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Game development emancipating from technology development

Submitted by Abalieno on August 1, 2006 - 18:21.

While I was finishing those comments about God of War I felt like there was a lot more to write about that particular aspect of console games Vs mmorpgs (and PC games in general).

For example I cannot swallow how there are continuous attempt at "ruling out" the technology development from game design. Like if game design and technology could be decoupled and treated as independent.

That's just terrible and it happening all over right now. Like in the recent news about SOE licensing the Unreal engine. I don't think it's a good move. At all. I'd imagine that at least Sony could have more than enough resources to develop its proprietary technology and make it at least good enough to be first class.

In all these years you would expect that SOE AT LEAST took the time to develop some great tools. And what happens instead? That not only their games deluded expecations, but that they were also unabled to develop a "capital" at least from the point of view of the technology and now are buying that tecnology from someone else.

I don't like this trend who wants the technology trivialized and pushed out of the actual development. You can acquire middleware instead of developing it in-house, but it's also true that it will represent a HUGE limit about what you can do. I believe that game design cannot be detached from that level. I'm quite sure that in God of War the majority of the development and design focus was about getting the technology right. And then fine-tuning it. That's how you make a great game that will be remembered for years. I believe that's what kept David Jaffe occupied for the majority of the time: working with the team to explain what he wanted and then push the technology to achieve those goals.

I mean, one things is saying "we have this technology, what we can do with it?", another is saying "okay, we start from here, what technology we need to develop to achieve these results?" In general the games falling in the first group tend to not leave a strong sign.

Imho good programmers are more important than designers or even artists or animators. Like an obligatory premise for those other roles to exist. And in fact those games who tend to slide into oblivion are those where the programmers are moved away and there's only a "content team" left who can just add more of the same. Like if we can forget that what a content team can do is confined by the tools they have. And the quality, variety and scope of what they can do is always directly tied with the tools they have available.

Technology and execution are the most important aspects in mmorpg development as they are for every other game. At least when you aim for a wide market and not a niche that can digest whatever you propose to them because they have no alternative. Take all those NWN modules. They are all exactly the same and feel the same. And the best ones are those who mess with the scripting at a deep level to make the game behave in ways that weren't planned. As if the quality depends directly on how much you are able to break the technology available.

And if all the work is about breaking the technology, then maybe it's more convenient to develop yourself that technology so that you can make what you really want. Makes sense?

Take that interview with Mark Jacobs (which, btw, I found rather plain and boring. There's nothing interesting in what he says if you aren't interested just because he is who he is. Like when he says that, one day, there will be a game more successful than WoW. No! Really?!):

That’s what’s so brilliant about it. You can play WoW on a lower spec machine than EverQuest 2, and than Warhammer. It was the way they designed it. If you look at the amount of polys that go into their figures, it’s less than what everybody has. And yet it feels better than EverQuest 2, and it feels better than Camelot. Now I don’t think it feels better than Warhammer, but it’s better than the games that went before it. And it wasn’t driven by the hardware, that’s what’s so amazing.

I definitely DO NOT agree with that. In the same way I didn't agree with Ubiq analysis about WoW's UI. WoW has without a doubt THE VERY BEST technology and tools among ALL mmorpg game companies out there. Saying that it just moves less polys and has a simplified UI is a HUGE understatement. How can Mark Jacobs get away with that one?

I'd be really curious to load the same amount of polys and particle effects used on WoW onto DAoC and see how it would perform, because I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't move at all. The same about the UI which not only is extremely powerful under the simplistic appearance, but it has also a great performance, not lagging the game at all. Compare it with EQ2's UI which not only has a fraction of the flexibility of WoW's UI (and all the enhancements and new features supported from release till now were possible because how how flexible was the technology below), but it also heavily lags the client.

Give also a look at how the terrain in the various zones is laid down and is absolutely detailed and smooth. That's not a world builder designer who adjusted all the vertices one by one. That's technology and I bet they have the very best editors for every aspects of the development: animations, world building, quests, scripting and so on. I bet that you could build a small zone with that kind of detail and polish in just a few minutes. You would think that Blizzard has the very best developers in the industry. I think instead that they have superior tools available who made all that possible. Take some devs from Mythic or SOE and show them with what Blizzard devs are working. I think they would be AMAZED. That's not "equal footing" at all.

I say that ruling out low-level programming and technology development is a big risk. Games start from there. That's a part that comes before everything else and I strongly believe that game designers should always work in close contact with the programmers. If I cannot go talk with a programmer or an aritist to explain what I want to achieve, then game design simply cannot exist.

