Skip to main content

A game a decade

It's only been a month since I finished Dragon Age. I've still got some DLC left to play but currently I'm first playing through Mass Effect 2. What a luxury problem! Two instant classic games were released by Bioware less than two months apart. And now Bioware announces that they will release Dragon Age 2 by march next year. All this while developing the Dragon Age expansion planned for march this year and creating more DLC for Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2. They're doing all this while creating the next big mmorpg, SW:TOR! The quick expansion pack release for Dragon Age already had me worried. How can they create all this in such a short time frame?  We know that the EA programmers all work 72 hours a week but even then, how do they pull this off?

Let's take a look at Biowares archive:

It seems like Bioware is creating games at an increasingly faster rate while their quality is even improving. I liked both Mass Effect and Jade Empire but they weren't on the same level as SW: KOTOR. I personally didn't like them as much and their metacritic scores are in the 80th percentile. Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 have a 90+ score and I love both games.

Reading all this I couldn't help but think about Blizzard. They've been my favourite developer for a long time now. I still remember playing starcraft, diablo 2 and warcraft 3 for the first time. And one day they created WoW. I must have spent more hours in WoW than in all the other games I ever played combined. If I were to create a top 25 of my favorite games it would probably contain four Blizzard games. Sadly, it's been a long time since I had the joy of playing Warcraft for the first time:
Blizzards last game, WoW was released five years ago! They have been creating nothing but creating expansions for WoW since 2004. Blizzards philosophy has always been "done when it's done" so it's no wonder that Starcraft 2 got pushed back to Q2 of this year. I wouldn't be surprised if they pushed it back again. Of course, it's hard to argue with success. Which developer wouldn't wish they spent a decade creating WoW? It's clear however that even Blizzard wants to create more games at a faster rate. Splitting up Starcraft 2 in episodes should have done the trick. But they still take as long to create one episode as most developers take to create one new game. Let's hope that the two sequels in the trilogy will be created faster.

Valve already tried to use episodic gaming for Half Life 2. The episodes would make sure that their development time went down at the cost of games with a smaller duration. It's a great idea but we're still waiting for episode 3 two years after the second instalment. At the other end Valve also released Left 4 Dead 2 this year. Releasing a sequel a year after the original caused quite some outrage but once people got to play the game it all calmed down.

In the end it doesn't really matter how long it took you to develop a game. Create a great game and we'll enjoy playing it. But I sure wish that Blizzard had some of the stuff that the Bioware developers are taking.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EvoLisa - Comparing two images: performance tuning

It looks like the program is rather slow. Using DotTrace , I took a look at where the bottleneck is. The method that calculates the 'fitnesse', how closely the created image resembles the original image, is where most of the time goes to. Can we improve that? So what happens in this function? We compare each pixel of both images to compare their ARGB values. The better they match, the better the result! How can be compare this? First, I tried using the naive approach: compare each pixel using a bitmaps GetPixel(x, y) . Do that however, and you'll quickly see how excruciatingly slow that is. Especially considering that even with an image of 333x333 you're already comparing a million pixels each time you compare two images! So, instead I tried using a 'FastBitmap'. It's a project I found which wraps the Bitmap and provides much faster Get and SetPixel performance. Using this instead, the performance went up by an order of magnitude! But we can still do be
Post a Comment
Read more

EvoLisa - My own version

It's an old idea by now, can we recreate the Mona Lisa with fifty polygons by using random changes? The idea and original implementation by Roger Johansson can be found here . So, how does it work? You start with an source image. Then you create an empty image. We keep on doing small changes to this image. In my case this is one of these changes: Recolor our polygon Change the position of one of the polygon points Add or remove a new point to our polygon Add or remove a new polygon Switch two polygons After each action, we take a look and check if the newly changed image looks more like the original image by comparing each pixel. If it is, we continue using this one. If it's not, we discard the changes. Looks like a fun project! So I built my own version from scratch eight years ago, reusing some of the same ideas. Here's my result using the Mona Lisa: Mona Lisa with 50 polygons: You can see that it's the Mona Lisa but the details around the eyes and mou
1 comment
Read more

You can leave your hat on

You always think that these things only happen to others. You may even think that they should have used better protection. And then one day you get this mail in your box from your guild leader: Hi there, I dont know if this email will arrive, but I will try anyway. I saw that your chars came online today. They are selling all your gear and equipment and they are not answering on guild chat. I think you are being hacked. Suddenly it's not someone else who has been hacked. It's you! So I quickly took a  look in my second mailbox account and yes: someone merged my account to a battle.net account. My account has been frozen for half a year so someone must have hacked it and have reactivated it. Next thing I did was checking my characters and my armory page looked like this: Kind of them to put on my Christmas hat, it's the season!. Everything that a vendor will accept is sold however. After seeing that picture I  really started to worry. They reactivated my accou
1 comment
Read more