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Can we get next-gen graphics without the insane budgets?

Sissel said:
That comparison doesn't really work. Lower budget films like Drive look as good as higher budget films like transformers. Games aren't there yet, where the low budget games look as good as the high budget games.
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Do you mean 'dont look as good as high budget games'? If you do, then as mentioned above as an example of The Witcher and there are many other titles from previous gens then look 'better' technically than some from the games from this gen with higher budgets - due to talent, planning and direction. Its about being clear in your objective and setting your resources accordingly but that doesnt mean your product cant still sing to its audience (and beyond)

I dread to think what the overall cost of Aliens CM was and did Capcom throwing 600 people at Resident Evil 6 make it a better experience than RE4? Hell arguably it was graphically worse with tearing and frame rate problems all over the place.
 
Anyone who thinks budgets will drop next gen are crazy. No developer or publisher is going to drop any of their budget, because it means dropping a possible advantage over their competitors.

No, at the very least the budgets will stay the same with more of it going to other aspects aside from graphics. Realistically though, you're probably going to see budgets EXPAND. You have to spend more money building new engines to begin with (no avoiding this, new engines take a LOT to make, over time if the engines are well built and maintain this will reduce cost in the long run over many many games) you also have to spend much more money on marketing at the start of a generation. Initial costs are going to be higher.
 
aegies said:
The two things that add the most to game budgets are the things that require the most time. For graphics, that's statically lighting scenes for pre-baking over and over. For development, that's finding a way to achieve specific design parameters under slowly shrinking resource overhead. Some of the games late this gen with the longest development cycles required much of that time to script and rig levels and AI to provide a specific series of experiences.

More power isn't just good for graphics. The giant leaps in memory and processor power in the next gen consoles make design less of a death march. The less time it takes to make things happen during development, the cheaper games are to make.
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Exactly the opposite is true. The less you max out the box, the less profit you will make. In a competitive environment everyone tries to max out everything, and that means AI, Physics, graphics. Maxing out the rumored specs for Orbis/Durango will not be easy.
 
RoboPlato said:
The move to real time lighting and heavy use of tesselation will also help speed up development time and keep budgets in line since you don't need to waste hours baking lighting or molding polygons.
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I don't think tessellation will actually speed up development. Its uses fall more along the "cosmetic" side than actual "world building".

Also, you still need alot of polygons for something to look good under tessellation so there's still some modeling involved.
 
The next step is to take development to third world countries. Crysis graphics for everyone almost for free!
 
Crytek is expanding while making engines that target the highest end. So yes.

Atolm said:
The next step is to take development to third world countries. Crysis graphics for everyone almost for free!
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Crytek is Germany, not Poland. (nor is Poland 3rd world).
 
ksamedi said:
Exactly the opposite is true. The less you max out the box, the less profit you will make. In a competitive environment everyone tries to max out everything, and that means AI, Physics, graphics. Maxing out the rumored specs for Orbis/Durango will not be easy.
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How many man hours do you think it requires to decide to lower a game's resolution by 4 horizontal lines? There is a ridiculous amount of triage and compromise that happens throughout development. It adds to cost. People want realized concepts that grab their attention and hold them in thrall, or they want games that are easy to pick up and play. Consumers don't walk into the store thinking they want the game that cost the most to make. It just so happens that many of the games that cost the most to make often have smart, talented people making them.

Also, developing in eastern Europe is considerably cheaper than developing in Japan or the UK or North America, so comparing the Witcher 2's budget to triple AAA development isn't really fair or indicative.
 
JordanN said:
I don't think tessellation will actually speed up development. Its uses fall more along the "cosmetic" side than actual "world building".

Also, you still need alot of polygons for something to look good under tessellation so there's still some modeling involved.
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Sorry, wasn't clear on that point. I just meant that it'll be significantly faster than trying to add all of that detail through full polygon modeling. It'll help flesh things out a lot so the minute details don't have to be poured over as much. Simply using it for silhouette smoothing will make games look a lot better anyway.
 
