What they did achieve was already done on gta 4. Only the map is 5x bigger and they cull / crank the view distance way down so its technically not even rendered anyway. Aside from fading between 2 shadow quality resolutions, it seems like Unity could create this same world.
Reading a game from 2 sources isnt impressing me enough to warrant cutting corners on everything I talked about.
I mean if a large portion of their game was meant to be a country side outdoor setting, why did they not put enough art emphasis on it? And you’re talking about streaming? Again this has nothing to do with optimizations, it is just lazy cut corners.
Why? Because I finally realize, they simply didn’t need to.
Could they have made the mountain region much more explore-able and immersive? Sure.
Could they have done everything I’m ‘complaining’ about and still have it run on consoles? I think so.
But they simply didn’t need to because this was enough to get them their profit. None of what I mentioned is probably going to make or break their figures.
Thats a typical salesman quality though. “Just look at what we actually managed to pull off!” Instead of “Why wasn’t the budget used to make a better game”. I guess it just simply didn’t need to. Thats it. No optimization arguments or anything. It could have everything I wanted it to have, and still run on the old hardware, but it just didnt need to.
My boss had a saying: “Everything is easy for the guy that doesn’t have to do it.” My son was watching a 'caster play through GTA5 so I got to see a mix of cut-scenes and game play. I was impressed.
I really think some people are being overpaid with these budgets instead of investing it where it should be.
For instance a thought in the back of my mind is maybe they pay 1 artist a good salary to just model 1 building for a week or two. When if it was his own game or his own personal project, he could really get it done in a few days. A ‘mechanics pay’ if you will. He gets paid 3-4x than what is actually needed. Maybe thats happening all across the studio
I haven’t played the game yet, so I cannot comment on the quality, but with sales surpassing $1 billion dollars in three days, I think the money was well spent whatever they did with it.
The development budget was 110 million, as pointed out already.
$1 billion in retail sales - not $1 billion in Rockstar’s pocket. Sure, they made their money back, but all game development is a risk, and more money doesn’t automatically buy you a sliding scale on quality, just as more artists doesn’t do so.
As Hippocoder says, they did a pretty incredible job - just pulling all those resources together and keeping the ship afloat and on course over a five year period is a crazy achievement.
Ultimately, if you think they did a rubbish job and you can do better: Show us
While I concur that what they did was awesome given the hardware limitations, saying the above comment is a bit silly - if you give me an insane amount of money only then one could even to try such a venture - I’d still be limited by the fact that I’ve never organized a company n stuff. It’s like saying “oh, the Wii U is not that good you say?? can you make a better console?”
This sounds like someone who has never worked in a creative field…
What most likely happened is that they paid a really experienced artist a good hourly rate to produce quality work in a very efficient time frame. The artist did his job well. Then the Assistant Art Director had him change his work a few times before showing it to the main Art Director. Then the main Art Director had his own tweaks and had the artist do a few more. Then after about 15 iterations everyone in the art department was happy and sent it up the pipeline for approvals. The art was rejected because the project’s Creative Director had made some sweepeing stylistic changes that now needed to be incorporated so the artist did 5 more iterations before getting final approvals from upper management. But upper management decided to muck around with it some more because one of them showed it to his 7 year old daughter who’s favorite color is lime green and just had to incorporate it somewhere and oh yeah change the windows to pink and put a princess crown on top of the building. So the artist had to incorporate all the new changes on all the buildings he spent the last two weeks on before leaving for the weekend. When he came back in Monday morning, it turns out the Upper Manager’s daughter actually likes pink more then lime green, so…
This shit happens folks. The artist is not over paid.
I have to agree with Hippo and I also have a background in art working in the industry for the last 8 years. Yes, if I had to do a better model than what you see in most of the shots, I could. That doesn’t mean much since it isn’t really a direct comparison. The amount of objects they are drawing in a single scene is still very high with tons of AI that is being processed, as well as countless other rendering effects, particles, and sound.
