You've seen the trailer. It's beautiful. I have expanded my theory of what it means:
I'm thinking DICE wants Battlefield 3 to be the Crysis of this (hardware) generation. I'm fine with that in principle, mostly because it's long past time for a "mainstream," cross-platform game to actually leverage the power of high-end PC's.
Microsoft and Sony have had their way for far too long: they don't want their player base to see what's possible when they're not limited to ossified hardware. And they definitely don't want have to transition into another loss-leader console generation before they've squeezed every last dime out of the current one. There will be no real technological innovation in video games in the short to medium term unless it's done on the PC, and unless it's done often enough that it creates a strong demand for the Xbox 720 and the PS4.
Battlefield 3 might be the game that pushes the tech far enough forward that console players will be forced to recognize that their antique plastic toys should be put out to pasture. That won't happen, however, if BF3 is as buggy and pedestrian of a game as the original Crysis was. DICE really has to execute on all fronts, and then make a lot of money in PC sales. If that doesn't happen, other developers will probably decide that it's not worth investing in new tech, and we'll all be stuck at the damnable "360 baseline" for several more years.
If that makes me a "PC elitist," I embrace the label.
Then there's this, from CVG:
'Our competitors are getting lazy,' [Karl-Magnus Troedsson of DICE] said. 'They're using the same engine, the same recipe for building a game. At some point you need to take that leap. I haven't seen them take that leap since a long time ago.
'We are doing that now. They had better watch out. We are coming for them.'
DICE routinely blistered Call of Duty in the run-up to Bad Company 2. I once asked a college professor how one goes about becoming a heavyweight in his academic field. His response: "Go elephant hunting."
Happy hunting, Mr. Troedsson.
He's absolutely right. Think how long it's been since Source was released, and it wasn't really a huge step up from the HL1 engine. They've continued to improve it, but it's still the same overall engine.
ReplyDeleteBut, be aware, BF3 is going to use the Frostbite 2.0 engine. It will support DX 11, but have absolutely zero support for DX 9 which means the game will NOT run in Windows XP.
I'm sure Micro$oft will love that... time to upgrade, boyz!
I disagree with the first thing you said. I've been playing HL1 a bit, and I'd say Valve made quite a leap between Goldsource and Source. One of the reasons Valve never did a straight port of HL1 to Source is because they would have needed to rewrite all the shaders in the first game to HDR to work. That leaves out all the remodeling for hardware facial animation and a ton of code work to add multiprocessor support. There's so much that has changed just since 2007, it's hard to believe that Source is a Quake derivative engine.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right though, about BF3 on Windows XP. Ain't gonna happen. Don't worry about MW3, though: the CoD engine's tool set is all tied to XP and DX9. That's not likely to change while the 360 is still the lead platform.