Podcast about Next Generation games with Todd Howard

[Lumpy]

<a href=http://web.mac.com/willartdirectforfood/iWeb/Site/Gamasutra%20Podcast%20Producer's%20Page/Gamasutra%20Podcast%20Producer's%20Page.html>Link</a>
I haven't listened to it yet.

 

[Micmu]

40 minutes of this toad?
No way!

Someone, text please.

 

[Lumpy]

Not only him. There are about 6 people talking on that podcast.

 

[Micmu]

I don't give a fuck. Deleted the file after heard "oblivion best game ever made!!!11".

 

[Lumpy]

I've just remembered - I hate podcasts.

 

[Kraszu]

Summary.

 

[ixg]

i want to have a laugh but i don't want to stop listening to my music.

 

[Seven]

Summary.

Sure, my name is Todd Howard, I know what gamers want--shinny graphics--also we can't do everything well--actually, we can't do anything well--so we'll focus on a few areas and still manage to screw them up, did I mention pretty graphics?

 

[denizsi]

I was gonna make a thread about this podcast, but I didn't want to without listening to it first ( even though it's obvious that he wouldn't say anything sincere like "Oh yes, we sucked big time with Oblivion despite the sales, and this was a real eye opener for us. So we decided to hire original developers for FO and make them lead designer & producer ). Actually, I was hoping someone would transcribe it so I could waste less time on whatever shit Todd has voiced out this time.

 

[Twinfalls]

Okay, I listened to as much of this MP3 my stomach could handle.

I shit you not, this is what the dull fuckers had to say in the first few minutes, clearly setting the tone for the rest of it:

Todd - "You have to realise what the consumers want. They see really great blades of grass in other games (he really says this) and then they expect that from your game, they get savvy. So you have to pick your battles, and do only some things, and do those things really well"

Can you believe this? We're in the age of middleware, this fucker leads a studio which used Speedtree to make its blades of fucking grass, and he's using this as an excuse for gutting TES? (though Bethesda developers spending all their time in the office 'doing grass' would explain the quality of their product).

The rest that I heard was the other miserable failures echoing the sentiment. They even said 'Next-gen means we have to focus on only a few things, and do them really well'.

So debased has the thinking become in what passes for 'high-end' game development now, that tons of available machine power equates to excuses for doing less with games.

 

[Jung]

What would Todd know about NextGen?

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Okay, I listened to as much of this MP3 my stomach could handle.

I shit you not, this is what the dull fuckers had to say in the first few minutes, clearly setting the tone for the rest of it:

Todd - "You have to realise what the consumers want. They see really great blades of grass in other games (he really says this) and then they expect that from your game, they get savvy. So you have to pick your battles, and do only some things, and do those things really well"

Can you believe this? We're in the age of middleware, this fucker leads a studio which used Speedtree to make its blades of fucking grass, and he's using this as an excuse for gutting TES? (though Bethesda developers spending all their time in the office 'doing grass' would explain the quality of their product).

The rest that I heard was the other miserable failures echoing the sentiment. They even said 'Next-gen means we have to focus on only a few things, and do them really well'.

So debased has the thinking become in what passes for 'high-end' game development now, that tons of available machine power equates to excuses for doing less with games.

That's something I really don't get - with all this middleware stuff and licensed GFX engines, you'd think that developers would have more time on their hands to actually make games, yet the opposite seems to be the case. Why?

 

[galsiah]

Probably because scheduling takes that into account.
It's not this situation:
We've got three years, so let's license a graphics engine. That'll save us at least six months, so we can spend that time making a better game.

But this one:
We've got three years, so let's license a graphics engine. That'll save us at least six months, so let's release the game over six months earlier to ensure that our engine is still cutting edge when we release. Of course it might take a month or two to learn the engine, and integrate it etc., so we'll need to cut a few features. We also don't understand the engine amazingly well, since we didn't write it, so there might be unforseeable difficulties down the road. We can always cut more features.
In any case, once we've got great grass, the rest is bound to fall into place around it.

 

[elander_]

Not only him. There are about 6 people talking on that podcast.

They spent almost all of their time talking about pretty trees and a lot about the casual gamer. The only way i found patience to listen to this was because i was watching the new Fallout speedrun record at the same time:
http://speeddemosarchive.com/Fallout.html

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Probably because scheduling takes that into account.
It's not this situation:
We've got three years, so let's license a graphics engine. That'll save us at least six months, so we can spend that time making a better game.