Having made a crappy football game on the 360 and seeing how hard it was for our team to squeeze all the performance out of the machine, it is a lot more difficult than we first imagined. Since then all projects I have been a part of follow several phases of development where models are placeholder, then polished, then cut back down when needed. Regardless the process is very time consuming and laborious. The last 20% of the product can be the longest part of the development, and usually is in my experience.
As a side note, while I think they care about the out of city environment, it us probably not high on their priority due to 90% of the games focus will. E in the city. Go explore more in game and I am sure some of their scenes will be quite impressive if you consider the limitations they were under.
I had some time to play around with GTA5 and I will say that for the amount of SCOPE that is in the game (fog notwithstanding. And yes if you look into something far enough in real life, depending on where you live, objects will fog in the distance.), the amount of activity going on at any given time, the breadth of detail in the game, I am VERY impressed. I am not in the industry, so I can’t really comment on how “poor” the terrain looks, but I am capable of extreme detail in my work. If I had to choose between graphical polish and having a living world with AI, independent people doing their thing, great lighting and sound. And VERY aggressive police officers who now stop at NOTHING to put you down, I am very impressed with this game. I can already imagine the old consoles trying to keep up with this large game… I can saw the same about a few other open world games, but I have never seen anyone else do it better than Rockstar and Bethesda (in my personal experience as a gamer).
But don’t take my word to heart… I am just an indie dev building a game in my vision.
Tough crowd, personally I thought GTA V had some of the most impressive visuals of this generation. Yes there’s fog, but it’s pretty natural, it’s how California and LA actually look, LA is one of the smoggiest cities in the world! When you get out into the desert the fog effect matches pretty accurately how it looks in real life out in the Mojave, and yes the distances are obviously much smaller than in real life, so the haze and fog are closer, but seriously, that fog to me was impressive, especially the volumetric shadow casting on these pretty ancient GPU’s.
If you want to see a visually beautiful game full of detail on those platforms then check out Uncharted 3 or The Last Of Us. Those games look better than most current gen PC games, they’re nothing technically outstanding, it’s simply the artwork that’s amazing. But you couldn’t do that on the PS3 and XBox 360 for a game the scope of GTA. GTA V’s city is far more detailed than the city in any other open-world game I’ve seen on those platforms, just visually speaking. You have an incredibly small texture and polygon limits, very weak processing, and yet they can do all of that in addition to running a pretty effective set of simulations for the cities. The landscape is to me much more explorable than the other behemoth of open world games Skyrim, there are certainly more activities to pursue, more little nooks and crannies and easter eggs, more ways to get around, more things to do, more paths hidden and clearly marked. All this running on something that’s equivalent to pretty much a ten year old PC.
And yes you could make this all in Unity. Making something in Unity isn’t a mark of “oh well if you can make it in Unity then it’s shite”. This stuff is really the answer to all those people that keep asking “Can you do make an AAAA game with Unity?”. Yes absolutely you could make these games with Unity, if you had a great art department. Most of the mechanics are dirt simple in modern games, it’s just that most people with the funds and desire to use Unity don’t have the patience to refine a game mechanic to that level, nor employ a creative team to generate graphics of that quality at that quantity. Most people just don’t have the money and time to do that, yet most people use Unity because it’s initially easy. But merely slapping together some presets isn’t how you make an AAAA game, nor if you’re a modeller simply modelling some buildings or landscape, to make an AAAA game you pretty much need to invest the same amount of effort and follow similar processes to those making AAAA games. Unity game engine can easily handle it, most people though can’t.
Gotta join in on the backlash to this thread. GTA 5 looks generally quite good and overall you guys have very little ground to stand on when it comes to dissing it’s visuals. Just because you can see a blurry texture or two doesn’t mean the game is “not impressive”.
Also why are people getting into hissy fits about the marketing costing a lot of money? The fact that the game is well marketed is why we’re even talking about it at all besides every post in this thread being “What is GTA 5”?
Also it’s probably a lot more complex than what they pay a guy to do 3D art… such a huge project must need all kind of supervision and be sure everything fits well together.
Imagine supervising and testing everything!!.. you have to give everything an ok, from simple aesthetics, to legal stuff, I mean you never know.
But this is just guessing… I’m just saying it’s certainly more complex than we realize.