Fudgepuppy said:
This is what I was thinking. Amnesia was made by what, 15 people? And it had to sell something like 15000 copies á 20$ to break even.

So what gives? Some say that Metro and Hard Reset are examples of studios being able to do amazing things as long as they are well managed, but I haven't heard any numbers that would prove this.
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Aren't all of those developed in Eastern European countries (I know Metro is, at the very least, pretty sure Hard Reset is as well, not sure about Amnesia)? Doesn't mean they are managed any better than western teams, they just have much lower wages than in western Europe & North America.

Though,I wouldn't really say Amnesia is a good example of a game that looks really good but has a small budget. You can easily see it has been developed by that small a team.
 
I don't know why they wouldn't. Every generation they've increased somehow. So I doubt it would suddenly not increase now just because of "better tools" or whatever is said.
 
Fudgepuppy said:
This I don't get. You get some games that have hundreds of hours of content, and yet the average FPS today is like 6 hours, with some being on the shorter end of ~5 hours. Is it just a matter of pacing, less intriguing gameplay or cheaper production? I wouldn't have mind Halo 4 being 15 hours long...
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your average FPS has the focus on multiplayer which is essentially infinite replayability. It doesn't NEED a long single player campaign because that's not the draw. You may as well complain that street fighter doesn't have a 40 hour solo game.
 
ksamedi said:
Exactly the opposite is true. The less you max out the box, the less profit you will make. In a competitive environment everyone tries to max out everything, and that means AI, Physics, graphics. Maxing out the rumored specs for Orbis/Durango will not be easy.
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It depends what genre your throwing your self in.
FPS and TPS your right. In other genres im not so sure.
 
Famassu said:
Aren't all of those developed in Eastern European countries (I know Metro is, at the very least, pretty sure Hard Reset is as well, not sure about Amnesia)? Doesn't mean they are managed any better than western teams, they just have much lower wages than in western Europe & North America.

Though,I wouldn't really say Amnesia is a good example of a game that looks really good but has a small budget. You can easily see it has been developed by that small a team.
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Amnesia is made in Sweden, where salaries are pretty high for developers.
 
Kimawolf said:
I don't know why they wouldn't. Every generation they've increased somehow. So I doubt it would suddenly not increase now just because of "better tools" or whatever is said.
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This. Yes, they have better tools/power to do the things they already could... but with all of that comes NEW things they can and eventually MUST do to compete in the AAA arena.

An example.... Real Time Lighting. Yes, it will save a lot of time/power to have those real time lights, but those lighting elements come at a cost of their own. While you save developer time, you're sacrificing power to get it. As a AAA game, it may be worthwhile to actually do FIXED lighting ala last gen, thereby saving processing power that can be applied to more lighting or more particles or more models or a ton of other things.

In that instance, the ability to do it won't speed up the process at all (except maybe for prototyping scene lighting, could still be great for that situation). It would mean more or less the same work PLUS the cost of working on those additional effects.

Even if you do say use the real time lighting and therefore spent less time on that aspect, you still have people who have to work on improved AI routines, or people who have to work on better model collision detecting, or any number of other things.

As a famous person once said, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
 
Just look at what some indie games are doing with procedural systems, physics and art styles. Yes, you can have next gen with out focusing on pushing poly counts and effects.
 
Yes, but it takes special cases to manage. A particular low cost concept, maybe involving procedural generation to various degrees, maybe focusing on certain types of environments, etc, or a team of super passionate and super talented people working longer for less to make their dream a reality rather than your average studio, or whatever other possible scenario.
 
