Caltrops - Dragon Age 2





	[quote name="jeep"][quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]But by the same token, I can think of plenty of PC games designed to run on 16MB 486es that still exhibit more complexity than something like Dragon Age. At a certain point - and I think we probably passed this point with the <i>original</i> Xbox - it becomes increasingly difficult to blame certain developers' lack of ambition on hardware constraints, real as those constraints may be.[/quote] Finally something I can't blame on game journalism! Everything else is still their fault, though. You are right: developers <i>could</i> make games with ambitious social engines alongside pretty graphics. In fact I've seen it with the resource/crafting/economic systems in eve online and swg. I don't want them to just run it in some datacenter, though. I think toady (as terrible a coder as he is) has still demonstrated this stuff can be run locally on one thread if a developer is clever. I guess I'm saying it's no longer <i>very hard</i> and is now merely <i>pretty hard</i> so pretty ambitious devs should be able to do it. Fussbett is right: developers who work on AAA games can only make what their investors will fund. Markets for nonessential goods don't just exist, though. Someone makes something cool and it brings people along, creating and then expanding a market. I know investors are so lazy they may never put dwarf fortress, dragon age and minecraft together. I know it would take 10 groups of them to make one awesome finished product. I know I want that product, though. /jeep/ ...I played Eschalon Books 1/2 they were suppose to be old-school turn based but they were very stale. There was no reason the distances between stuff couldn't be shortened and the town layouts generated procedurally. [/quote]