Interesting Sweeney Interview - Comment on Crysis

[jAkUp]

Long 10 page interview with Sweeney, check out his comments on CryEngine:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...uture_tim_.php

Does it scare you when you see Crysis... or, I don't know. What's the biggest competitor in the game engine market? Is it id's stuff, or is it another company?

TS: Today, it's Crysis. Because Crysis is doing some things on high-end PCs that we're not doing ourselves. That's a tricky case though, because we could do vastly more than we're currently doing if we focused on supporting dual high-end video cards, which have about 10 times the graphics horsepower of a console today.

The thing is, that market is about 2% the size of the overall next-generation game market -- PS3, Xbox 360, and mainstream PC. So there's a real hard business decision: if you go the route that Crytek goes, you can beat us in certain areas in graphics, but you're really sacrificing the larger market.

Because you can't run that engine on the PS3 and that sort of thing.

TS: Yeah. And some of the things they're doing are just conceptually incompatible with that level of performance. Wherever you have an order of magnitude performance difference, you can't really scale.

We can scale down in performance by a factor of three by going to a low resolution, dropping some textures, and things like that. But to scale by a factor of 10 -- you can't design a game with 10 times the detail and then scale it back to something that looks decent on the consoles. You'd end up looking much worse than a console game that was just designed for the console specs. So they have real scalability difficulties there.

[SH64]

Makes sense. Its all about decision ... and i like Crytek's decision more than Epic's

Crytek needs to give us a new expansion that isn't just jungle battles.

[Noriega]

Originally Posted by SH64

Makes sense. Its all about decision ... and i like Crytek's decision more than Epic's

Me too but sounds like Crytek is going to walk Epic way ;/

[NarcissistZero]

There's no money in PC exclusives anymore... not with production costs what they are for AAA titles. There's a reason STALKER is being milked like crazy and Crytek is going to consoles... these companies need to make money.

That said, I disagree with his statement that you can't make something Crysis-level and then scale it back for console. You CAN do that, it's just time consuming, which is why few do it. There's no reason Fallout 3 couldn't have had even further detail levels and higher-res versions of the textures... the reason it did not was because that's a good deal of effort to go through for 2% of the audience... plus, if GTA4 and Crysis are anything to go by, providing super high-end settings like that just angers people who can't run the game on max.

[Noriega]

Originally Posted by NarcissistZero

There's no money in PC exclusives anymore... not with production costs what they are for AAA titles. There's a reason STALKER is being milked like crazy and Crytek is going to consoles... these companies need to make money.

hahaha you made me laugh. Crytek wrote about getting back Crysis production costs when they sold about 500 000 games. They also made some good money from engine. That is what one of Crytek's developer wrote on crymod forum. They sold more than 1 milion ages ago. You just belive this console hype propaganda and BS that on PC there is no money : (


Hahaha and yeah consoles have super cell power so you can make virtual earth... hey it's just thing of time.

[SH64]

Originally Posted by NarcissistZero

That said, I disagree with his statement that you can't make something Crysis-level and then scale it back for console. You CAN do that, it's just time consuming, which is why few do it.

Out of curiosity, do you know that by experience (i.e. you have programming background?).
Besides, we know that everything in this universe is possible to achieve but its time consuming duh!! do you think we can wait 8-10 years to play a decent game? (DNF anybody?) people are aiming to get the best in the shortest possible time rather than waiting for too long till the game gets outdated by the time of its release.

[Sazar]

Originally Posted by methimpikehoses

Crytek needs to give us a new expansion that isn't just jungle battles.

You prefer fighting Korean sharks with friggin laser beams?



I dunno man. I found both Crysis and Warhead to have a lot of replayability because of the many ways you can tackle the levels. Speed running through them was AWESOME

Having a relatively open way to play makes games like World At War seem patently archaic.

[NarcissistZero]

Originally Posted by SH64

Out of curiosity, do you know that by experience (i.e. you have programming background?).

It's common sense... Crysis itself can be run on a damn old system on low settings... the Xbox has a great processor and a decent video card... it could run Crysis on medium probably, or low/medium, at 720p or near there. The key is that in order to make it look its best on console, then also provide a well optimized PC version, you need to spend more time catering to each platform's strength. The reason GTA4 got so much crap on PC was because it was built for consoles and not modified much for PC, which resulted in poorer performance than neccessary... the reverse would be true for Crysis, without significant time spent carering the engine to console architecture (which is exactly what they have done for Cryengine 3).

hahaha you made me laugh. Crytek wrote about getting back Crysis production costs when they sold about 500 000 games. They also made some good money from engine. That is what one of Crytek's developer wrote on crymod forum. They sold more than 1 milion ages ago. You just belive this console hype propaganda and BS that on PC there is no money : (

I'm glad you found it funny... yes, Crysis made a profit and was PC only. That doesn't mean 5 million more sales is something they don't want.

[Noriega]

Originally Posted by NarcissistZero

It's common sense... Crysis itself can be run on a damn old system on low settings... the Xbox has a great processor and a decent video card... it could run Crysis on medium probably, or low/medium, at 720p or near there. The key is that in order to make it look its best on console, then also provide a well optimized PC version, you need to spend more time catering to each platform's strength. The reason GTA4 got so much crap on PC was because it was built for consoles and not modified much for PC, which resulted in poorer performance than neccessary... the reverse would be true for Crysis, without significant time spent carering the engine to console architecture (which is exactly what they have done for Cryengine 3).



I'm glad you found it funny... yes, Crysis made a profit and was PC only. That doesn't mean 5 million more sales is something they don't want.

Man this IS pointless. Making game for years and optimising it to be looking good with good performance mean costs. This just do not calculate.


Haha 5mln? Man 5mln on consoles sold ony FPS games with trade mark of Halo and Call of Duty, Crysis is new title you can't compare it to Halo and Call of Duty.

[nekrosoft13]

Originally Posted by NarcissistZero

That said, I disagree with his statement that you can't make something Crysis-level and then scale it back for console. You CAN do that, it's just time consuming, which is why few do it. There's no reason Fallout 3 couldn't have had even further detail levels and higher-res versions of the textures... the reason it did not was because that's a good deal of effort to go through for 2% of the audience... plus, if GTA4 and Crysis are anything to go by, providing super high-end settings like that just angers people who can't run the game on max.

that is what i don't agree on, simply start off with higher res textures from the start. higher res textures can help quite a lot.