Sid Meier On Industry State

Gamespy had a talk with Sid Meier and Soren Johnson at the DICE event last month, and they've got some interesting commentary on the current state of the gaming industry. From the article: "I think the thing is, if you're going to make a multiplayer game, the days of trying to 'shoehorn' in multiplayer are over. As an aside, I think we're almost reaching a point where single-player games are getting under-served. One reason I really enjoy World of Warcraft is that there's so few good single-player RPGs for the PC right now. I mean, I play with my friends, but I also like to solo -- I have separate characters for each -- because there aren't really any good single-player RPGs out there to play! But anyways, if you're going to make a good multiplayer game, you need to make that a priority from the beginning."

Comments

Re:Civ 4 - How in touch really?

[yassax]

So what you are saying is that a game that has a thousand or so small animated characters on screen would not benefit what-so-ever from hardware and programming APIs designed solely to remove most of the graphics processing from the CPU? You do realize how much calculation is going on behind the scenes? I think any amount more that they can free from the cpu would benifit the game tremendously. *sarcasm*Plus I mean we get globe view. I mean that is by far the most useful feature of the game.*/sarcasm*

Also, I really do not see how any of the Quake engines, or the Unreal engines, or actually any FPS engine could possibly be used with a topdown/isometric style strategy game. I think the only thing in common would be actual direct3d/opengl libraries. Of course I could also be pulling this out of my ass.

On a side note, what is the deal with gaming companies releasing games that do not run right on ATI cards? Civilization 4 is by far an excellent example. I'm guessing thats what chipset you are using, no?