Thinking that we can abstract mmorpgs and game development as if we only need to work on the content and presentation is a foolish idea. Mmorpgs are complex products, that's why those who see the light of the day and are valid can be counted on one hand. But this doesn't mean that you can flatly ignore some key areas.

It just means that the price of admission in higher and will ALWAYS remain that high. Flexible middleware is just an illusion and an occasion to just see more crap products and amateurish teams who believe that they can build something worthwhile without the competence to do it.

I think it's just like the illusory bubble of the new economy. "You can do that too!" No. You cannot. Go back in line.

In the future I see so many more spectacular failures than spectacular successes.

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Re: Game development emancipating from technology development

Dave Rickey (not verified) on August 1, 2006 - 21:07.

Because Counterstrike, Deus Ex, and all the other best-selling games based on liscensed engines don't make any impression?

Game design isn't about technology. Chasing the technology curve is what put us in the hole we're in. Programmers holding a veto over game design through passive resistance isn't a good thing for the games, either. In the ideal game design scenario, the programmers are no more in the loop about the game design than the artists. They're told what is being done, and the designers have enough knowledge of the field to understand explanations of why it can't be and come up with aternatives.

WoW's technology isn't cutting-edge. There is exactly *one* shader it uses that took advantage of the most recent card's capabilities when it was new, and it wasn't absolutely neccessary (which is good, because it has to be emulated in software on all earlier cards). WoW looks as good as it does because they spent an *outrageous* amount of money on artist time. In terms of poly counts and cutting-edge rendering techniques, it just doesn't have them.

The technology that defines the capabilities of an MMO in ways that are meaningful to the design is not the rendering engine. It's the back end, the server architecture and the net code (and the net-code is quickly becoming as much a solved problem as the graphics engine).

--Dave

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Re: Game development emancipating from technology development

Innsmouth on August 2, 2006 - 10:45.

Because Counterstrike, Deus Ex, and all the other best-selling games based on liscensed engines don't make any impression?

Sure, but again because of how much they differ from the engines they inherit. Deus Ex introduced RPG elements and some sort of open ended mission flow, Counterstrike was a realistic, team-based combat on top of Half-Life.

I'm not saying that you cannot make games without building yourself your engine. I'm saying that innovation comes from both fronts, and deciding that you can do without one of those sides is a big danger and limit for the future.

So it works for those two games because they are finited experiences and do not need to move from there. But a mmorpg is based on the evolution. If you don't have great programmers all you would like to do will be always limited by the implementation and lack of control over the engine and tools available.

Chasing the technology curve is what put us in the hole we're in.

Odd, because I think exactly the opposite. The technology is the only field where there has been a definite, undeniable progress that we should take advantage of.

The truth is that there is no hole. Great games continue to come out. MUCH better games than those we had years ago.

Not in the mmorpg space. But that's a problem of this genre and the general incompetence that has surrounded it.

Programmers holding a veto over game design through passive resistance isn't a good thing for the games, either.

In fact the point is about pushing the technology. The programmers are there for that reason. That's the same mistake that Lum did proposing his "design challenge". Budget and time constraints have to be analyzed AFTER the brainstorming, not as the premise for it. That's not even my own idea but every single book about marketing will say the same thing (and pitching a game idea to a producer is another form of marketing).

In the ideal game design scenario, the programmers are no more in the loop about the game design than the artists.

And instead I think everyone should participate, and only in a second moment it will be the designer to have the final word. Where the game is going should be obvious for all the teams who are working on the game. And that kind of vision shared.

WoW's technology isn't cutting-edge.

And I'll continue to disagree and say that's a HUGE, COLOSSAL understatement. On the surface it seems like WoW has an old engine, but the truth is that no other mmorpg that I can play today (and for at least three other years, if not more) has a better *engine* (excluding art assets and all the rest).

UI, animation system, memory management, dynamic load, terrain render, performance, number of characters and monsters on screen without killing the framerate, number of particle effects active and so on. To this add the tools thay use to develop the content. We cannot be sure of that, but I bet that it's with the tools they have available that they have the biggest advantage over competitors.

And while you could try to make better games in the future, Blizzard will continue to have an advantage after they capitalized the engine and tools they use. It's something that they can port from game to game and that will grant them a permanent advantage.

Slapping in a game a bunch of shader effects isn't about being "cutting-edge". Using them consciously is (WoW for example uses the shaders to be able to have so many characters on screen without lagging).

Remember that WoW doesn't have any CRAPPY LOD like SWG or EQ2. And the animations are always absolutely fluid and varied even at the maximum range. Want to discuss the clip plane? Use the same clip plane on DAoC and I would be surprised if it moved it at 1 FPS.