But this one:
We've got three years, so let's license a graphics engine. That'll save us at least six months, so let's release the game over six months earlier to ensure that our engine is still cutting edge when we release. Of course it might take a month or two to learn the engine, and integrate it etc., so we'll need to cut a few features. We also don't understand the engine amazingly well, since we didn't write it, so there might be unforseeable difficulties down the road. We can always cut more features.
In any case, once we've got great grass, the rest is bound to fall into place around it.

But it seems teams are bigger now, and development schedules have stayed pretty much the same. How hard is it to integrate Middleware?

 

[galsiah]

But it seems teams are bigger now, and development schedules have stayed pretty much the same. How hard is it to integrate Middleware?

I've no personal experience beyond well, personal experience. So I know that using software libraries can be a mixed blessing - you don't completely understand how they work; you don't fully understand their limitations; you need to integrate them correctly into your code. Making sure you do understand what's going on can take a long time. Quite often if the library is relatively small and solves a problem you know how to solve, you might as well write the code yourself - your complete understanding will save time later.

Clearly complete game engines / graphics engines are not just small libraries, but similar issues arrise. I think that integration would be fairly easy if the engine were designed specifically for your purposes, and if you understood it perfectly. Often it isn't, and you don't.

Here's a quote on licensing for Deus Ex:

5. Licensing technology. We went into Deus Ex hoping that licensing an engine would allow us to focus on content generation and gameplay. For the most part, that proved to be the case. The Unreal Tournament code we ended up going with provided a solid foundation upon which we were able to build relatively easily. Dropping in a conversation system, skill and augmentation systems, our inventory and other 2D interface screens, major AI changes, and so on could have been far more difficult. UnrealEd, the main tool our designers used to generate our maps, was superior to anything else available. UnrealScript was very powerful and allowed programmers to do lots of interesting things quickly and easily. The dollars and cents of the deal were right, and I didn't have to hire an army of programmers to create an engine, 80 percent of whose functions already existed in Unreal Tournament. We were able to make what I hope is a state-of-the-art RPG-action-adventure-sim with only three slightly overworked programmers, which allowed us to carry larger design and art staffs than usual.

However, to my surprise, licensing technology didn't save us all the time I'd hoped it would. You'd think cutting a year or more of engine-creation off a schedule would result in an earlier release date. On Deus Ex, that didn't prove to be the case. Time that would have been lost creating tools was lost instead to learning the limitations and capabilities of "foreign" technology. Time that would have gone into making an engine went into focusing more on gameplay systems and tuning than normal. Unreal certainly allowed us to focus on content generation over everything else, but we spent more time doing it.

The biggest downside to licensing was that we were just never going to understand the code as well as we would have if we'd created it ourselves. That led to two distinct kinds of problems. First, there were areas where we ended up treating the engine as a black box. I think it's pretty well documented by now that we shipped Deus Ex with some Direct3D performance issues. Honestly, that didn't show up in any significant way during our QA process -- a slight problem here or there, but none of the dramatic slowdowns some players reported in the early days following our ship date. Once players started reporting troubles, we were kind of in a lurch -- we couldn't very well go in there and mess with the Unreal engine -- we just didn't understand it well enough to do that safely. We had built around the edges of Unreal without ever getting too deeply into the nuts and bolts of it.

Second, because we didn't know the code inside out, and because we'd shelled out a fair amount of money for it, we tended to be conservative in our approach to modifying it. There were times when we should have ripped out certain parts of the Unreal Tournament code and started from scratch (AI, pathfinding, and sound propagation, for example). Instead, we built on the existing systems, on a base that was designed for an entirely different kind of game from what we were making. It's not that Unreal had bad AI or pathfinding or sound propagation, but those systems were designed for a straightforward shooter, which was not what we were making.

Technology licensing bought us a lot and cost us somewhat less. I guess the fact that we'll be licensing technology for our next round of projects, Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3, says the price was right. But it remains an interesting dilemma, and we will be able to approach our next licensed engine with the wisdom gleaned from using Unreal for this project.

Based on that, you'd think it ought to help. However, Deus Ex wasn't rushed: they expected to save time by licensing the engine, but ended up spending that time getting things right. If the schedule had been decided strictly assuming that time would be saved, the game would have suffered.

