VentureBeat Interview with Jason Sussman

VentrueBeat has an interview with Jason Sussman about how Bungie created the look for Destiny. It's a good read, and even mentions briefly why the game is 30fps instead of 60fps.

Couldn't find this shared yet, sorry if I missed it, I was a little distracted this weekend

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Sussman: It’s a lot of different things. I could get really technical, but I’d bore you to death. A lot has to do with performance. We’re cross-platform, so we had to be very delicate with all four consoles, making sure they have the same experience, that it looks as good as it possibly can on all these consoles. A lot goes into that, from geometry to textures to post effects to particles to how many players you get on the screen. We’re always balancing that out to make sure everyone gets the same experience.

So basically, it could have been even more impressive as next gen only.

I get the feeling PS4/XB1/PC would have made the game even better. I guess XBox360 + PS3 > PC sales.

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Sussman: It’s a lot of different things. I could get really technical, but I’d bore you to death. A lot has to do with performance. We’re cross-platform, so we had to be very delicate with all four consoles, making sure they have the same experience, that it looks as good as it possibly can on all these consoles. A lot goes into that, from geometry to textures to post effects to particles to how many players you get on the screen. We’re always balancing that out to make sure everyone gets the same experience.

So basically, it could have been even more impressive as next gen only.

I get the feeling PS4/XB1/PC would have made the game even better. I guess XBox360 + PS3 > PC sales.

A fraction of either would be more than PC sales, probably by several times.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/less-than-1-of-boxed-call-of-duty-ghosts-sales-were-on-pc/032414

Even if online sales are a large multiple of PC boxed sales, there's just no comparison. Ghosts sold about 7M on Xbox 360 and a smaller but comparable number on PS3. Figures on next-gen are lower, but still in the millions-- and that number is only low because we're still early in the cycle compared to the last two generations.

Making games for PC operating systems is at this point what it was making them for Macs back in the 90s-- a PR move designed more to please fans than actually pay for itself.

Probably the only current extant platforms selling fewer copies of AAA shooters than the PC right now are the Nintendo platforms-- COD did poorly there as well.

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I hear Sussman is a pretty cool guy. He makes awesome art and doesn't afraid of anything.

At least that's what I've been told.

Sussman: It’s a lot of different things. I could get really technical, but I’d bore you to death. A lot has to do with performance. We’re cross-platform, so we had to be very delicate with all four consoles, making sure they have the same experience, that it looks as good as it possibly can on all these consoles. A lot goes into that, from geometry to textures to post effects to particles to how many players you get on the screen. We’re always balancing that out to make sure everyone gets the same experience.

So basically, it could have been even more impressive as next gen only.

I get the feeling PS4/XB1/PC would have made the game even better. I guess XBox360 + PS3 > PC sales.

I figure that if this was just Xbox One and Ps4 then graphically would still get the same deal we have now. Why? With a new cycle comes a sort of re-learning what you can do with the new found technical space while keeping 30 fps or more, while networking all of it.

After a year of raw network data with Destiny along with more experience with the Xbox One and Ps4, then will we be able to see what they can do with the extra power and tech behind each device with out blowing something up. Well... actually... no... something will blow up, something always has to blow up, it will just be smaller due to caution and experience.(Also the work on the frankly inevitable PC version will no doubt help too)

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I figure that if this was just Xbox One and Ps4 then graphically would still get the same deal we have now.

Maybe in terms of the 30fps decision (it is a Bungie game, after all), but the inner workings of the engine might differ significantly. Under the hood, Destiny was designed to play nicely with seventh-gen consoles right down to the light prepass rendering model with a 360-eDRAM-friendly 96 bit-per-pixel G-buffer.

It would have looked somewhat different as a strictly eighth-gen game, I think.

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Or it wouldn't have been made. The smaller nextgen economic base might not have supported it...

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Or it wouldn't have been made. The smaller nextgen economic base might not have supported it...

And doesn't PC have an installed base of hundreds of millions? And isn;t it always connected so piracy is impossible?

:-p

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Heh. I'm reminded of a neat EVE story. There was a big organized group that went around destroying everything in their path and they accidentally uncovered players using advanced bots (which are not allowed) to mine asteroids. They could tell they were bots because the players escape pods would warp to the stations and return to the asteroid belts over and over even though there were giant fleets of doom clogging the system.

PC doesn't necessarily mean no cheating. Or good sales. I'd say supporting the far more locked down PS3 and 360 gave Bungie a better chance of both than supporting PCs ever would have.

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Heh. I'm reminded of a neat EVE story. There was a big organized group that went around destroying everything in their path and they accidentally uncovered players using advanced bots (which are not allowed) to mine asteroids. They could tell they were bots because the players escape pods would warp to the stations and return to the asteroid belts over and over even though there were giant fleets of doom clogging the system.

Well, the problem there is two fold.

1. If bots can play your game, then it's too simple.
2. If players would rather have a bot play for them, then the game is dumb.

This is entirely eliminated by removing boring things from games, and only including fun, interesting things that humans alone could do.

I personally would rather have Destiny be 50 hours where every second is intense and interesting, rather than 10 years where a lot of it is filler.

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It's required to have boring parts.

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This is entirely eliminated by removing boring things from games, and only including fun, interesting things that humans alone could do.

Perhaps, but the larger point is that always connected PC games are not a solution to cheating.

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And the PC install base cannot all handle Destiny. Hell, my EVGA GTX570hd is having a hard time with Watch_Dogs on the lowest possible setting...

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Did you install the PC "fix" mod to stop double-loading frames to clog up VRAM and make it look on-par with consoles?

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Forgot to look for it...

Silly Zack.

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Or it wouldn't have been made. The smaller nextgen economic base might not have supported it...

Maybe. There's a narrative going around that cross-gen games will inevitably sell tons on PS360, but leaked NPD data for many games is already placing a significant majority of sales in the eighth-gen camp (for instance, PS360 apparently only account for ~25% of retail Watch Dogs sales on consoles in the US).

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I figure that if this was just Xbox One and Ps4 then graphically would still get the same deal we have now.

Maybe in terms of the 30fps decision (it is a Bungie game, after all), but the inner workings of the engine might differ significantly. Under the hood, Destiny was designed to play nicely with seventh-gen consoles right down to the light prepass rendering model with a 360-eDRAM-friendly 96 bit-per-pixel G-buffer.

It would have looked somewhat different as a strictly eighth-gen game, I think.

*Oh!* Yea. That's true. I don't think the over all look would be all that different though so close to the changing of the guard. We'll see how things look 2015 onword, or even once the beta hits since it just occurred to me that all we have seen is PS4 stuff.

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VentureBeat Interview with Jason Sussman (Destiny)