NexGen and Innovation

[HappySqurriel]

r2007 said: Over the past few days i've been reading the news mainly from gdc and people from the industry saying that it's difficult to make more risks now in nex-gen, mainly for two reasons: the need to spend money on showing the power of HD, and the reluctance on spending that lot of money in new games no one knows if they will succeed. Can Little Big Adventure be a million seller, for example? Viva Piñata failed on that attempt, didn't? Will the publishers start risking more on the Wii in cost-contained productions? staticneuron said: I cannot really assume why people assume that it cost more to make a game in HD. Little Big planet probably did not break the bank and most likely flow did not either. When I made game content it was easier and took less time to create objects with higher res textures instead of hand painting low res textures to look decent on your objects. I think the PS3 might need to sell a little bit more to ensure some million sellers. Viva was a beautiful game but I did not like the "type" of game that it was. I think that had more to do with Viva's sales than anything else.

High Definition is not what the real issue is, after all you could run Quake 3 Arena in High Definition on a modern PC and that didn’t impact the development cost of the game at all … The real issues are that in order to make more realistic looking surfaces in games you’re required to use a lot of advanced shaders which usually require another texture (with data related to the shader) being applied to a model; as an example, to create normal maps on models it is not uncommon to produce a super high detailed version of the model and map the normals back onto the lower detailed model (essentially, doubling or tripling the amount of time to create one model). At the same time, the more detailed your models become the more detailed people expect the environment to be; this means that you now have to create all sorts of extra game assets in order to populate the environment. Ultimately, this is what people mean when they say that it is 3 to 4 times as expensive to make a HD game on the PS3 or XBox 360 as compared to a SD game on the Wii ...