Perception

There is a moment in time where when you become a Game Developer your perception shifts. You begin to take those fifteen minutes in Rage to just sit there and argue with your fellow developers about how id, the creator of Rage, got those textures into the game, about how the stairs in Mass Effect 1, aren’t really stairs but some amazing normal map work. You begin to notice the seams in the environment, the small touches that an artist added to a room, or the trigger volumes that initiate a dialog sequence.

Our perception of games has been altered by our knowledge we have gained in making games. But this doesn’t ruin the magic for us, no, not by a long shot. Watching all of the debut new videos that are coming out of E3 is a tremendous amount of fun, because now we are trying to break down how the game was built.

For example, we were watching the Watch_Dog’s trailer and immediately were all struck by the sheer number of textures, spec maps, animations, that was going on in the opening scene. We began to speculate how much of the interactions, mostly that crazy intersection crash is scripted or not. When those cars crashed I was struck by the fact that bystanders were helping people out of the ruined cars, that a man is trying to wake his dead wife who is in the driver’s seat and what it all means if that was actually a dynamic instance.

There is a moment in the Beyond trailer as well where I saw the fan, which was across the room of that office, actually causing ripples on the main characters shirt. How in the heck was that accomplished? Tesselation? There is no way it’s animated for something so small.

So go ahead, take a look at these videos and ask yourself what is it that you are noticing?

WatchDogs

Beyond