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Squilliam on 14 August 2009
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HappySqurriel said:
Squilliam said:

You're talking about gameplay, 90% of the work in creating games has nothing to do with gameplay. The 3d artists for a game like Halo 3 can be more creative than someone working on Halo 2 for example. I don't see where most people working on a game get to be innovative, creative yes and innovative, no. We're talking about artists and programmers leaving EA, not the design staff.

Oddly enough, I suspect that the average modeler or artist would say that HD game development is far less creative than game development on previous generation consoles ...

If you look at how games were developed for the N64/Playstation generation the typical artist in a game studio would be involved in the production of models and textures for a large portion of the 3D assets in game and would even be able to produce some of the most interesting elements of the game. In the previous generation artists had to specialize more and tended to become either modelers or texture artists, but they still were involved in the creation of a large portion of the 3D assets in game and had some work on some of the most interesting elements in game.

With the size of development teams and the ammount of content produced artists can work months in a row on a repetitive task working on unimportant details on assets that the average gamer will never notice; and (on top of this) the work has become so unchallenging that many studios (including Epic) are offshoring the development of most of the content for their games to China.

Well for the most part, the stuff produced in the 3d worlds in previous generations look pretty bland by comparison to some of the things in the current generation. Sure it takes 10 weeks to make a car in Forza 3 compared to a week in Forza 1, but the final result of the car does look pretty fantastic and that 3d modeler can be pretty proud of his work. The current generation HD consoles really can show off the quality of a lot of design work which was missed due to muddy textures, low resolution etc in the previous generation. They may also be frustrated in having to vet every single design off a tight performance budget and having their design work culled to fit into the games.

Design work does count for something, the average consumer if shown pictures of Killzone 2 and Fable 2 and Uncharted 1 actually tend to pick Fable 2 the majority of the time. So from a lay persons perspective the design work still counts for something. The creativity and artistic direction still count as well.



Tease.