Lorne Lanning, le boss d’Oddworld Inhabitants, tente de nous expliquer pourquoi les jeux vidéo proposent toujours un contenu très superficiel :
The costs are inflating and the innovation possibilities are going down because instead of focusing on the content, every five years’ we’re focusing on the tools again. And we don’t really get to inherit much of what we built the last time. So for example, with Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, we invested a lot of time, blood sweat and tears into that – but we saw that the Xbox isn’t really being supported at all. It was discarded by Microsoft who has its own strategy, so for developers that built great toolsets for that, they’ve been discarded.
We should be in an evolutionary model. I think Nintendo is showing some real intelligence and sensitivity in that respect because if you’ve developed on GameCube it’s a pretty straightforward transition onto ‘Nintendo next-gen’ because the Wii is very similar but with more power. We could argue about whether it’s enough power, but that’s not the point. The point is that it should be an evolutionary process.
En résumé, la technologie progresse tellement vite que tous les cinq ans les développeurs doivent réinventer la roue : ça leur laisse peu de temps pour se concentrer sur le contenu des jeux. D’après lui, c’est la raison pour laquelle la plupart des titres sortant sur console next gen ne sont que des clones de leurs ancêtres avec des graphismes mis à jour. Qui a dit Halo 3 ?
