patsu said:
Yap, joker454 is just plain wrong when he claimed that GG has to do everything in-house. According to their tech slides, the KZ2 animation system is done on top of Edge Animation. Culling is done via early shared SPURS work. Parts in the AI looks reusable too although it is proprietary. Perhaps someone can port it to enhance Edge's path finding. Sony's cross platform PhyreEngine also has deferred rendering, and may be able to benefit from some of KZ2's work too.
The dream is that all of this tech is usable by everyone with little work. The reality is that it's not. Makes no difference what pr firms will say in public, there is still little reusable tech out there, and the stuff that is shareable represents a minuscule amount of code in the grand scheme of things, and still requires piles of additional work to make it even remotely functional for coders, artists and tool people. Both of the PS3 exclusive studios I'm talking with are using none of the tech people here love to mention, not even Edge. One place can't afford the time needed to make some of it work, the other simply can't make it work in their existing code/tool chain. Neither one is even considering a deferred renderer. If it's so easy to share all this glorious tech, then why are these two Sony funded studios not using any of it?
The clues are real simple, once someone comes up with something easy to use and share, you will instantly see it everywhere. If you don't see it everywhere, then it's because it was deemed either not worth the time/money, or it was simply not possible to use. Everyone wants to save money and we will all jump at the chance to reuse code of value. It's simply no where near as plug and play as it is claimed to be.
MazingerDUDE said:
Guerilla Games was credited in Uncharted, as far as I know, the shadow tech used in Uncharted was from GG, and that's long before KZ2 is even completed. Also it was mentioned several times that how GG was working closely with studios like Insomniac Games. At least, the Sony first parties seem to share their technologies.
There is no GG 'shadow tech', they use cascade shadow maps like everyone else. What GG did was a small tweak on their usage to eliminate shimmering, albeit with another side effect. This is what Uncharted swiped from them. Ideas are shared, but tech for the most part is all created in house and customized to each game. Insomniac does things somewhat differently than Naughty Dog and GG. Likewise, GG and Naughty Dog have different approaches to their differed renders. In the end, each company has their own engines that are incompatible with each other.
MazingerDUDE said:
According to their recent GDC document, KZ2 has had about 1 year preproduction period, and 18 months of full production, which adds up to 2.5 years of development as patsu mentioned above, which I don't think isn't much longer than a development time of the other games of similar caliber. GG has about 140 people, and additional 50 Sony people helped making KZ2, for a comparison, UBI Montreal had about 280 people working on Far Cry 2. (and how many did it sell in its first month at NPD?)
So that means they started KZ2 in late 2006? That would imply that they totally guesstimated for the E3 2005 demo, then started started work on the game ~1.5 years later. It's hard to believe they waited that long to start considering PS3 third parties started earlier than that, but if that's what they say then I guess we'll go with it.
You can't compare staff numbers with UBI Montreal. GG makes only one product, so it's safe to assume everyone there is working on KZ2. UBI makes lots of stuff, meaning they can get creative with their 'team size' numbers. There may very well have been 280 working on Far Cry 2 at some point, but many of those same people likely worked on other games at the same time. In other words, it was not 280 people dedicated 100% of the time to just Far Cry 2. EA does the same thing, they have massive teams but the same people will work on multiple projects over the course of a year, but they still get credited on all games resulting in team sizes that appear astronomically large.
tha_con said:
Also, it's ill-informed of you to think that KZ2 is "all it's own technology" considering it's well known (and documented) that many folks from MANY STUDIOS were brought in to help, etc, as well as folks from GG helping other studios. The fact that you would write it all off and say that none of the studios have any interaction, and they're all on "parallell lines" is a bit over the top.
They are parallel lines. The games are incompatible with each other. Some ideas are shared and that's about it. There is still an 'engine group' at each company working on their unique tech.
tha_con said:
Edit: Also, it's inaccurate for you to say it's "way cheaper" to buy DLC, publishing rights, etc, when the only evidence you have is those titles being successful. In this one situation, yes, but if Sony were the one buying these exclusives, and still seeing slow sales, would you be so quick to say that? Do we know for a fact that $50M spent on Lost and the Damned was "worth it"? That cutting a deal for Tomb Raider DLC was viable? Fallout 3? We have NO NUMBERS on this stuff, from price tag to sales. How can you say it's "way cheaper"?
Funding your own studios is the epitome of risk. You don't know when they will finish the product, if they will finish the product, how over budget they will be, or if it will even sell when they are finally done with it. You have to pay rent, health insurance, and a million other costs in the process. It's high risk.
Buying DLC exclusivity shifts all the risk away from the person buying it, that is the beauty of that strategy. Plus you have foresight to help better determine the value of said DLC. With a new studio/ip, you are working blind, with no clue if the final result will payoff. This is not the case with DLC. You buy exclusive DLC for games with successful history, like Fallout, to minimize the risk and maximize the reward.
Brad Grenz said:
Well, if those studios lose exclusive status with Sony, why won't they just make a deal with another publisher and go multiplatform? I doubt studios like Insomniac or Sucker Punch will have trouble finding new work based on their strong reputations.
Yeah Insomniac has nothing to worry about, but some of the others might. It depends on how much cash a studio has on hand. If Sony pulled support from a studio, then the studio will still have to maintain payroll while shopping their project around for a new publisher. If their game was only 25% complete when funding was cut, then shopping it around will be even harder. Plus, from what I'm seeing behind the scenes, Sony is willing to throw around more money than other publishers are. So...if a studio was burning through X dollars a month with Sony, that 'X' amount may likely not be acceptable to other publishers, which would necessitate staff cuts.
