"AAA" games?.. how do they get away with..

Do you ever look at so called AAA games and think, how do they get away with this?

Prime example in Titanfall 2 on Xbox One.. A tree textured badly.. screenshot attached

I guess the average gamer doesn't spend their time walking around examining the level, but I do, thinking they should've done better for a game costing >$70..

 

Yeah that's pretty horrible lol.. I don't play many AAA games so I couldn't tell you how I feel. But that tree is horrid.

 

background assets no one really cared about
or simply mistakes.
games have a gazzilion different assets, so its very unlikely that there are no errors whatsoever

 

OMG! The game is ruined!

 

Considering Titanfall being a speedy game with no actual time for standing still and examining the level, it just wouldn't make sense to detail any background (?) props in HQ.

They still can do it better - with patches.

 

They probably did not have enough performance budget available on console platforms to HD texture every prop in the game. The performance specs of an XBox One are well below that of a high end PC. The developers needed to make some compromises to get good frame rates on the current consoles.

 

I would say they are not really getting away with anything more that the only people who would care about such a thing would be the folks around here. lol Okay, I suppose maybe game devs or wannabe game devs in general might notice it and perhaps a few gamers screaming loudly about it because they have nothing better to do.

 

The customers notice such things. I'd say percentage wise computer games are among the highest percentage of customer returns than any other product. You don't thing they made it so difficult to return computer games because they customers are just thrilled with the quality of the AAA titles do you?

 

My god, one asset out of ten thousand that is a complete F***ing travesty. Clearly some 6 out of 10 garbage.

 

Wouldn't know and won't spend the money to find out.

 

What exactly are you referring to with "textured badly"?
There is obviously one polygon with messed up UV.

No one is perfect. Not even AAA.

 

It's ok, you can also have a badly textured tree, everybody can have 1 badly textured tree in their games, and everyone else will just have to live with it. Fair?

 

I honestly don't see the problem in the screen shot. And most gamers won't. It's just one background tree.

AAA is not just about high production values. These do play a big part in AAA. But they are not everything.

There is also high quality gameplay, marketing, online experience, scope and so on that make a game AAA

 

The texturing on the tree is really weird and crappy. It could be much better, for example here's a tree from a non-AAA game (The Talos Principle) where the bark actually looks like bark:



Although even here there's a visible texture seam and a few slightly detached limbs. However these are things you have to look for; they're not in your face. I found a few spots in Bioshock Infinite with z-fighting due to careless modeling, and a couple of unsightly gaps in meshes. It happens.

--Eric

 

8.3 / 10
- IGN

 

No not a travesty, my point is that this clearly passed QA and is deemed acceptable by Respawn.

They could've spent 10/15 mins longer on this asset to make it look better and not amateur.. it's not the only asset like this in the game.

My point is that I expect more from a large studio and a major console title.

 

Or, you know, they could not waste time on that when 99% of players will never see it.

 

In Borderlands 2 I had stumbled across this huge oversight in texturing. That right there is the default Unreal Engine texture.

 

At least it was nicely UV'ed.

 

That should be an achievement!
Find an destroy the ONE 64x64 (badly) textured tree in any free roaming, fps or tps game - in all games. It could be that spot in other games people work so hard to get to - only to see there is nothing on the other side of the mountains.
I remember reading about points of interest like this in WOW when they were working on one of the expansions.

 

Assets are usually made with context in mind so they can define that asset's quality scope properly with the bigger picture of overall optimization in mind.

If that tree is somewhere in the background then it was probably assumed that no one would ever look at it closely, or at all for more than half a second so as long as it looks good 30 meters away they can sacrifice texture and model quality that could be better used elsewhere - on things that actually have to look good.

For example in Overwatch the background assets are literally just pure garbage, but you only notice when you stare at them for a while. Interestingly, Overwatch runs great and looks freaking amazing.

 

Ok, but it's not 10 or 15 minutes on that asset, it's 10 or 15 minutes on all of the assets.

It's easy for one of us to find one thing and say "someone should have fixed this". We're only looking at the one thing. The developers need to look at the whole game, because they don't know in advance which things are broken - they have to find them. (How long were you playing before you found the tree?)

Then there's a pipeline to making, testing, and integrating the fix. It's not one person opening a model, tweaking some UVs and hitting save. For instance, you say it's textured badly, but is that really the case? For instance, maybe someone put a background prop in an accessible area by mistake. If so, jumping in there and "fixing" the texture is going to screw with the LOD on all of the cases where it's used in the actual background... So there's a process there, and it really ought to be respected.

And finally, they probably did have a list of stuff to fix/improve/change. All projects I've worked on do. You never have time to complete the whole list. You prioritise the items on that list, and then work from most to least important until you run out of time.

With that in mind, it kind of suggests they did a pretty decent job if the thing being complained about is "a background prop that isn't core to the experience has some dodgy texturing".

 

hmm.. i spend the time to make sure like almost every pixel is perfect lol .. im not even making money..

damnn they suck
hire me

 

Looks like a uv glitch. Presumably the trees on a game of that scale aren't created by hand. Something along the lines of speedtree. Probably an edge case with wonky math.

