High-Tech Games

GameSpot has posted up a great article called “High-Tech Games: Pushing the Envelope in 2001 and Beyond”. The article talks about how advanced games are getting and compares many of the contenders that will be showing up this year. Included in the article are games such as Black & White, Dungeon Siege, and Neverwinter Nights.

Here’s an excerpt from their page on Neverwinter Nights:

The main thing is that BioWare wanted to design the game’s architecture around the needs of the multiplayer environment, and this became one of the toughest things to pull off. “In the Infinity engine games, we had to worry about only a maximum of 6 players. In Neverwinter Nights, we wanted the number of players to scale up with the available hardware,” says Grieg. “This required an entirely new approach to the system. In Baldur’s Gate, players had the entire set of game data on their machines. That meant that each machine didn’t need to be told all of the details of each creature or area. In Neverwinter Nights, the players will be creating their own content. In this case, every piece of information needs to be sent from the server to all of the player clients. A lot of effort must be expended to ensure that this information is as small as possible without limiting the design of the game.”

And here’s a quick take from the Dungeon Siege section:

Thanks to this new engine, Dungeon Siege takes advantage of state-of-the-art graphics to create a continuous gameworld. Using the latest in 3D hardware acceleration, features such as colored lighting effects, weather effects, a bone-skin character deformation system, real-time blending, and a night-and-day cycle are some of the advances that this action RPG showcases. The result is that trees sway in the wind, as do smoke and weapon fire, and spell effects produce stunning visuals.