According to Ken Levine, the stance of Microsoft-owned Blizzard on realism is worth considering.
In an interview with IGN as part of the publication’s IGN Icons series, BioShock creator Ken Levine shared his thoughts on the perennial debate between realistic and stylized graphics. He believes that using the latest technology to achieve realistic graphics is expensive and doesn’t age as well as a more stylized approach. Levine’s argument is certainly not new. Blizzard Entertainment, for example, is known for its stylized graphics that age well, as seen in World of Warcraft. Even Levine’s next game, Judas (which runs on Unreal Engine 5), features stylized graphics. Given this, it’s unlikely he’ll support cutting-edge technologies like path tracing. He also explained why Judas is taking so long to complete.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been a company that said, ‘Oh my God, we need the latest and greatest technology.’ In the rendering space, we’ve never been that kind of company. Outside of SWAT 4, we’ve never tried to achieve ultrarealism in our games. It’s expensive and doesn’t age well. BioShock still looks good because it didn’t try to render every nut and bolt super realistically. It looked realistic, but it was more stylized. If you have the right art director and approach, you don’t need to be on the cutting edge of technology. Even the stuff we’re doing with Judas is not CPU intensive. It’s labor-intensive on our end, and Baldur’s Gate is the same way. There was just a ton of work behind that. None of it was particularly technologically demanding. They had to manage and think about a billion branching tree structures, and I tip my hat to them because they did an amazing job, but that’s not a technological or hardware challenge. It’s an engineering and thought challenge.
The reason it took so long isn’t related to rendering technology. It was figuring out how to craft the system – this narrative Lego system that combines modular elements dynamically at runtime to create reactive stories for the player. We had the technology, and then we had to figure out how to write a story for it. How do we write stories with maximum leverage? As much as you love the stories from BioShock and BioShock Infinite, those games are pretty linear; outside of combat, they aren’t highly reactive to player action. I really wanted to make a game that was sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from that,” said Levine.
Judas still doesn’t have a release date. Hopefully, we’ll find out next month at Summer Game Fest.
Leave a Reply