DICE says modern gamers would be unable to "understand" Frostbite 2 engine - by thiefinthedark
june gloom on 4/7/2011 at 18:29
That's part of what killed TF2 for me. You couldn't find a real game anymore because every fucking server was using server mods that gave you donation perks. Worse, many of them let you 'test' said perks out before donating. So you had engineers fucking riding on top of roving turrets that shot an endless stream of rockets while permanently invisible spies backstabbed the whole team.
Fuck TF2.
Koki on 4/7/2011 at 19:34
Doesn't TF2 have an equivalent of a Ranked server?
catbarf on 4/7/2011 at 20:06
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
From a non-technical side, I'd much rather have a multiplayer shooter without mod tools. Keeping a game's multi focused on a relatively small amount of official content means servers full of players playing content everyone has rather than a fragmented online community where it's impossible to find a game you want to join. That's just me, though; I typically stop playing multiplayer games when the amount of content starts to exceed the userbase's ability to stay cohesive.
Battlefield 2 is still going strong despite the popularity of Project Reality and other mods. UT2k4 similarly has an active online community, despite the dozens upon dozens of popular mods released for it. People talk about this idea of fracturing the community, but I've never seen mods do it. If it's something you need to go and download, and then has its own server list independent of the main one, there's no crossover. Minor server plugins that are still compatible with the regular game and total conversions shouldn't be considered in the same category.
Fafhrd on 4/7/2011 at 21:07
This is probably more driven by the fact that Frostbite is EA's big in-house engine now, and the majority of their AAA releases going forward are going to be using it. Releasing the tools for BF3 equates to releasing the tools for Need for Speed: The Run, and who knows how many unannounced titles.
Aerothorn on 4/7/2011 at 22:48
Yeah, it makes a certain sense from a business standpoint (not the least of which is making people pay for DLC rather than getting free mods) but the excuse is still total fucking bullshit, made worse by the fact that the guy almost certainly KNOWS its total bullshit.
catbarf on 5/7/2011 at 04:18
But it's really not total bullshit. The complexity of game engines has gone way, way up since the Dark engine was created, and in-house purpose-built engines (as opposed to flexible platforms like UDK or Source) are even less straightforward. A mod team of five to ten amateurs probably isn't going to be able to do much with tools designed for thirty to forty nine-to-five professionals, and that's totally leaving aside the financial and proprietorial concerns.
Renault on 5/7/2011 at 05:15
You gotta love id software though, who basically said the same thing a few years back (Rage modding will be too complex for amateurs), but recently announced that they were releasing modding tools with the game at release time anyway.
Melan on 5/7/2011 at 05:26
I don't know, Dromed is quirky, but it is not all that hard to produce good content with. More than 900 FMs say it is not rocket science to use.
WRT modern engines, the reliance on external apps, like Eldron wrote, is a killer. If your ability to create a level depends on mastering three or four complex systems and their interactions, that cuts down on the pool of potential takers, especially if three of the four are expensive commercial utilities. I can build pretty fine stuff in TDM since it is primarily brush- and patch-based, while I'd be royally screwed if I had to work for an engine that required me to model the terrain outside, then import it. More likely, I would not even try.
Sulphur on 5/7/2011 at 05:35
Quote Posted by Brethren
You gotta love id software though, who basically said the same thing a few years back (Rage modding will be too complex for amateurs), but recently announced that they were releasing modding tools with the game at release time anyway.
Yeah, but I think the upshot of it is that you can't really create new maps with it, just modify existing ones. Not too sure if they're releasing that functionality, but it's going to be insane anyway: Carmack said that it takes a huge amount of time to bake the levels in Rage thanks to the megatexture thing, you've got entire GBs of texture data going into any one map thanks to the way it works.
nicked on 5/7/2011 at 05:56
All you have to do is look at the figures to show how much less important mod tools are these days - in 2000, there were hundreds of great Half-Life maps and mods, some so good they got commercial releases from Valve. Valve show nothing but support for the mod community, and so they released the editor and all the modding tools for Half-Life 2 when that came out. The result? It's largely too complex to make a good Half-Life 2 mod without some serious effort and commitment, so we have far, far fewer of them.
Follow that trend through to much more complex engines than Source and it'd be like Pixar packaging their inhouse CGI software with Toy Story DVDs.
The few people able to use them probably don't need to be mucking about with free tools, they're probably already employed in the field. That and if you look at the massive rise of indie games over the same time period, and you'll see it's now much easier for almost anyone to make a stand-alone game with Untiy, Game Maker and programs like that.
