The always effusive Cliff Bleszinski recently spoke his mind to Develop on a wide variety of subjects. Relating to the look and setting of numerous games, Bleszinski attributes much of it to what the hardware is good at.
"I just think that the technology of this generation just happens to be very good at rendering metals and stones and dramatic lighting, which is why you see a lot of pillars and girders and destroyed blown-out areas because that’s what the bump-mapping happens to do very well," explained Bleszinski. "At the same time, in this generation the translucent effects are very hard to pull off. That’s why everybody sees a lot of these bald characters and wonder why games feature so many f***ing space marines. Well, the tech is good at showing off armor and it’s not that good at doing hair. That’s why we have bald space marines. There’s your answer people."
While Crytek and the CryEngine 3 are competitors to Unreal Engine 3, he was very happy that the competition is there. "That's the nature of capitalism," he responded. "If there wasn't a competitor out there we wouldn't have Tim Sweeney coming in shouting 'oh my god we have to upgrade this, that and this! We've got to stay competitive!' Without a competitor you just get lazy and fat and complacent. I like the fact that there's competition out there, it keeps our programmers up at night. Crytek is continuing to make strides on making its hardware more console friendly, which is certainly an intelligent direction."
When asked about the ZeniMax acquisition of id Software, Bleszinski described his mind as blown. "id was always the studio I had my eyes on in the early days as far as wondering if we could be as good as them if not better," Bleszinski related. "When we had Unreal Tournament they had Quake 3 which is one of those legendary showdowns between two games. To see this happen to the id guys just blows my mind. To see the old standbys go through these kinds of changes – like with 3D Realms closing up Duke Nukem – it’s really shocking. We all came from the same mould from the shareware days; these studios have been around forever, and to see them acquired like that is a surprise.
"I think in the long term it will probably be a good thing for id," he added. "It will add stability, it will help them leverage their properties more; but in the meantime it’s so surreal. As they say, the one constant is change."
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