Videogame News

[dezm0nd]

Hideo Kojima joins Sony! Hmmm...!

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

Yeah interesting one that, although fairly predictable.

What I took from it is he's setting up his own independent studio, but that he's working with Sony on his first game. Feels like a second party type deal where he makes the game exclusively for Playstation with Sony's support and they publish it, rather than the new Kojima Productions being a first party Sony-owned thing.

Would be interesting if they turned into another Platinum style studio for hire where they make games and exclusives for whatever platform waves enough money in their face.

[Bakers_12]

A Kojima game where he is not ansawerble to any bosses that would be an intresting game!!!
Lets hope he uses the ideas he had for Silent hills but could not use them in the end to make somthing that PT hinted at.

[goatsnake]

Is it just me that thinks the FFVII remake looks absolutely ghastly?

I mean, if their goal was to surgically remove every single ounce of charm that the original had, then they have completely succeeded. Simply put, characters that are that outlandish and stylised (sporting crazy spiked hair and wielding foot-wide blades, for example) will always look laughably silly to me when rendered in a gritty, 'realistic' way.

Yeah, Realistic Cloud Strife is having a a weird uncanny valley effect on me that brings to mind Realistic Homer Simpson from The Internet:

[Craig]

Just wait until they show Cait Sith.

I have a feeling Cloud won't be riding dolphins in this one.

[KissMammal]

This is the problem Square have.

A lot of existing fans just want the original game with a HD polish.

To appeal to a wider audience than that (and therefore cover the development costs, which are sky high at the moment compared to 1997) they've chosen to completely reimagine it as a title with a more modern design philosophy (and also split it into multiple SKUs, because money).

I genuinely think if all they did was a straight HD art polish of the original game, it wouldn't sell enough to cover the costs of doing it. Building art to modern HD standards is by far the most expensive part of game development in 2015.

Perhaps, but to me it's throwing the baby out with the bath water. I think there's a large section of their audience that just wanted an HD remake of FFVII, and are not going to be interested in what is essentially a totally different game. Also, while remaking the original game would undoubtedly be expensive, I imagine it would be peanuts next to what they're spending on this one, which is essentially a whole new AAA title.

Yeah, Realistic Cloud Strife is having a a weird uncanny valley effect on me that brings to mind Realistic Homer Simpson from The Internet:

I was literally going to post that exact thing! Same thing with that creepy-looking Tin Tin movie from a few years back.

Let's not jump to a conclusions. Its just one trailer, and it barely shows any gameplay.

I'm not talking about gameplay, I'm talking purely about visuals and character design. I don't think that's 'jumping to conclusions' - I think it looks weirdly generic and ugly while the original looked utterly beautiful.

[KissMammal]

There are a lot of outdated mechanics that i wouldnt like to deal with again (like random encounters )

Genuinely curious here - if you're not a fan of random encounters then why do you want to revisit Final Fantasy VII in the first place?

Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud, but I like turn-based RPGs. I like random encounters. I don't think they're 'outdated', they're just not 'in vogue' right now, and personally I've never liked RPGs that try to do a weird blend of real-time and turn-based. It always seems like an awkward compromise to me. Pick one or the other.

[gallo_pinto]

personally I've never liked RPGs that try to do a weird blend of real-time and turn-based. It always seems like an awkward compromise to me. Pick one or the other.

100% with you on this. There are some really fun turn-based games out there (I thought South Park: Stick of Truth and Child of Light were particularly good recent examples) and some really fun real-time games. All the ones that try to mix the two end up with the worst of both worlds. They're not as strategic as turn-based games or as thrilling as games that give you direct control. This was my biggest issue with Ni No Kuni, where the combat felt like I was trying to hang on to a pig coated with vaseline.

[KissMammal]

This was my biggest issue with Ni No Kuni, where the combat felt like I was trying to hang on to a pig coated with vaseline.

