Deano Calver
Newcomer
Some years ago, the big thing was the convergance of Hollywood and gaming. A glut of truely awful FMV games followed, possible marking the worse gaming period in the last two decades.
A similar malaise seems to have fallen over the industry again, the logic being because Hollywood have made 'big' movies, its obviously the way to make 'big' games.
But Hollywood and games are miles apart, contary to what every 'big' manager will tell you the differences are greater than the similarities.
Budget:
Games cost a fraction of movies, maybe $10 million against $100 million. And games have to produce more 'footage' for that money. A game has to last 20-40 hours vs 2 hours, so normalized cost per hour entertainment is $0.5 million against $50 million.
Scope:
Movies are cut and shipped to the user edited. Games allow the user to interact and effectively edit it themself. So a game cost more per hour than movie does, a movie can use whatever tricks it wants. Examples are the fake lighting/shadow rigs and sets constructed in the very limited view the director chooses. Games of course can limit views etc but to a much smaller amount. A movie can post process things by hand, for example a item can be added that isn't really in the scene, a game on the other hand has to have real item with physics, visual, AI etc.
Interaction:
Its hard, no its really hard. Its piss easy to ask Lara Croft the actress to do something, it takes months of very hard coding/art and design work to do the same thing in game. If anythings its getting harder, next gen we want physics, intelligent AI, realistic animation and feel 'smooth'. Nobody knows how to do many of the things we want in a game. A movie is fairly safe because you can always kludge it and the viewer won't notice, game kludges tend to be far more obvious...
The overall effect is that per hour of gameplay we get very small amounts of developer time. But because we focused on the Hollywood model, we aren't bothering to tackle problems. Instead of working at producing a good game, we are sucking up massive resources with 1000's of animations and textures.
And because these take a fair amount of time to produce, we require the code to be done far earlier than make sense. So we force code to be done at speed and without the time it really needs, so that the artists can produce there lovely art that will be needed due to all this code that makes the game. Except there isn't any code because the code was rushed to meet the art requirement... So you end up with a cracking looking game that fails to meet the same standard in gameplay.
Middleware is meant to be the answer, but its not. It solves the easy things (you get a teapot renderer[1], a exporter that doesn't export what your game needs and a basic ragdoll that doesn't look real) but not the hard things. But generally the marketing has convinced people its solved all your problems, so no need to schedule any time to do the hard things.
Ironically the TV market would seem to be a far better model for the games business, with its small budgets, few hits make lots of money, failures don't usually get a second season. But everybody wants to be in Hollyword and the 'big' time, rather than tackling the problems of producing good games to relatively small budgets.
O.k. rant over. Feel better for that. I'll have to buy Gradius 5 and Doom 3 to restore my faith in games. Something original would be nice though...
[1] teapot renderer is a basic renderer that has lots of checkmarks against buzzwords and displays a very pretty utah teapot but isn't actually upto the job of a production level renderer for a game.
A similar malaise seems to have fallen over the industry again, the logic being because Hollywood have made 'big' movies, its obviously the way to make 'big' games.
But Hollywood and games are miles apart, contary to what every 'big' manager will tell you the differences are greater than the similarities.
Budget:
Games cost a fraction of movies, maybe $10 million against $100 million. And games have to produce more 'footage' for that money. A game has to last 20-40 hours vs 2 hours, so normalized cost per hour entertainment is $0.5 million against $50 million.
Scope:
Movies are cut and shipped to the user edited. Games allow the user to interact and effectively edit it themself. So a game cost more per hour than movie does, a movie can use whatever tricks it wants. Examples are the fake lighting/shadow rigs and sets constructed in the very limited view the director chooses. Games of course can limit views etc but to a much smaller amount. A movie can post process things by hand, for example a item can be added that isn't really in the scene, a game on the other hand has to have real item with physics, visual, AI etc.
Interaction:
Its hard, no its really hard. Its piss easy to ask Lara Croft the actress to do something, it takes months of very hard coding/art and design work to do the same thing in game. If anythings its getting harder, next gen we want physics, intelligent AI, realistic animation and feel 'smooth'. Nobody knows how to do many of the things we want in a game. A movie is fairly safe because you can always kludge it and the viewer won't notice, game kludges tend to be far more obvious...
The overall effect is that per hour of gameplay we get very small amounts of developer time. But because we focused on the Hollywood model, we aren't bothering to tackle problems. Instead of working at producing a good game, we are sucking up massive resources with 1000's of animations and textures.
And because these take a fair amount of time to produce, we require the code to be done far earlier than make sense. So we force code to be done at speed and without the time it really needs, so that the artists can produce there lovely art that will be needed due to all this code that makes the game. Except there isn't any code because the code was rushed to meet the art requirement... So you end up with a cracking looking game that fails to meet the same standard in gameplay.
Middleware is meant to be the answer, but its not. It solves the easy things (you get a teapot renderer[1], a exporter that doesn't export what your game needs and a basic ragdoll that doesn't look real) but not the hard things. But generally the marketing has convinced people its solved all your problems, so no need to schedule any time to do the hard things.
Ironically the TV market would seem to be a far better model for the games business, with its small budgets, few hits make lots of money, failures don't usually get a second season. But everybody wants to be in Hollyword and the 'big' time, rather than tackling the problems of producing good games to relatively small budgets.
O.k. rant over. Feel better for that. I'll have to buy Gradius 5 and Doom 3 to restore my faith in games. Something original would be nice though...
[1] teapot renderer is a basic renderer that has lots of checkmarks against buzzwords and displays a very pretty utah teapot but isn't actually upto the job of a production level renderer for a game.
