<\/td><\/tr><\/table>I’ve read a couple of reviews for this game to see what the mainstream press has to say about it. It was common for them to ding the game for having “dated visuals”. This only solidifies in my mind the idea that reviewers live in their own little world where everyone plays games two months before they come out and owns a $3,000 computer. It’s like the fashion \/ modeling agent who spends all day working with preening 18 year old girls who have breast implants and skeletal physiques. Show him a fit, healthy woman in her mid-twenties and he’ll recoil in horror at the obese old hag. Their visual palette has been so distorted by their profession that their capacity to judge what others will find pleasing is nonexistent. For the agent this is regrettable, but for the game reviewer… Man, that’s your job<\/i>.<\/p>\nThe game looked great on my videocard, which I believe was forged by NVIDIA sometime during the latter part of the Bronze Age. It was choppy and the special effects were all turned off, but I still found the game to be wonderfully atmospheric and visually engaging. I can only pity the reviewer who will look at this game running in all of its high-detail glory and say, “Meh. Looks dated.” <\/p>\n
The load times were a little long when compared to more traditional titles, but the environments were truly immense. Each region of the game is a huge, sprawling area of indoor and outdoor areas to run around in. The load times were easily worth it when compared to how much time was spent exploring each area. <\/p>\n
There is an old saying in software development, “The first 90% of the features take up the first 90% of development time, and the last 10% of the features take up the other<\/i> 90% of development time.” This is a common pitfall – particularly in young, unexperienced companies – to greatly underestimate how long a project is going to take. Development houses with clout and cash can afford to keep working until they feel a game is done, but a team of newbies being bankrolled by a publisher don’t have that luxury. Sooner or later the investors are going to tire of paying all of those salaries without getting the promised game in return, and that’s when things turn ugly. When this happens, the publisher only has three choices: <\/p>\n (I should add that all of this glosses over the supreme difficulty of marketing<\/i> a game which the developers keep promising is “six months from release”. This turns into yet another money sink if the game’s development lasts longer than the marketing campaign.) <\/p>\n\n
<\/td><\/tr><\/table>It will be interesting to see what developer GSC does next. I understand they are