Haha, great analogy - I know exactly what you mean about NNK. I liked it but would have much preferred it as a straight turn-based combat game. Having said all that, I actually do like some real-time stuff in turn-based combat (for example in the 16-bit FF games, pulling off a Street Fighter style combo or triggering a slot machine to deliver a limit break always added a bit of spice to proceedings).

I'm aware that my comment above might come across as a bit snippy or sarcastic. It's not intended to be, I'm genuinely curious. To me, so much of the appeal of FFVII (and my warm memories of it) are tied up in that lovely combat system. Tinkering with weapon slots, farming Materia and experimenting with different character line-ups. I don't even mind a bit of grinding, within reasonable limits.

To me, the main thing that is dated and troublesome about Final Fantasy type RPGs is that it's often easy to stumble into an unwinnable battle/boss/dungeon with no way of backtracking unless you have been carefully staggering saves. This to me is far more of a barrier and a turn-off than random battles, turn-based combat etc.

[KissMammal]

and therefore cover the development costs, which are sky high at the moment compared to 1997

I also don't think this is strictly true. Yes, assets need to be created at a higher resolution, which is obviously more expensive and time-consuming, but technology has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 18 years, which must surely help to off-set this to a significant degree (imagine trying to render cgi or use Photoshop on a 1995-spec PC compared to today). All the design and concept work is set in stone, you just need to task a team of artists (which would be a fraction of the size of the original art team) with redrawing it all.

I imagine things like re-recording the score with a full orchestra and employing a full voice cast to perform the dialogue would perhaps be cost-prohibitve, but are (in my humble opinion) unnecessary in this case.

Completely rebuilding the game from the ground up might (arguably) broaden the potential audience, but it's also undoubtedly going to increase production cost, and thus sales targets, exponentially (I'm no expert but I have to imagine it must be at least ten times more expensive than just doing a straight HD port of the original game). A straight HD port could also (presumably) be instantly released on every platform under the sun, including iOS, meaning a much wider potential market for it.

I dunno, I could well be talking bollocks

[Flabyo]

Lets use a concrete example cause it's a game series I worked on. Data here is from Mobygames.

Fable
4 designers, 18 coders, 9 scripters, 8 animators, 20 artists.
That was considered a slightly above average team size for the time, but not massively so. I was on Black and White 2 at the time, which had a fairly comparable team size.

Fable II
10 designers, 53 coders, 18 scripters, 22 animators, 27 artists.
Much heavier level design load for a game that wasn't a lot bigger than the original was. Very heavy code load due to brand new next gen engine construction for the 360. Art requirement was about the same, but more complex models meant animations took longer to do.

Fable III
8 designers, 50 coders, 25 scripters, 10 animators, 24 artists.
Still quite a heavy code load, we added co-op multiplayer to the existing engine. Quite a lot of animation reuse, but everything else was much the same.

Fable: The Journey
13 designers, 38 coders, 24 animators, 39 artists.
A larger art team than any of the main series games for something that is both smaller and running on the Unreal engine, but required higher fidelity art.

Fable Anniversary.
15 designers, 36 coders, 10 animators, 134 artists.
This was the recent remake of Fable 1 for the 360 and PC... Very little of the game itself changed, it was primarily a complete retouch of all of the art. Now granted, the bulk of that much larger art team is because it was outsourced, most of the work wasn't done in the UK. So the costs are not as crazy nuts as they could've been if they'd done that in house.


You can see a clear bump in team size from Xbox to 360, and then a second bump in the last couple of years of the 360's life as engines got faster and we could shift more polygons. Now if we had data for Fable Legends on the XBO we'd have a clearer picture, but it'll be a while before that happens.

Just redoing the art of a game to go from Xbox to 360 takes a huge amount of resources. Taking PS1 era art up to PS4 level tech is a much bigger leap than that. I don't think they'd get away with just up resolution on the textures, FF7 was actually untextured for the most part anyway. There's no way to avoid building modern models, with high polygon counts and much higher animation bone counts. You can't reuse anything from the original art. It's unlikely they even still *have* the source models for the pre-rendered backgrounds.

