Goric Rumis
Amarr Templars
Amarr Empire
90
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Posted - 2013.03.01 23:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
I feel like the fact that EVE is amazing is one of the reasons DUST isn't (yet).
If you started from scratch and picked up a team to make a shooter, you'd probably pick a very different development team. You'd probably start out with very different ideas about what you're trying to build. You'd probably be much better at the things people are expecting you to be good at right away. And in the end, you'd probably make a forgettable shooter that disappears after a couple years. At best, you'd make a Team Fortress or a MAG. But it wouldn't be anything revolutionary or truly lasting.
But we're starting with people who have a lot of experience developing one really amazing thing over a very long timeline. Unless I'm mistaken, this is only the second time CCP has ever done a new release (although individual developers must have worked on other projects). And their last release was a game nothing like this. Hit detection? EVE just needs to make a bunch of calculations and then animate the result. There's no such thing as hit detection. They don't even need to have tight synchronization. If somebody changes course and it takes half a second for you to see it, that won't change the outcome of an encounter nearly as much as it might in an FPS.
And then, even if you hire people who understand FPS-specific issues (which I'm sure they did), the fact that you're trying to put these two games on the same server means you're dealing with traditional problems in a non-traditional environment. If my experience in R&D holds, that fact alone makes it far more challenging to, for example, "just fix hit detection" on this game than it would be on a dedicated FPS.
I expect the initial development process to take a lot longer with CCP than it would with a seasoned FPS developer. And I expect it to require some patience, as they have very little experience communicating and managing expectations around a console game, an FPS, or really any completely new product. But I expect the outcome to be totally unique, totally spectacular, and totally worthwhile. |