Posted on Friday, January 20 @ 20:13:07 Eastern by Jonathan_Leack
If you were to step back in time about 10-20 years, one thing you would notice is that gamers loved talking about bits and polygons. The two metrics were a numerical way to judge the horsepower of a gaming platform, but that has gone the way of the dinosaur now that processes are much more complex. However, Naughty Dog might be bringing big numbers back in style by not just doubling, but quadragintupling (yes, that's the word for 40x) the amount of polygons used on character models.
Naughty Dog's career page currently shows an availability for a character artist, but it isn't the fact that there's a job opening that makes it interesting, but rather what the details listed say. Under the responsibilities section of the recruitment entry it states:
This digital sculptor will be responsible for making million poly models game ready, and support highest-res characters for renderings.
In contrast, a gorgeous game like God of War 3 uses 20,000 polygons for its Kratos model, while Killzone 3's high-resolution Sev uses 16,500 total polygons. That's a substantial difference, and one that is likely impossible on current generation consoles or handhelds. Given Naughty Dog's exclusivity to PlayStation, it's pretty clear that a successor to the PlayStation 3 would be called for to make rendering over a million polygons possible.
So the game will likely be gorgeous, but the second question beckoned is what the game will be. Naughty Dog have stated that outside of their upcoming The Last of Us release this year there's another game being worked on by a second division of the growing studio. Uncharted 4 is certainly a possibility, but if they're working on a game for the next generation, it's unlikely since they have a history of using a new IP for each new PlayStation console. Let the rumors commence.
As I said before , Mass Effect is an incredible universe. ME1, 2 and 3 focused on Shepard’s tale but set the scene for books and graphic novels to complement that story arc and chronicle the stories of other characters such as Anderson, and the Illusive Man whose adventures feed into the events we have already played through. It’s testament to BioWare’s creation that the tapestry is so rich that even after the main plot and the complimentary plots are taken care of there is... read more...
"16 bits? DOUBLE the NES? I guess if you play video games on a LCD screen or something..." *Guffaw*
Get out of my sight, you disgust me... in fact get your **** and get out, your fired!
And on that day a single polygon became the bane of one artists life.
Also, I'm excited for this.
Grammariamos! :Waves wand: