Why is it that relatively inexperienced devs like Naughty Dog and Guerrilla Games can produce incredible results such as Uncharted and Killzone?
But when uber-experienced devs like Bethesda and Bioware have a go, they remove all the effects (such as AA, V-Sync and since I am no tech-wizard, that's all I can think of) that would have made Fallout 3 and Dragon Age far more enjoyable experiences.

Priorities.

Why is it that relatively inexperienced devs like Naughty Dog and Guerrilla Games can produce incredible results such as Uncharted and Killzone?

Inexperienced? Naughty Dog has been around for close to 20 years now (that I know of), and they have always had very experienced people working for them that knew how to push the playstation to it's limits. They have written some great articles sharing their techniques too.

They always release very high quality software. Uncharted 2 almost makes everything else look second rate by comparison. Even the in game cutscenes. The characters have all the little subtle facial emotions and body language that makes you forget you are watching an in-game cinematic at times.

I don't find Bioware to be a high quality developer at all. The storyline content of their games tends to be very good, but that's mostly the result of David Gaider. Everything else they do, not so much. Their games are always full of game stopping, save corrupting bugs. The 360 port of DA:O is still barely playable at times, they only updated to support their DLC. Their expansions and DLC always consists of re-skinned, existing assets. Their NWN 3d engine was piss poor. The models themselves were full of newbie mistakes like ugly texture seams and inner faces on the models making really bad lighting artifacts etc. There was all kind of rending engine bugs, like having everything on screen rendered with blending on, etc... It's like they read the NeHe tutorials and then made their engine, and then hired a bunch of random modelers off a forum.

Bathesda isn't bad, but they usually just make a simple interface and then produce a TON of content around it, and have to support multiple machines. Their elder scrolls games are too opened up to have the same level of graphical detail that you'd get in a smaller, controlled environment like Uncharted. Morrowind didn't even have any clever algorithms, they have said they just forward rendered everything brute force. Also, being a streaming game, the content has to be able to load on the fly.

Uncharted uses small closed off stages where what can be seen from every point at all times is known and can be optimized. They can take as long to load as they want. Naughty Dog also makes only PlayStation games, so they can the best out of the PS3 without having to cut corners to support the PC and the 360. They have always specialized on the PlayStation consoles and gotten the most out of it.

What is your definition of inexperienced? The Crash Bandicoot Series were some of my all time favorite games. Back then the graphics were great and the game play was a lot of fun. Just because the graphics are "uber" does not mean it's a good game.

Priorities.

This and exclusive developers usually get all the keys to the castle as far as support from the manufacturer goes.

<br />Why is it that relatively inexperienced devs like Naughty Dog and Guerrilla Games can produce incredible results such as Uncharted and Killzone?<br />But when uber-experienced devs like Bethesda and Bioware have a go, they remove all the effects (such as AA, V-Sync and since I am no tech-wizard, that's all I can think of) that would have made Fallout 3 and Dragon Age far more enjoyable experiences.<br />

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Ok, perhaps inexperienced is wrong word here, but the rest of my question still stands.

Ok, perhaps inexperienced is wrong word here, but the rest of my question still stands.

Whether or not it stands is questionable.

It's based on the very flawed assumption that things like AA and Vsync are more important than having a stable game on 3 radically different platforms.

Ok, perhaps inexperienced is wrong word here, but the rest of my question still stands.

They are not engine developers. If their existing engine doesn't support these features, they don't bother about it.

To a techie this may sound like a big flaw, but studies have demonstrated consistently that such features have absolutely zero impact on sales.

I don't find Bioware to be a high quality developer at all. The storyline content of their games tends to be very good,[/quote]This is all they are. They are a strong non-engine developer. They focus on their strengths, not increasing texel throughput.

Market agrees they know what to focus on.

Bathesda isn't bad, but they usually just make a simple interface and then produce a TON of content around it,[/quote]Fallout 3 is one of the buggiest pieces of software that came anywhere near my computer in last 10 years.

But again, it barely matters.


Think of it as car manufacturer vs. "pimp my ride". The latter will not be developing their own valves or invent new materials. They don't want people with such skills anywhere near. It's not how they make their name and brand and it's not why customers come to them.

PS3 is a giant PITA to deal with. The Cell architecture is ridonkulous. If you focus on PS3 exclusive you can push the system to the limit. However, If you're releasing on both PS3 and 360 then you're hamstrung on PS3 since you need your codebase to run on both machines. Because the two architectures are so divergent it's *very* difficult to have the same game running well on both systems.

Basically, the architecture of a PS3 exclusive game is fundamentally different than one that can run on both systems.

-me

Well its probably because of PC exclusive games are able to mix-match tons of preferences. If developing multi-platform, it might just be that they standardized. When going to PC though, the option to MSAA with multiple 2x,4x,8x is only a few extra lines of code, so...laziness?