Sledgehammer at "Competitors": "You Ship a Game, Not an Engine

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The bitter rivalry between Activision and EA is intensifying as the release dates of two FPS juggernaut franchises approach. Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 will be going head-to-head this year, and both publishing giants want you to buy their game. As both release dates approach, EA and Activision have been increasing their attacks on one another, trying to show potential customers why their game is better, while not specifically naming each other -- referring to each other as "the competition."

Well today we're seeing another round of hits, this time from Activision-owned studio Sledgehammer Games. The studio's Co-Founder & General Manager, Glen Scofield, was talking about Modern Warfare 3's engine in an interview with AusGamer where he was asked whether or not Sledgehammer or Infinity Ward would one day abandon the aging engine:

I don’t really know. I mean we really re-vamped this engine. We put a whole new audio system in and it is as competitive as anybody out there. You can go out and name your engine and call it whatever you want, right. You know, I’ve done that before; I’ve seen that trick and the bottom line is, this game will run at 60 frames a second. Not sure any of our competitors will.

Not sure I’ve seen any of our competitors on the console especially running at 60 frames a second and I’d be a little scared at this point -- in June -- if I was looking forward to a particular game that wasn’t on the console and running at 60. And I think 60 is our competitive edge and you just don’t throw that away.

While we can't confirm that he was talking about Battlefield 3, it seems pretty obvious that he was when you consider the fact that DICE's upcoming FPS will be running at 30 frames per second on consoles.

Scofield then continued on by talking up Modern Warfare 3's engine:

What you do is you build upon it, right? And build and build and build. And we build new tools that make us more efficient. We built brand new tools so that we could put more stuff in. That’s why, you’ll see a level and you’ll come out of the water; so we’ve built all this water. You’ve got New York in the background; you’ve got explosions going on; you’ve got skyscrapers, then you have this huge submarine coming out of the water.

And then, "So I don’t know what the future holds for the engine. But you don’t ship an engine, you ship a game." DICE has been hyping up Battlefield 3 's impressive engine over the past few months, and using it as a way of calling its competitors "lazy."

Now we now that the guys at sledgehammer games are retarded.

60 FPS is nice, but I'd much rather have a game that doesn't look outdated.

TRF wrote:

60 FPS is nice, but I'd much rather have a game that doesn't look outdated.

MW2 doesn't look outdated.

I don't really think you guys "get" what the IW engine is. The BASE technology is the Id Tech 3 engine which is like 8 years old, but it's been heavily modified and revamped over and over to run alot more efficiently and can crunch out better graphics at a higher framerate.

The IW engine is indeed a revamped engine with each MW game. The jump from COD4 to MW2 alone is pretty huge. They introduced new streaming tech which meant alot more can be rendered on screen. And now MW3 is going to have alot more on-screen. There is no way the "same" engine half a decade ago can run MW3 =/.


Another example of this is like with the Gears of War series, Uncharted series, and even the Halo series. Halo Reach uses the same base assets as Halo 3 but the engine has been updated to take use of the existing assets more efficiently. Same with Uncharted and Gears. Hell, even Forza has been running on the same engine since Forza 2. Yet look how Forza 4 looks. Are we going to call all these developers lazy?

The reason why they developed the Frostbite engine 2.0 isn't because they couldn't build a game with the visuals they wanted with the Frosbite engine 1.5. It's because Frostbite Engine 2.0 literally is a next gen ready engine and it would make the transition to next gen easier if they already had a supported engine to use from the get go which could give them a competitive edge.

I don't see the problem, he's not wrong.

Compared to other games out there, the COD games do defiantly look old. they're not terrible liek DNF, but are very average compared to other games out there. But they kinda have to in order to keep a steady 60 FPS on consoles without it dropping.

chobo500 wrote:

Compared to other games out there, the COD games do defiantly look old. they're not terrible liek DNF, but are very average compared to other games out there. But they kinda have to in order to keep a steady 60 FPS on consoles without it dropping.

Exactly. I consider the engine to be pretty damn impressive considering it keeps up a high framerate with decent graphics. The only time this gen we've ever seen stunning graphics and 60 FPS is with racing games.

ITS ALL BOUT TEH 60 FRAMES!!!

I like how Alanski is defending COD on every thread i've seen