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SOE Picks Up Former Monolith Employees

Posted by Zonk on from the shaking-out-the-good-ones dept.

eXxy writes "1UP.com talked to SOE about the Matrix Online announcement, and came away with some info that wasn't in the public PR. SOE is picking up many former MxO employees and offering jobs at their Seattle office, the DC Comics game is PSP/PS3/PC and should be cross-compatible between all three platforms, stuff like that."

6 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Right.. by Propagandhi · · Score: 3, Funny

    I assume the only reason Sony is picking them up is so they can shake any loose change out of their pockets, right?

    /Ok, Sony might not be that evil...

  2. PSP-PS3-PC?!? by KDR_11k · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What does it imply for the graphics quality of a game that gets puton the PC, the PS3 and the PSP? I mean, the PSP is a full generation behind the other two, are they planning on making all assets twice, even with expansions and squeeze it all into the 1.8GB UMD size or what? The PS2 needed a HD to play FF11. The PSP obviously can't have a HD so it will have to rely on the overly expensive MS medium. Which again limits size. I believe they'd actually make more money by dropping the PSP and not making everything in the game twice.

    --
    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    1. Re:PSP-PS3-PC?!? by Babbster · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I doubt that the PS2 version of FFXI "needed" a hard drive. Square probably just didn't want to optimize for running from DVD - it's far simpler to decompress everything once during install, and with hard drive access you've got a much better speed cushion. As one example, Sony's own EQ Online Adventures ran straight from DVD on the PS2 and used memory cards for patches/network/login info.

      As for "making all assets twice," that's not really how it works. After all, you don't need to make all assets twice (or many times) for a PC game that will run from 800x600 to 2048x1536 on computers running a myriad of different video cards and a wide range of CPUs. Art assets (which take up the majority of space) can fairly easily be scaled down. Even the MMOG game engine itself requires much less space than those in single-player games because the majority of computations are done on the game server, not the client.

    2. Re:PSP-PS3-PC?!? by KDR_11k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The gap here is much larger than what you find in the PC world. It's like trying to port Unreal Tournament 2003 to a P2/233 with a Voodoo 2 card and 64MB RAM. With such a huge gap you cannot rely on downsampling textures and autoLODs, you have to pretty much redo your assets. MMORPGs also have unpredictable numbers of objects onscreen (think marketplace), that might become problematic with the RAM unless the game is designed for the PSP first.

      As for the HD/storage meduim, well, something's got to hold the addons and patches.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  3. DC game!!! by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 4, Funny

    > the DC Comics game

    * a_Street_Thug_with_kryptonite_in_his_pocket punches YOU for 8 points of damage!

    * You have died.

    Yeah, I can't wait. :rollseyes

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  4. PSP maybe low end PC equiv? by Taulin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I guess the PSP version will be the same thing as just turning down some settings on the PC version. This usually just means automatically using low poly LOD objects and textures. The best part of online games is that the client software is nothing more than a representation of the data. How it looks has no impact on how the data is manipulated on the server. I am really excited about seeing a console/pc/handheld union.