 

Funniest thing I have read all week :-D

 

@DaVeF101 - So where did you find the tree? Was it in an area where the player is not expected to be?

Looks to me like someone either touched the UV coordinates or managed to scale the texture by mistake through the material shader or something. Honestly nothing big unless it is in your face...


Stuff happens in game development... x)

 

Not to mention that it could very well have been an intentional decision. Game development is about finding compromises and prioritizing what's important--for all we know they needed to free up an extra couple megabytes of RAM by putting a lower res tree in a place where players don't usually go so the rest of the level could look prettier (and that screenshot does look like an obscure corner wall somewhere). Or maybe they realized later that area looked better with a tree but there wasn't enough ram for one of the hero trees so they used the low res one.

 

This thread reminds me of an article Jim Sterling wrote a while ago ... about the sub-par lemons in Uncharted 4.

EDIT: Fixed the link.

 

The auto-censoring in this forum kills the link. Good read though, once you entered there right URL.
I'm glad I have no interest in the Uncharted franchise. Oh boy, would that have been a disappointment! It's time gamers stand up to these AAA bullies that think they can do whatever they want!

 

@Martin_H

Thanks for the headsup, I fixed the link.

 

Good lord no! You're far too expensive if you spend that much time on minor assets!

Though I suspect you're just joking, because you didn't even take the time to hit the shift key while typing, and your ellipses are a travesty.

 

1. AAA have deadlines and often, the performance budgets of a prop are set well in advance. They don't have the luxury indies do. Basically props are given a memory budget and a time budget. That's the best it can look within those constraints.

2. Sometimes a prop needs to be butchered near end of project. This can get a bit ruthless but there's no choice. Nobody will ever delay a game because 1 object looks bad. If that was the case, WoW would probably never exist, yet it is a billion dollar enterprise.

People in indie land should have different rules, different workflows, etc. We should not be doing most of what AAA does. Because it is a different environment with different rules entirely.

Also if you zoom in enough on any texture or model it will look rubbish. If you take step back and see it with everything else it becomes acceptable. This is an ancient rule of design. Everything looks terrible in isolation.

A lot of people keep going on about how they'd do better, fact is they wouldn't...

 

No! That's what detail textures are for. You can plant your nose right on that Talos Principle tree and it still looks fine, 'cause of the detail texture. Of course, you have to decide if it's worth the shader and time budget to have detail textures for trees. (Or tessellation for models.)

--Eric

 

A better question, perhaps, becomes... is this what are you doing with your free time?

I highly doubt that the $70 you pay for the game is so that every tree, rock and piece of grass can be examined under a microscope and found to be indistinguishable from a real rock, tree or piece of grass. The game has to offer something in terms of game play, so many hours of replayability and content. That's the value of the product. Honestly, I see that screenshot, and I just wonder what goes through some people's minds.

People have literally made millions of dollars from games that do not have perfect, or even good graphics. I would like to see a thread one day rivaling this one in terms of fervor that says, "How to do modern horror games get away with not even being scary? All they do is throw you into unlikely combat with supernatural monsters..." But that's doubtful to happen.

*mumbles to self and walks off*

 

Likewise I'm sure there's plenty of hollywood A lister max budget films with frankly naff acting from some people, and the occasional dodgy prop or effect...

 

What matters is how the game reads as a whole, not the quality of individual assets. I'm not even sure yet if that tree is bad. You'd have to step back to see the full silhouette, because that's the most important thing for a tree to sell.

 

That tree texturing is definitely pretty bad and could be improved a lot; the question is whether it would be worthwhile given the context in which you see it (i.e. did the player have to go out of the way to see it up close like that).

--Eric

 

I just accept that games are made by people and people make mistakes and can't find every single flaw in a huge game. I pretty much only play games with AAA graphics (yeah, I'm a sucker for shiny games) and constantly finding things like z-fighting and gaps where there shouldn't be.

 

hahhaha
I didn't know a small texture problem could become a huge issue for some players

 

I think its also worth noting is that titanfall 2 doesnt actually release until October of 2016....so you know...they have time to fix super major important things like this one tree.

 

Hahaha! Quoted because this made my day.

 

Wait what? We are discussing a poorly textured tree in a game that hasn't been released!!!

So a texture might be bad on a tree a player might notice, and that tree might end up in an AAA game?

This is a new low, even for the discussion forum.

 

I nominate this thread for the Unity Forum Awards, category: "Worst thread of the year that isn't an obvious troll"

 

To be fair, a) the thread isn't about that tree, it's just an example of an apparently common issue, and b) I thought it did give opportunity for a little decent discussion anyway.

 

Yeah good points.

 

if you really want to know the exact circumstances about stuff like that, open a thread on the polycount forum.
chances are pretty high that someone from the dev-team will see it, and if you are lucky you even get a response from the guy who did this unspeakable act of atrocity
i would go with a thread title like
"who made this S***ty tree in game x, i will find you and i will end you"

also keep in mind, many assets that are made, often end up beeing used for things they are not intended for.
level designer have a pool of assets they can use and sometimes they recycle parts for completly different purposes.