Want to discuss the lack of zoning and the dynamic load of the whole world, still without crippling the variety of the zones? Other games do that too. But they do it with a memory leak and fragmentation so huge that you have to reboot the game after a few minutes (and EQ2's performance also degrades over time).

"Cutting-edge" technology? Yeah, SOE had it. And now that's what they say. They have to redo it because it lacks flexibility and it's actively crippling all they are doing.

Shinier doesn't mean cutting-edge. The use of the technology is about serving a purpose. WoW's engine does that. And it does it wonderfully.

I think I'll have a lot of fun watching game companies going with that huge understatement and starting to use low polys characters and crap engines because they think it's what made WoW successful.

The technology that defines the capabilities of an MMO in ways that are meaningful to the design is not the rendering engine.

It's ALSO the rendering engine. UI, fluidity of the controls, responsiveness (and this is all still in the "design" field), animations, clip plane and so on. And the tools, zone/terrain editors, quest/NPC editors, scripting and so on.

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Re: Game development emancipating from technology development

smidgen (not verified) on August 2, 2006 - 21:53.

On the subject of whether WoW's technology is cutting edge or not, would it be fair to say that it's simply more efficient use of older technology, which is kind of (unfortunately) cutting edge in itself?

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Re: Game development emancipating from technology development

Sisca (not verified) on August 3, 2006 - 15:47.

Remember that WoW doesn't have any CRAPPY LOD like SWG or EQ2. And the animations are always absolutely fluid and varied even at the maximum range. Want to discuss the clip plane? Use the same clip plane on DAoC and I would be surprised if it moved it at 1 FPS.

Want to discuss the lack of zoning and the dynamic load of the whole world, still without crippling the variety of the zones? Other games do that too. But they do it with a memory leak and fragmentation so huge that you have to reboot the game after a few minutes (and EQ2's performance also degrades over time).

All of those are true and all are because they made a concious decision, early in development, to not try and push the technology envelope. The WoW engine isn't doing anything that the WarCraft III engine couldn't do.

Part of this was a desire to support the Mac - which has a much lower end video card by default and you can't count on Mac users to upgrade the way you can PC users - on the same servers that PC users were using. A much bigger part of this was that Blizzard knew their market. They knew that a large percentage of their fan base came from Asia and that the average system over there had much lower system specs than the average game system in the U.S.

Oh and a personal pet peeve - WoW does have zones, their entire world is just as zoned as any other MMO, they just dynamically load them. The first game I remember playing that did this was Half-Life (the original) but there may have been someone else that did it first. So once again no new technology there.

EQ2 doesn't, as far as I've seen, use dynamic loading of zones so I'm not sure where you're getting that this is causing memory leaks and performance degradation. I know I played for over 8 hours on Sunday and never saw a performance issue. I know that EQ2 had some serious memory leaks early on and I'm pretty sure there are still some floating around but then pretty much every DirectX game out there, at least those that use the latest features, suffers from memory leaks so is it SoE or is it Microsoft? So my question would be what games are you playing that have memory leaks, that can be traced to dynamic zone loading, that cause you to need a reboot after a short period?

I have to agree that having a solid engine is crucial to good game design but I think you're not understanding that a lot of the reason that companies license the Unreal, Doom or HL2 engines is because they're starting with a solid platform. What SoE wants from the Unreal engine isn't the game play mechanics of Unreal, what they're after is the rendering engine. They can then have their programmers concentrate on coding the gameplay instead of building the, much more complicated, rendering part of the engine. I think this is the point someone was making about Deus-Ex. They were able to spend their dev dollars concentrating on coding new and innovative gameplay instead of trying to build the engine to put pixels on the screen.

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Re: Game development emancipating from technology development

Tide (not verified) on August 2, 2006 - 17:01.

I've spent enough time this Summer modding in WoW to appreciate and be critical of a few things Blizzard did or failed to do. But the point remains they took the time to plan in a modding capability which I think has added to the game positively. Over at FoH they're actually complaining about that today. But all in all it may be a good thing for that game, particularly where they went with a lowest-cost-play type of approach.

I don't know if it's because I'm only waking up now, but just recently I've noticed how much my gameplay and reactions to it and a game overall are effected by a UI. Take 4 MMO's: CoX, WoW, EQ2, and SWG and compare them. You could argue there's a continuum of play-cost between each, where CoX has the simplest design and lowest cost to SWG which had the most complicated and largest cognitive load of a game to learn (pre-CU). Their UI's all reflect that. But Blizzard put in a sort of sliding scale by opening up their UI. I wonder how much more fun CoX might be with modding, and conversely how better SWG might have been if people couldn't do AFK-macroing from the in-game tools.

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