Interview: Oxide and the Nitrous Engine

from JoeUser Forums

GamesIndustry International has an interview up with Dan Baker and Brad Wardell about the Nitrous engine and Oxide Games.

"I've known some of the Oxide guys for a long time and we've been making strategy games for a long time," said Wardell. "Every time we go and do a strategy game, we have to roll our own engine. It's gotten tougher and tougher for strategy games to be competitive with say, a first-person shooter, in terms of fidelity, because FPSs can just license Unreal. It was getting more and more difficult for us to compete visually as strategy games, and as a result they were becoming more and more niche. Or in the case of role-playing games, they just became first-person shooters."

The full interview is here.

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Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The gaming industry - and with it hardware development - has reached a cul-de-sac in terms of Games Development. For sure talented programmers have created ever more innovative effects for the end user, but in the background they are thrashing around the same wall at the end of a developer cul-de-sac. The opportunities to create a dash for revenue by rushing down a narrow route (aka consoles), are now all virtually closed off in an innovation sense, its all "been done before" blah blah.

Its back to basics time, and widen the Base, else there are limited ways medium to long term for programmers to go to create innovative revenue streams - flashy wiz-bangs on screen are less and less able to hide the Core weaknesses.

I view Oxide as a Bold move that will take a lot of determination and effort to overcome short-term drivers that are more and more evident in software due to the "want it now" pressures of Investors. If Oxide can "hold the line" against Short Term Investor pressures, still keep a broad base to the software, and meet the aspirations that are becoming clear .... the Gaming Industry is going to take off in a new Long Term direction that will not suffer from short termism. If the aspirations are met, the full use of 8, 16, 32 or more cores will be commonplace - think about the latter in a darkened room and see where it leads .... :w00t:

Beam-me-up-Scotty .... rofl ....