All else being equal, I don't think so. Something will have to give; higher prices in shops, more forms of monetisation behind the scenes. One possibility that strikes me as plausible but hasn't been spoken about much: Less actual *content* being produced (but what there is is much prettier!). That's not necessarily a bad thing if it's planned with care, though - although I suspect that games that go for that principle and do it *right* will be uncommon.
 
aegies said:
Also, developing in eastern Europe is considerably cheaper than developing in Japan or the UK or North America, so comparing the Witcher 2's budget to triple AAA development isn't really fair or indicative.
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Begs the question as to why it is considerably cheaper, and why the results seem impressive given cases like The Witcher 2.

It seems to me a case of certain studios doing the best they can with what money they can drum up through investors, and figuring out cost effective workarounds to not having the kind of budgets that larger/more successful studios have (in the same way that horror film people like Peter Jackson know how to stretch a dollar and put out impressive results).

AAA studios spend the money because they can, not because they need to, ultimately.

lefantome said:
yes on smaller games using next gen engines and middleware.

or

on big AAA games with a smooth development and good resources management


it's not something new.
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pretty much this.
 
One thing that I can see cutting cost for a lot of games is procedural animation. Mo Cap is something that a lot of games will throw out just because of the cost and time strains it puts on things. Procedural animation looks better in a lot of situations and just more fluid.
 
I foresee changes in the industry for sure. The current model isn't sustainable.

Games will get too expensive, take too few risks, and be too similar to each other and people will get burned out. Something will have to change.
 
kenjisalk said:
Begs the question as to why it is considerably cheaper, and why the results seem impressive given cases like The Witcher 2.

It seems to me a case of certain studios doing the best they can with what money they can drum up through investors, and figuring out cost effective workarounds to not having the kind of budgets that larger/more successful studios have (in the same way that horror film people like Peter Jackson know how to stretch a dollar and put out impressive results).

AAA studios spend the money because they can, not because they need to, ultimately.
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Stepping outside of the GAF echo-chamber, TW2 didn't set the world on fire saleswise. It made money for sure, and I know that everyone involved considers it a success, but still. Also, TW2 was designed with console limitations in mind, which certainly had a major influence on the way it worked. It's cheaper to develop in eastern Europe because the economy is considerably different from the other regions I specified.
 
Gamers wonder: is it sustainable to fund 500-person development teams in which one person models a chair over the course of a multi-year dev cycle
 
I don't think next gen games will be a lot more expensive. The engines being used for many current gen games are already capable of producing next gen graphics. The extra expense on gaming budget will go to employee salary for the extra time a dev needs to put into a game because they can do so much more.
 
aegies said:
Stepping outside of the GAF echo-chamber, TW2 didn't set the world on fire saleswise. It made money for sure, and I know that everyone involved considers it a success, but still. Also, TW2 was designed with console limitations in mind, which certainly had a major influence on the way it worked.
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I was mainly referring to the visual fidelity of the game versus AAA contemporaries. For the amount of money it cost, it's still really impressive looking.

As to the economic aspect you mentioned, it's not like outsourcing isn't a big thing for western developers, yet dev costs are still insane.
 
Uncharted games were made at around $20 million each, and that is considered a moderate budget in the light of games with $100 million budgets. So yes it is possible, but it is very dependent on the talent of the studio. Just like this gen.
 
I think most of the money is from trying to make the game more cinematic. Popular voice actors, extensive motion capture, symphonic scores done with a real orchestra. Probably some more aspects I can't think of that add a lot to the budget. Maybe when they stop trying to make every game a damn movie, they can cut costs.
 
aegies said:
The two things that add the most to game budgets are the things that require the most time. For graphics, that's statically lighting scenes for pre-baking over and over. For development, that's finding a way to achieve specific design parameters under slowly shrinking resource overhead. Some of the games late this gen with the longest development cycles required much of that time to script and rig levels and AI to provide a specific series of experiences.