 

[Sirbolt]

Am i the noly one who is sick and tired of hearing people spit out OMFG NEXT GEN at every possible opportunity? My cock is fucking next gen.

Todd Howard; "We really enjoy having the hardware drive things!"
And this guy is the executive producer of Fallout 3.

EDIT;

I love it when one guy talked about emotionally evocative characters, and one of the developers chimes in with "yeah, we're trying to make the animations as realistic as possible".

 

[Oarfish]

How hard is it to integrate Middleware?

Guess that depends on the middleware.. For speedtree, probably not all that tricky. There's sme people over at the OGRE landscape scene manager project who are itching to integrate planta as soon as the buggers release an SDK.

 

[Romanian_Dude2005]

Todd Howard; "We really enjoy having the hardware drive things!"
And this guy is the executive producer of Fallout 3.

what I can't believe is that this guy actualy worked on Daggerfall, either Zenimax is writting his speeches or his IQ droped over the years

 

[Lumpy]

That's something I really don't get - with all this middleware stuff and licensed GFX engines, you'd think that developers would have more time on their hands to actually make games, yet the opposite seems to be the case. Why?

Bethesda said that one of the reasons they had to cut some weapons was that they had to integrate them with Havok. So rather than helping gameplay creation, Havok slowed it down.

 

[onerobot]

I think that our budget for trees alone would make anyone throw up!

He goes on and on about the damned trees. At more than one point the interviewer gets a little annoyed that they've spent most of their time rambling on about the graphics with hardly any mention of gameplay (as opposed to the devs of Halo, who spent their time talking about the difficulty of creating a challenging ai), and questions their decision of spending so much developmment time on them, especially after stating "Next-gen means we have to focus on only a few things, and do them really well".

The devs didn't think that there was anything wrong with it at all, and went so far as to say that the only people that don't love the graphics in Oblivion are just cant appreciate them as they don't own an HDTV and an Xbox360.

I had always hoped that Howard was a cynical bastard who created Oblivion with the sole purpose of selling as many copies as possible, but he thinks that he is taking games in the right direction. Gameplay is irrelevant, the visceral experience is everything. It's too bad the majority of people seem to agree.

 

[St. Toxic]

So rather than helping gameplay creation, Havok slowed it down.

WELL NOT ANYMORE! Any developer knows that realistic physics are a must in a next generation console/pc title, but so far the difficulty of implentation has put a limit to the creative drive.

"- I'm a lead developer over at some conglomerate developing house, and I have a big problem. 12 years ago, I started out with games that were based primarily on text and story, and now finally worked my way to fame by providing cutting edge graphics. 12 years is a long time ago, and it's time for something new and extreme -- physics. Unfortunatly the implentation time is too long, and the complex metric calculations of the physics engine eat CPU like termites, forcing me to limit my game's graphical superiority."

Fret not, oh creator of entertainment! What you need is the latest sdk from AGEIA! With AGEIA physics is as easely implented as a deep story or a meaningful dialogue -- no wait -- easier! What more, AGEIA won't cost you a nickle, as your game becomes a vertual advertisement set in our name, not to mention forcing the elitist gamers to purchase our modestly priced physicsX-card.

"- Wow, thank's AGEIA, you saved my bacon. For a second I thought all was lost, and that no one would buy my game, lacking physics and all. Now I'm sure to make big bucks from making trailers of stuff falling over and guards coming in saying "HALT CITIZEN, NOW YOU GO TO JAIL FOR SPILLING WINE ALL OVER YOUR SHIRT." just like in the medieval fantasy days of yore. I wish there was something else I could do to show my appretiation!"

Well, you can suck my cock while I beat you over the head with this mallet, you brainless sack of shit.

 

[Twinfalls]

 

[LlamaGod]

I always want to meet someone that purchased an AEGIA PhysiX card because they obviously enjoy throwing their money away without a second thought.

I'll tell them i'm from the charity for homeless starving blind lepers.

 

[HanoverF]

Todd - "You have to realise what the consumers want. They see really great blades of grass in other games (he really says this) and then they expect that from your game, they get savvy. So you have to pick your battles, and do only some things, and do those things really well"

That does explain why there's so much fucking grass in OB that half the things you kill dissapear into it, never to be seen again...