Yes, the tools for making game art are better now. But the skill and time required to make good art is the same as it's ever been. And now we need more of it. A lot more.

So yes, I don't think there's massive cost disparity for Square between doing 'just the art' and doing 'make a new game' in this case. As I say, code has ceased to be the bottleneck in modern console game development.

[KissMammal]

So yes, I don't think there's massive cost disparity for Square between doing 'just the art' and doing 'make a new game' in this case.

Wahhhhhhhh? You're not serious, are you...?

Surely building an entirely new game is infinitely more work and expense. Everything, from gameplay to the combat system to level design to dialogue to character design to the graphics engine has to be completely redone from scratch. You also have to factor in a lengthy preproduction phase and extensive testing, tweaking and balancing to do after.

With an HD remake, 'all' that needs to be done is the graphical overhaul. No small task, admittedly, and I'm sure there's quite a bit more to it than that, but that's the majority of the work, surely?

I also don't think anyone would expect a remake of FFVII to look like a AAA PS4 game, just, you know, like the original but prettier.

[Flabyo]

I'm not getting my point across.

This isn't the kind of forum where we argue, so I'll stop now.

[KissMammal]

Sorry, no offence intended. I was very interested in your insight there, just a bit shocked, that's all. I am certainly not wanting to get into an argument about it, sincerely hope I'm not coming across that way!

As I say, I could well be talking out of my arse, just making a casual observation.

I had heard that they no longer have access to all the original pre-rendered art (from before it got all compressed to fit onto a PS1 disc, that is) and this was the main barrier holding back a straight HD remake or remaster, I just can't help thinking with the game they're making they are over-egging it a bit. I dunno, it seems to me like colourising an old black and white movie instead of just doing a new fresh B&W remaster of it, if that slightly dodgy analogy makes any sense...

[macstat]

I think that arguing something as subjective as your perception of specific style isnt worth getting so excited. Of course you can have your own preferences but its best to remember that they arent objective measures of what this game should look like, so its best not to treat them as universal truth (especially based on one trailer)

Also even more than earlier I think that's really the case of jumping to conclusions to early. You assume a lot about how this new style, new character visuals will affect your enjoyment of new game. Hell, you can even make it happen, self-fulfilling prophecy. Your huge scepticism will affect your view on final product VII, and i dont think that's really healthy.

ps. I think Homer analogy was huge miss. FF7 remake fist perfectly in how anime style CGI has been done in last few years, while Homer was specifically done to be creepy.

[DomsBeard]

Soon as I saw the trailer I thought it looked just like Advent Children which is a spin off set after the end of VII (I noticed it arrived on Netflix the other day).

[Alex79]

http://www.ibtimes.com/playstation-netw ... ns-2248963

Hack a bank, hack the pentagon to highlight security flaws, whatever, but the only people hurt by stuff like this is the end user.

Cunts.

[Flabyo]

DoS attacks aren't hacking. All you need to do them is sufficient server capability.

There's very little a company can do to mitigate them when they happen other than to use very aggressive cache setups (which are no use with a 'live' environment anyway, that's more useful for someone like the BBC whose content isn't rapidly changing). And it's possible to mess that kind of strategy up (see what happened to Steam on Christmas Day).

The only other remotely viable solution is to have large amounts of spare server capacity, but it's not cost effective to have massive amounts that only get used when the site is attacked. There are cloud scaling solutions that can ramp up quickly and help, but again, you're paying huge amounts of money for something that only gets used occasionally. Safety critical stuff absolutely should (and probably does) use these, but a gaming service isn't exactly infrastructure critical.

DoS attacks rely on a fundamental flaw in how the internet works. There's only one way to end them for good, and that's completely rewrite how the internet works. And that's not happening any time soon.

All we can do then is wait for the authorities to find the people doing it and arrest them. They're simply a fact of modern life now.

[ratsoalbion]

PS+ subs will be automatically extended to compensate for the downtime apparently.

[Alex79]

That's good, Sony are generally pretty good with that. Remember when we got two free games when it was out for ages a few years back.