| Noobie said: As far as i believe every Sony first party game studio spend considerable time and effort on first developing a game engine and than a game. and most of the time only two or three games and then either the series is droppped or Sony release a new console. See the list of Engines - Infamous developed new engine (only 1 game on it so far) - GG developed special engine for KZ2 (developed only 1 game on it) - ND developed engine for Uncharted, (now developing second game on it) - MM also developed special engine for LBP ( only 1 game on it) - i think Insomniac also developed special engine for resistance (2 game on it) - Polyphony i think is developing a new engines for GT5 from scratch.. and many more the problem i see although few of these engines were necessary but others i feel could be avoided. the most i fear is that many of these engines will become useless when Sony will launch PS4. So i think Sony waste too much resources on developing the platform/engines which become obsolete or which have to be discarded every generation. PS2 engines can;t be updated to use PS3 Cell Chip.. similarly i believe PS4 will be a totally different architecture (seeing the last three playstations). so if sony can somehow get a way to make its first party game studios to make fewer and better game engines and spend more resources and time of these game studios to crank out games, than it will definitely help Sony a lot. or better yet Sony can develop an ISA for its platstation chip so that atleast these game engines just need updates or modification, and old engines are not discarded at the end of every console generation. What are your opinion.? ps. this is just my opinion based on some observation.. and being a naive abt game devleopment i may be technically totally wrong.. |
I prefer that, actually. I know its expensive, but as an end consumer I'm of the opinion, based on what I've observed, that games running on an engine completely tuned to the concept tend to be superior to more generic games based on middleware engine.
It's an old argument though, and goes right back to when the first 'engine' sourcing started to take place. I think there's an old but interesting interview with Warren Spector where he reviews this regarding putting Deus Ex on Unreal engine.
There are so many average FPS on U3 engine, for example, or games that built on the engine but end up buggy as a result - probably because at the end of the day the developer using a sourced engine is unlikely to really understand its guts as well as the engine's developers.
I know Ted Price from Insomniac has quoted on this a few times too (he's in the build your own engine camp). Epic are in the source it camp, but given they make a lot of money from sourcing the engine they develop themselves I'm not sure they can be seen as totally unbiased.
However, I would hope that the core engines you list will see more use/expansion which I'm sure they will - either via further entries in the series or sharing of assets. Insomniac for example have released 3 full games and an expansion using the same, evolving in-house engine.
Try to be reasonable... its easier than you think...
