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Procrastinato on 14 August 2009
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HappySqurriel said:
Squilliam said:
HappySqurriel said:
Squilliam said:
NJ5 said:
For all this talk of creativity, can anyone name ONE example of creativity on a PS3/360 game which wouldn't be possible on a lower-specced console?

Fallout 3

Halo 3

Rage

Bioshock

Grand Theft Auto IV

Fable 2

etc.

You mentioned creativity, not innovation.

Besides graphics and production values associated with producing big budget games at an unprecidented expense how are any of these games drastically different from games produced by these studios on previous generation hardware?

While you respond to this consider that games like Half-Life, Counter Strike, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Theif, Tribes, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena contained (almost) all of the gameplay mechanics that are available in modern FPS and were released over a decade ago on hardware that is less powerful than the Dreamcast.

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.

This is kinda backwards thinking, in my opinion.  HD artists spend their time making what they find interesting -- usually characters, and important game elements.  The garbage cans, trees, etc... tht's farmed off to art houses that have loads of that stuff in a catalog already, and just need to tweak it some to fit with the style of the game, and the specs of the customer (being the dev house).

I don't think you can claim that HD artists are "less creative" because they don't spend their time modelling trash cans and newspaper dispensers, that for the most part, weren't even worthy of being present in games in previous generations.