Slashdot Mirror
No Crysis for EA or Consoles
There was a lot of buzz this weekend about the possibility that EA would be buying Crytek, the company currently working on the uber-shiny Crysis PC game. IGN checked in with the mammoth publisher and, at least according to EA, there are no plans for Crytek to join the EA family. Crytek did have some news to share at the Leipzig Games Convention, though: Crysis won't be on the next-gen consoles. It's just too intensive for even the likes of the 360 or PS3, apparently.
Enough with people calling programmers crappy. For example, Oblivion, every says it has huge hardware demands and crashes. It is possible that they are all hack programmers, but I tend to think management is really to blame. I am a programmer, and as much as the arrogant programmers will argue, you will always have bugs in your code if it reaches a certain point of complexity. Video games are very complex and there will always be bugs. Management is in control of the QA process and they decide when to release a game with bugs. If management and technical directors decide that X is the hardware requirements of the game, then what is the programmer going to do? I am not going to be spending my hours making my code run 4% faster on hardware below the specs set by management. I'm sure most game programmers could spend a few weeks squeezing every drop of performance out but guess what, they would get fired for wasting time. "But look, it runs on a 486!!!".
Thank God EA has been stopped from absorbing yet another promising game studio. I was worried there for a minute. As for the "no consoles" thing, they think the 360 is too weak? Are they kidding? There are a lot of people who can't even afford a 360, nevermind the PS3.. and they expect to market their game to the "teenagers with enough free time but also somehow have hojillions of dollars" niche? Maybe I'm the minority here, but I don't find it very feasible to spend many thousands of dollars just for a system to play one extra game that I probably won't have the time to play. Not only that, but if this is the only game that will require such ridiculous system specs, why would we invest in such a system for some 40 hours of gameplay only to be left with a machine that overkills the rest of our collection?
Blerg.
I'd hardly call them crappy programmers. They're pushing the absolute barriers of PC gaming and they're not compromising their vision just so they can push more units on a console (i.e. Oblivion). It's actually refreshing to see a company going straight to the limit instead of trying to cater to their pocket book. Besides, if you bought a Mac, you weren't really interested in gaming anyways.