First and clear point. Sandlot had only two paths. Either go for a hectic environment with as many simultaneous enemies, bullets and destruction as possible with the obvious graphics quality trade off. Or go for a game with good graphics and then have just a few enemies at the same time in nicely detailed but totally or almost static backgrounds which is what happens in 99%+ of the games these days. They decided long ago to follow the first path. If you want the second path go play another game or go for Iron Rain.
Second. Sandlot is a very small company, so what they've achieved is still remarkable. They seemingly have no John Carmack, Tim Sweeney, Johan Andersson, or similar level guru. Even so, they still have managed to create and improve a game engine that handles a remarkable number of graphics entities at the same time. Is it perfect? No, but it's still very good and it creates an awesome gameplay experience, completely unique if people mostly bothered to really learn it. Do remember that it's not only graphics that are involved. There's physics, movement patterns, environment (added in EDF 5), hit detection, and all this adds a lot of requirements for computational power.
Third. They took some really hard chances and succeeded. How many developers ported, adapted and fine tuned reasonably their proprietary engines to run on the Vita, where there's nothing even remotely similar to their games specially in performance? Or on the Switch where they're making strong inroads?
Fourth. Do realize that many of the constraints of Sandlot's engine is not only on the graphics processor but also on the main CPU itself. Controlling the huge amount of entities, from bullets, enemies, enemy parts, NPCs, and their physics properties when necessary requires a lot of computational power that the graphics processor can't handle. So they have 2 bottlenecks, the CPU and GPU.
All major games engines have been developed to provide graphics quality and fidelity over sheer numbers of moving objects. It's what the market wants (I won't discuss the quality of gameplay of the vast majority of the gorgeous games that are produced these days, I find that almost all of them are a boredom festival in gameplay). So no Sandlot can't use any usual game engines like Unreal, CryEngine, and even worse something more generic like Unity or GameMaker.
As a example it's clear that Epic are the company that takes more advantage of Unreal Engine. It's not difficult to see why, they have the unique inside knowledge and extremely vast financial resources and consequentially manpower in numbers and quality to achieve that. Even so it's not unusual for Fortnite, which clearly is a remarkable game in production quality (not talking about gameplay...), to have slowdowns or graphics glitches and other issues. If you even remotely want to compare the number of entities that are at the same time on screen or even on the map and their characteristics with a EDF Sandlot game, well you really have a IQ problem. Is Fortnite it a more optimized game overall? Surely, but again it's like comparing the capabilities of rocket building at Jet Propulsion Labs and a team of students at a small university. Could Epic make a game with the characteristics of a EDF Sandlot game with Fortnite quality graphics for instance. No? For two reasons. The hardware, even current generation consoles and high end game PC's can't handle it. And worse, all processor and GPU development is again 99% geared towards quality and not quantity because it's what the market wants.
Another usual comment that makes me laugh is that there are plenty of games that have more action and enemies than Sandlot ones. Which ones?
There is one (yes 1) that followed a sort of similar approach. The game is World War Z, from Saber Interactive. For starters they also created their own game engine, Swarm Engine, which seems dumb as bats because accordingly to the usual commenting genius on the threads they could have used Unreal or anything else 😂. OK, the answer is that clearly they're just as stupid and incompetent as Sandlot. Moving on. I played World War Z enough to see what they achieved. The numbers of enemies are really high but they followed different paths from Sandlot. Enemies are mostly blurred entities which are much less complex polygon entities than Sandlot ones. Enemies move in concentrated hordes at high speed which create a lot of opportunities for compromises, as for instance you don't have to generate all the hundreds of enemies as most will be out of sight (Sandlot does the same as everyone else, but they have much less chances to take advantage of tricks due to how the game is done). A few (really few) enemies will become more defined when they're attacked or attacking in close quarters, but at the cost of blurring and make more compromises on everything that is not focused. And you don't have a gazillion bullets and explosions at the same time on screen, neither half a city crumbling at the same time. The graphic quality of enemies is largely inferior and they're much less complex entities in World War Z compared to EDF Sandlot games, and environment is a lot better on WWZ compared to EDF Sandlot games, but still graphics quality is clearly not stellar in WWZ. Both games made compromises to achieve what they wanted, and both games are not alike. In gameplay WWZ is the more usual boring brainless shooter, it's still fun, but has no depth, strategy or flair like Sandlot games have (my opinion of course, sales numbers say otherwise).
The crumbling city missions with termites in EDF are look a likes and probably Saber took a peek at them.
Ultimately they're just different games, only probably similar in that they were both so dumb to use proprietary engines and so incompetent because they don't have Borderlands 3 quality graphics which was so, so easy to achieve... 😂
Sandlot does evolve in a few things from game to game. The environment is better on EDF 5, than on 4.1. They removed the dragons, oops wrong, they were not actually removed, tadpoles are dragons (their movement and attack pattern is exactly the same as in 4.1 even down to the blue tadpoles / red dragons behavior, it would have been a waste to throw away all the work on them) , and they were substituted for a enemy with a clearly inferior polygon count and physics complexity (how many times you have tadpoles stuck on buildings or the ground compared to dragons...?). They clearly try to optimize the game as much as possible but there will always be compromises to be made. But unless they clearly reduce the number of enemies and their complexity (no more deroys, giant insects, motherships, etc), the number of bullets on the game from NPCs, enemies and players, and reduce movement patterns the game won't improve much in appearance even for next-gen.
So before you open your mouth think what you're saying... Or just create a better game than Sandlot, if it's that easy.
The game producer, Nobuyuki Okajima from D3 Publisher, has already said that they prefer to add more enemies and zaniness, over quality and fewer glitches, so we can hopefully expect that for the next generations of more powerful consoles and PCs. Please, please let that be true, same gameplay quality and more brain teasers. That will be absolutely awesome.
I wouldn't mind at all having more games with crappy graphics, sound and other compromises but a really good gameplay.
No comments:
Post a Comment