive with architecture and objects, but I think that's going to be a while. Until then, I guess we might see a lot of reuse of assets between games. But still, as a person who loves non human creature design, motion capture just isn't viable for a creatures that doesn't exist.

I would love to see what the Linus team could dig up on this and have Linus present it in a show so I can see if the facts agree with me.

Edited April 30, 2016 by AlveKatt

AlveKatt · April 30, 2016

I edited the topic and post to make make it aimed at anyone interested, not just the show crew.

trag1c · May 4, 2016

I wouldn't blame graphics at all. Absolute ship dates from publisher's are the bigger problem . Evan Wells who is one of the presidents of Naughty Dog stated "If you ship a game that’s late, people will forget the delay. But if you ship a crappy game, that’s going to be there forever." Naughty Dog is as perfect as you can get for a game studio. Their releases have been nearly flawless. For NG they are self governed so if they need to delay their game for polish they're free to do so. Where as most AAA developers are forced to release at specific date.

I am not disputing that workloads are getting bigger but ultimately i think that poor releases and lack luster game play are at fault of publishers or poorly structured studios. And as you stated the graphics problem will be eased with more automation on the software side.