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kool, I thought the first game was too short.
Jason Rubin was at the latest Game Developer's Conference, and gave a presentation entitled "Great Game Graphics... Who Cares?" which can be watched in RealPlayer format here: app201-2.cmpnet.com/ramge...bin2003.rm
He touches on several points throughout the 65-minute speech, about J&D, about game consoles, about the industry in general and its evolution. His main thrust is that graphics have ceased becoming the drawing point for games and a barometer for success. Technology has, for the moment, stagnated in terms of what it adds to the gameplay experience. This is telling, because, as he states in his opening lines, the mantra for Naughty Dog has up till now been "Make games that look better than everything else out there. Not necessarily innovate, but make it fun." Now, that motto has run its course, and he has discovered that new games need to rely on much different things now to survive. In one example, his company spent over $3 million developing the Jak & Daxter engine alone, yet games using a cheap all-purpose middleware engine (Renderware, used in GTA3/GTAVC and the Tony Hawk games) trounced it in the market.
The presentation is very interesting and surprisingly candid, with technical details about his games peppered throughout. He describes his declining awe at new consoles following the SNES, and the accompanying reduced interest in the new games. In the question and answer segment at the end, he gives an astonishing acknowledgment that he sees the XBox as roughly 2.5 times as powerful as the PS2, which is larger than any technological gap in any console generation before. This shocked me. Rubin has always been a frontline supporter of Sony and the PS2, and has pushed the hardware to new, incredible graphical heights, so I would have thought he of all people would have seen the tech gap as smaller than that, as Hideo Kojima does. More than that, I never believed the gap was on an order of magnitude of that level. Rubin points out, though, that this technological advantage hasn't helped the XBox very much in terms of market share or game-sales, further cementing his postulate that graphics no longer matter to the consumer. To paraphrase him, a tennis game is a tennis game, and rendering each individual string on the racket as opposed to a single texture doesn't make the game better on its own, and hence doesn't help it sell. He also makes a passing prediction as to the power of the next-generation consoles (1 billion polygons per second is within the realm of possibility), but only to emphasize that that extra power is meaningless without game evolution.
All in all, I found the presentation thought-provoking, interesting, and illuminating. His depiction of the current gaming situation as stagnant and rehashed is bleak indeed, but it has a ring of truth. If he proves idealistic in his actions to counterbalance this gloomy view, Jak 2 has potential to be either genre-defining or genre-defying.---
Behold Drakkael, the socially inept
He touches on several points throughout the 65-minute speech, about J&D, about game consoles, about the industry in general and its evolution. His main thrust is that graphics have ceased becoming the drawing point for games and a barometer for success. Technology has, for the moment, stagnated in terms of what it adds to the gameplay experience. This is telling, because, as he states in his opening lines, the mantra for Naughty Dog has up till now been "Make games that look better than everything else out there. Not necessarily innovate, but make it fun." Now, that motto has run its course, and he has discovered that new games need to rely on much different things now to survive. In one example, his company spent over $3 million developing the Jak & Daxter engine alone, yet games using a cheap all-purpose middleware engine (Renderware, used in GTA3/GTAVC and the Tony Hawk games) trounced it in the market.
The presentation is very interesting and surprisingly candid, with technical details about his games peppered throughout. He describes his declining awe at new consoles following the SNES, and the accompanying reduced interest in the new games. In the question and answer segment at the end, he gives an astonishing acknowledgment that he sees the XBox as roughly 2.5 times as powerful as the PS2, which is larger than any technological gap in any console generation before. This shocked me. Rubin has always been a frontline supporter of Sony and the PS2, and has pushed the hardware to new, incredible graphical heights, so I would have thought he of all people would have seen the tech gap as smaller than that, as Hideo Kojima does. More than that, I never believed the gap was on an order of magnitude of that level. Rubin points out, though, that this technological advantage hasn't helped the XBox very much in terms of market share or game-sales, further cementing his postulate that graphics no longer matter to the consumer. To paraphrase him, a tennis game is a tennis game, and rendering each individual string on the racket as opposed to a single texture doesn't make the game better on its own, and hence doesn't help it sell. He also makes a passing prediction as to the power of the next-generation consoles (1 billion polygons per second is within the realm of possibility), but only to emphasize that that extra power is meaningless without game evolution.
All in all, I found the presentation thought-provoking, interesting, and illuminating. His depiction of the current gaming situation as stagnant and rehashed is bleak indeed, but it has a ring of truth. If he proves idealistic in his actions to counterbalance this gloomy view, Jak 2 has potential to be either genre-defining or genre-defying.---
Behold Drakkael, the socially inept