More power isn't just good for graphics. The giant leaps in memory and processor power in the next gen consoles make design less of a death march. The less time it takes to make things happen during development, the cheaper games are to make.
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I agree, although part of the cost of pre-baked lighting can be mitigated using distributed computing. I know that Valve install software on all their workstations that allow them to parallelise lighting and visiblity calculations. ID also recently said that they used clusters to bake the megatextures in RAGE. Pre-baked graphics will always look better than real-time graphics until game worlds becomes complex enough that static lighting is impossible. As you say, there is still a lot of (quite tedious) work involved in making fine adjustment to lighting.
 
Man-is-Obsolete said:
Uncharted games were made at around $20 million each, and that is considered a moderate budget in the light of games with $100 million budgets. So yes it is possible, but it is very dependent on the talent of the studio. Just like this gen.
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Basically this. A more talented focused studio more efficiently uses their man power. Man power is one of the most expensive parts of developing a game. I'd say salary/benefits then equipment (including rent) are the most expensive parts of making a game. The only way to reduce those two things is have as little management overhead as possible, hire talented individuals, and have a focused design in order to not waste time going down too many dead ends.

What should occur at a studio with talented people is creating a pipeline that reduces downtime of all employees as much as possible.
 
good thread.

anyhow, Epic Mickey 2 had 120 or 160 employees working on it? That game must have had one hella of a budget and the graphics...

also uncharted if really at 20 million shows... that's its artistry,tech, production pipeline and management that keeps the budget in line. not bad for one of the most amazing looking games on consoles.
 
like this

9kqBbI5.gif
 
Yes, just don't advertise like a madman.

Keep a development blog or something and let it draw attention to your game for pretty much free and make sure it's a quality title so news of it spreads via word of mouth.

Like 90% of game budgets these days go to advertising and it's disgusting.

Also once graphene takes off, photo realistic games can be done with 3D models made from 3D scanners GREATLY reducing cost.

It's probably too much for silicon though, well consumer silicon CPUs/GPUs anyway.
 
Man-is-Obsolete said:
Uncharted games were made at around $20 million each, and that is considered a moderate budget in the light of games with $100 million budgets. So yes it is possible, but it is very dependent on the talent of the studio. Just like this gen.
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Talent and good management.

That's all you need, really.

Given the rise of middlewares and ready-to-use engines, there's no excuse, really.

And with new hardware round the corner, smaller devs will have much higher overhead and will need less optimization if they don't go overboard.

There are one-man-job games or mods developed by small teams out there that already look better than some somewhat-high-profile games.

I guess Japan will never get it right, though.
 
ShockingAlberto said:
Appreciable leaps of graphics will be possible without breaking the bank.

But the bank will be broken, regardless, because the minimum acceptable quality for graphics (and all the other things) will be raised by companies with tons of money to spend so that all other publishers will be forced to spend to keep up.

You're also probably going to see more freemium-like mechanics in your $60 games to compensate.
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Basically this
 
Isn't it true that one of the few reasons why we still have "long" games is because there's so many western style sandbox titles? Where it is easy to increase length by adding fetch quests, points of interest, and NPCs to take missions from without having to create new assets for new areas.

Games which require a lot of fresh content as the experience moves forward seem to have suffered. I believe this is why Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was so shocking for many. It was a linear arcade-action title but had a shitload of stages with fresh environments in every stage. Something we hadn't seen much since the end of the PS2 era.

This issue appears to be why we see so many 5-6 hour long corridor games, which spend most of their budget on scripted set pieces across a handful of levels.
 
Well I suspect the transition from this gen to next gen won't be as bad though. They already create characters, weapons etc as high quality assets, as opposed to modelling and texturing low poly objects.
 
aegies said:
The giant leaps in memory and processor power in the next gen consoles make design less of a death march. The less time it takes to make things happen during development, the cheaper games are to make.
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Yeah, which is why I never get people who say that next gen will automatically cause budgets to rise even more.

Due to the hardware being more powerful, it'll be easier to implement many features. Thus making it cheaper to put those features into the game(s) compared to how things were previously.
 
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