Kotaku spoke to some anonymous sources who apparently had first hand knowledge of the development on Aliens: Colonial Marines. One of the hot topics discussed is why the demo for the game looked so much better than what finally shipped.
BIG SURPRISE! The reason the final game looks so bad is because of the limitations of current consoles. Instead of making a PC version of the game that isn't restricted by set hardware requirements, they just made every version the same and thus crippled the hell out of (at least) the PC version. Brilliant.
This is perhaps another very telling remark about the game's development from these sources.
Ugh...
(via Kotaku)
BIG SURPRISE! The reason the final game looks so bad is because of the limitations of current consoles. Instead of making a PC version of the game that isn't restricted by set hardware requirements, they just made every version the same and thus crippled the hell out of (at least) the PC version. Brilliant.
According to a few sources I spoke with, the demo for Colonial Marines was built by TimeGate—with animation assistance by Gearbox—and ran in real time. As is standard for E3 demos, it ran on a high-end computer with specs that would be unfeasible for a normal console game.
"We were told many times through demo production, 'Don't worry about performance, just make it awesome,'" said one source. "There was a reason [the demos] were never playable."
(Press attending E3 2012 could join hands-on multiplayer sessions, but the single-player demo was not playable there.)
The demo looked better than the game does because the demo didn't have to be optimized for old hardware. Though these games are created using powerful PCs, any console game has a "performance budget"—the ceiling above which an Xbox 360 or a PS3 cannot go. The Colonial Marines demo was way over performance budget, and the development team had to cut back significantly for the final product.
"We were constantly cutting back more and more in terms of texture, shader and particle fidelity, in order to fit into the jacked memory restraints," said another source.
In the middle of 2012, once Gearbox had finished most of Borderlands 2, they took the project back from TimeGate. And Gearbox changed everything—partially because what TimeGate had produced was not very good, two sources told me, and partially because it couldn't run on the PlayStation 3.
"[Gearbox made] big changes to lighting, texture and shader complexity," said one source who had not played the final game, but was familiar with some of the later builds. "Design elements were altered or redone entirely. It looks like a lot of [TimeGate's] assets remained intact, with the exception of lower-res textures and faster-performing shaders."
"We were told many times through demo production, 'Don't worry about performance, just make it awesome,'" said one source. "There was a reason [the demos] were never playable."
(Press attending E3 2012 could join hands-on multiplayer sessions, but the single-player demo was not playable there.)
The demo looked better than the game does because the demo didn't have to be optimized for old hardware. Though these games are created using powerful PCs, any console game has a "performance budget"—the ceiling above which an Xbox 360 or a PS3 cannot go. The Colonial Marines demo was way over performance budget, and the development team had to cut back significantly for the final product.
"We were constantly cutting back more and more in terms of texture, shader and particle fidelity, in order to fit into the jacked memory restraints," said another source.
In the middle of 2012, once Gearbox had finished most of Borderlands 2, they took the project back from TimeGate. And Gearbox changed everything—partially because what TimeGate had produced was not very good, two sources told me, and partially because it couldn't run on the PlayStation 3.
"[Gearbox made] big changes to lighting, texture and shader complexity," said one source who had not played the final game, but was familiar with some of the later builds. "Design elements were altered or redone entirely. It looks like a lot of [TimeGate's] assets remained intact, with the exception of lower-res textures and faster-performing shaders."
This is perhaps another very telling remark about the game's development from these sources.
"The game feels like it was made in nine months, and that's because it was."
Ugh...
(via Kotaku)
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