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I kid, but honestly, seeing this doesn't excite me anywhere near as much as a preview of whatever the team that made Mirror's Edge has in store next for current-generation consoles.
It's going to be a while before there's another console generation. (In a sense, the Kinect and PS Move were an attempt to refresh the consoles without changing the base hardware) I haven't even heard rumors of new console development yet, so I'd guess they're at least 2-3 years out.
IIRC, Sony was banking on the PS3 being a 10+ year console. This could all change with the discovery of the PS3's private key however. Of course if that's the case, the PS4 might just be a PS3.5 with a new private key.
But, a virtual blade runner in proper 3d would be a little fantastic.
Why do they always have to do these shots at night? Is it because the processing to render far away objects in the background is just too much for the engine and they have to compensate by making these things at night so the background behind the characters is black or something close to them?
> The demo took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build. So using the new engine, the world-leading experts on Unreal Engine NG - Epic - had to spend 1 person-year per minute of video. Like Hollywood, this can only make hit-driven game design more common on consoles and PCs.
This engine isn't meant for release today, it's meant for release in a few years. Any pronouncements you make about how this engine is too X for today's Y are going to be invalid.
Problem is how to handle worst-case scenarios. With pre-rendered movies that might or might not be a problem, and even if it is - it's production one (e.g. you can't predict how many well for how many days you would render your movie) But for a game - this means dropping the frame rate, making it visually unappealing. That's why Ray-casting would never pick up for real-time games (Unreal most definitely is not doing…
Content will have to be increasingly procedurally generated. I worry less about the practical size of the content - to be frank, I think games will likely trend towards being rendered in whole or in part remotely, with consoles being dumb clients - than the manpower and budget required to create it. I lament constriction - I haven't bought any of the latter games in the Call of Duty series owing to how constrained an…
Even considering that the data structures for the world and rendering can be reused for AI purposes, it's still pushing our current hardware to expect to get a whole squad of really detailed, smart AIs and also have a playable action game with modern graphics quality.
It's a lot easier, for the purpose of making a novel, amusing game, to just back off from realism and find other things to try.
I agree with much else of what is said here about it being a "perfect conditions" demo that doesn't have to deal with any unknowns--and I also echo that it looks exceedingly cool. All that said, great graphics does not a great game make!
Too bad all these beautiful effects will be covered up by the foreshortened perspective of a gun in one corner and a health bar in the other corner. I kid, but honestly, seeing this doesn't excite me anywhere near as much as a preview of whatever the team that made Mirror's Edge has in store next for current -generation consoles.
Slightly OT but interesting: from what I hear from people at EA, it was a huge internal political war that year between the people who wanted to build more sequels and licensed franchises, and the people who thought that EA would die if it didn't innovate on its own IP. The latter won and were given a chance to prove their worth - the two main titles to come out of that were Dead Space and Mirror's Edge. From what I hear management considered this direction a flop (Dead Space, while popular, and spawning a sequel, was not the sort of hyper-blockbuster it needed to be, and ME was an unquestionable flop) and now EA is culturally back to the sequel-mill mentality.
A sad opportunity that didn't pan out :( There are precious few new IPs being worked on at EA right now.