Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

I had a moan about XCOM 1 being prettier than XCOM 2 the other day and got some nice replies from the Art Director of both, Greg Foertsch.¹

Having replayed both again just lately, it's striking to me how much more interesting 1 is visually. It uses baked lighting (Unreal's Lightmass, first seen in Gears 2) and gets lovely results; 2 doesn't, and gets no indirect lighting.

XCOM 2 also has less of the nice cartoony style of 1, going for something closer to generically modern - lots of clean shiny surfaces with screenspace reflections (not part of UE3, so done custom for XCOM 2 or backported from UE4), very flat, very sparse. The best-looking areas (forests, etc) break the visual up with too much noise, which feels like an occasional bandaid on the lack of global illumination, which gives some amount of "free" variation to the scene on top of just being very pleasant.

My assumption is that 2 ditched static lighting in favour of more semi-procgen level assembly and swappable time of day and stuff, which you can still statically light, but with a lot of extra hassle. Personally, it's hard for me to see it as worth it without any other GI subbing in.

As I said on Twitter, though, I'll probably be in the minority in caring what this type of game looks like at all. Which is where Greg came in:

Greg Foertsch:

I appreciate that minority. The baked lighting in XCOM:EU served it well and along with a lot of familiar environments, really resonated with players. Your assessment of the games is correct. The design problems in X2 we were trying to tackle dictated some of the decisions that were made. XCOM:EU will always be my favorite of the two. Lots of good insights in your comments. I could talk about this stuff all day

And in response to someone else, about the dynamic lighting:

Correct. The addition of procedural levels and dynamic lighting together had a significant impact on my approach to the art direction

Greg seems cool, thanks Greg

1. (i like to document these sorts of twitter interactions on cohost now because i think cohost will actually tell me before it shuts off for good)

I really desperately need well-meaning gamers to stop assuming that the indie side of the industry doesn't have labor issues. Crunch is certainly very common in indie studios. Bad managers are common. Abuse and harassment do happen. Plenty of people have had experiences in indie game development that are just as bad what we hear about from the inside of big AAA studios, but we hardly ever hear about it.

Plenty of indie productions are shambolic disasters fueled by human blood, including some of games that you love. Plenty of people toil away in indie studios being underpaid or mistreated. Plenty of those games aren't even good.

Like yeah Bobby Kotick should be flayed alive or whatever, sure. But let me be real with you, plenty of indie studios are just run like a personal fiefdom and/or harem by some small business tyrant who got a loan from his dad. Plenty of indie studios are, spiritually, a scheme to pay off a steep debt incurred with a publisher by crunching some people into an early exit from the industry (or worse). Plenty of indie studios are shitty little cults of personality built around some guy who bullseyed the zeitgeist once.

the thing about development hell is that often there is no "the game as originally envisioned" to be pined for or found with "just a little more time"

a lot of times you end up in development hell because the core vision is vague, contradictory, keeps changing, has big holes in it. It's not that those games fell short of their original ideals so much as they were trying to build a brick house on a swamp

sometimes, if you're lucky, you firm it up in the right places and it stabilizes

other times it just sinks

I just finished a three-year stint on a AAA game project that has been "in development" for at least six years. This client has now gone back to essentially pre-production. One of the things they're struggling with is carrying around a huuuuge amount of technical debt for games that never shipped.

We're talking things like an inventory system (built two games ago) that was never fit for purpose stacked on top of a backpack system (built three games ago) that was a colossal hack, which has to interact with "pockets" (built one game ago) for the player character to put their weapon in. Except that the inventory system is on an entirely different backend than the pocket system and doesn't replicate equipped weapons correctly, so the UI team (that's me!) has to assign a weapon picture directly to a player weapon slot based on their pocket index.

Throughout the project, I would poke the lasagne only to find it rotten all the way through. There was no "original vision" to RETVRN to. The vision was always inspired by whatever game was currently in vogue. As a UI programmer, I was constantly asked to display information to the player that simply did not exist. But because it was always for an "important demo," my team would have to fake the data themselves. This was a very bad idea (and I told them as such!!) because it meant that upper management would look at the game and see massive improvements while it was just another layer of load-bearing paint.

(article: https://www.eurogamer.net/civilization-7-pairs-seismic-changes-with-a-lovably-familiar-formula)

like. I like simulation for simulation's sake! I do. But if none of it's exposed to the player, a LOT of times you end up with a black box that is indistinguishable from a random number generator. This is especially common with people trying to make social simulations. If you're doing something neat, you have to surface it, or consider whether it's worth doing at all.