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Hideo Kojima To Depart Konami; Metal Gear Franchise Changing Hands
An anonymous reader writes: Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima is set to leave the video game publisher Konami, ending 29 years of service. Konami had announced a restructuring earlier this year, and observant fans recently noticed the removal of references to Kojima Productions from the company's web site. A source speaking to Gamespot states that both developments are the result of a "power struggle" between the studio and its parent. Konami has now confirmed to the English-speaking press that Kojima will work on The Phantom Pain until it is completed, but they are searching for new staff to take over the Metal Gear series. Kojima's only other announced project was Silent Hills, a horror game created in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro.
Metal Gear... It can't be!
Maybe they can get EA to take over stewardship of the franchise! Those guys sure know how to nourish and cherish a beloved series, don't they?
Much like how Sony mistreated the guy who developed the original Playstation.
Ken Kuturagi, who was batshit insane in his design decisions. Developers complained about the arcane architecture of the PS2 and then he made something even MORE arcane.
Sure they're both extremely powerful for their time in certain ways, but Kuturagi forgot that developers are lazy, especially X86 devs and that they would be unwilling to take the extra measures for the most part.
Having shipped a few PS2 games, and helped numerous PS3 devs, the situation is a little more complicated then that.
The PS2 had *blazing* fast VRAM bltblt copies. Yes, the cpus (EE, SPU, IOP, VU0, VU1) were a complete bitch to write for, but it was a beautiful site to behind when everything was working.
While the PS2 had a completely broken Z-Test (who the hell QA'd this??), it was ahead of its time. It predicted multi-core architecture that (game) devs had to embrace sooner or later. The Xbox with its unified memory definitely made things WAY easier then the complicated PS2.
The PS3 with its 6 SPU's of only 128KB each (!) forced developers to break the game up into "small jobs". It highlighted the problems of C++ OOP -- that it doesn't scale, and that you NEED to use DOD (Data Orientated Design) in order to achieve high performance. So while the PS2 and PS3 were "batshit insane" it had unintended benefit -- help move developers to embrace the "multi-core DOD" future.
On Xbox developers were typically CPU bound, while on PS3 developers were typically GPU bound.
The problem with the success of PS2 and failure of the PS3 was that Sony forgot what business they were in!? They were NOT a hardware manufacturer, but an entertainment company. It cost them 4 years of being in the red with the PS3 to remember this fact.
Sony moving to x86 for the PS4 allowed them to use "commodity" parts & pricing. Make things _easy_ for the developer and you'll get more/better games, or at least that was their justification.
So while I agree that yes x86 game devs tend to be lazy compared to console devs, the x86 guys had a valid point:
* Why is the hardware SO complicated?
The battle between fast & rigid and slow & flexible is never an easy one to answer.
Monosodium glutamate? We're talking about MGS here, not MSG.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
As for the Metal Gear series getting any better, I don't think I trust Konami circa 2015 to do the franchise justice. Castlevania's name is forever tarnished by subpar God of War clones; Pro Evo Soccer has been floundering about in some attempt to copy FIFA, forgetting all about the more arcade-styled gameplay that set the series apart to begin with; Gradius, Contra, BomberMan (yep, they own that now!) and more franchises than I can remember are essentially dead to them; and the franchises they do still make games for just aren't making them any money due to a complete lack of advertising or just being shoddy products in general.