Snaps Tremor
Doomheim
19
   |
Posted - 2012.11.05 15:47:00 -
[1] - Quote
This is a problem that's not going to go away any time soon, and you can thank the choice of engine for that. The real question here is why, six years into the PS3's lifespan, and innumerable examples of Unreal Engine games with mediocre performance on PS3, the Dust devs chose to use Unreal as a base for their game. It's basically damned the game from the start, and all the tweaking and tucking and post-alpha effort will at best patch it up to being a flawed port of a game that was NEVER ON ANY OTHER PLATFORM.
Look at every other technically advanced PS3 exclusive game and you'll see that the thing they all have in common is engines written specifically for the console. It's a very different architecture to the 360 and PC, and basing an exclusive on Unreal is a compromise from day one.
I can only assume that either they were hedging their bets on porting it if it took off (or even if it bombed), or they just lacked the confidence to build for the console from the ground up. Either way, without a miracle, it's damn near doomed what could have been a very interesting, and more widely accepted, successor to MAG. |
Snaps Tremor
Doomheim
19
|
Posted - 2012.11.05 18:00:00 -
[2] - Quote
Well, the Unreal Engine was of course made for Unreal. The problem is not that the engine is fundamentally broken, but that it's marketed as a super flexible and wide-ranging solution to anyone's game dev problems. It's not. It's very efficient at producing a certain type of game, and uses a lot of smoke and mirrors to reach that goal, but if you start pushing the engine away from its strict original spec of pretty but ultimately static scenarios to play around in, the cracks start to show, and those cracks are made worse by it then being exported to the least efficient platform for it, the PS3.
The real worry is that this is all super core-level stuff. You can trim, mould and poke the game for months or even years, and they're probably going to, but without someone reaching right into the guts and changing the beating heart of it, Dust will just be piling more layers of paint onto the rot.
I mean, it shouldn't need to be pointed out by anyone that a game with stakes as high as Dust, where people in a whole other game can win or lose based on the actions of one match, it is absolutely unsuitable for any kind of release when firefights and sometimes entire matches can be decided on the frequent stuttering and churning of a game engine.
(Just so we're clear, I've noticed many people mistaking this churn for network-related lag. It's not. If your game remains smooth but non-static objects like players and tanks are teleporting around, that's lag. If EVERYTHING freezes, including your controls, that's an engine that simply can't keep up.) |