Chapter 102: The Approaching Age of 3D
Chapter 102: The Approaching Age of 3D
Thanks to that, cigarette butts piled up behind the development room, and the snacks and treats they had stocked disappeared at an incredible speed.
Relieving stress through games like Insu did probably counted as one of the healthier options. If Insu had been old enough, even if he did not smoke, he probably would have come home and at least drunk some beer.
“Is there anything else?”
Slayer 2 was fun, but after playing only that for so long, he felt like he might get sick of it, so he looked for something else. These days, quite a few first-person 3D shooting games had come out, so he had several options to choose from.
[Vaccine]
The first thing he picked up was a game where the player boarded a spaceship and eliminated monsters and enemies that had infiltrated a giant space base.
The setting was somewhat interesting.
“Oh. This is clean.”
The map, rendered with a 2.5D feel, gave off a similar impression to the Slayer series, but the textures felt cleaner, so the sci-fi atmosphere came alive. What was even more unusual was that since it was set in space and took place inside a spaceship, there was no concept of a floor. The player floated in the air and could rotate freely, even flipping upside down.
Because of that, even though it still took place in a narrow space like Slayer, it gave the feeling of wandering through a more complicated and wider area.
But that freshness and enjoyment did not last long.
...This feels too similar to Slayer.
It was not that there were no differences, but because it seemed to have been made after seeing Slayer’s success, after playing for a while, he just started thinking of it as a knockoff Slayer.
Moreover, the sense of space was fresh only at first. After some time passed, it did not feel intuitive and became confusing, so it had less of the refreshing feeling of charging around and sweeping everything away like in Slayer.
He had heard that there was a similar game in his previous life, and while it had some dedicated fans, he felt like he understood why it had not become a huge hit.
It might be better if it were set in completely open outer space.
That seemed like an unreasonable demand given the technology level at the time, but surprisingly, such a game did exist. Insu took out another package.
[Starfall Genesis 3]
Even in this era, there were already a few dinosaurs in the game industry. One of them was EA, and it was nearly identical to the EA Insu knew from his previous life.
(Translator’s Note : EA — Electronic Arts, a major American video game publisher. In this context, it refers to the parent-company support behind Ultima Online in Insu’s previous-life comparison.)
They had developed several fairly experimental games with enormous funding, and one of them was the Starfall Genesis series.
Fundamentally, it was a shooting game where the player piloted a spaceship through space and took down enemies, but the whole thing was presented in 3D.
Of course, due to technical limitations, it had not been made in true full 3D. Instead, it merely used every possible method to make it feel like a three-dimensional space: restricted viewpoints, viewpoint changes, optical illusions that made it difficult to sense distance through dark backgrounds, and an appropriate mix of objects, background images, and textures.
On top of that, it included full-motion video, or FMV, filmed with hired Hollywood actors. In other words, instead of videos rendered in real time by a computer, these were simply pre-recorded live-action videos. By adding these videos and giving it a movie-like realism, it compensated for the somewhat lacking 3D graphics and raised the game’s overall immersion and quality.
“This really feels like a movie.”
Honestly, even if the in-game 3D graphics were impressive by the standards of this era, they could only look lacking to Insu. However, thanks to the event videos that felt like inserted movie scenes, he had no time to feel disappointed.
Later on, AAA games would create this kind of direction using in-game graphics, but no matter how good the graphics became, there was still a difference from reality. Because of that, there were even parts of these event cuts where Starfall Genesis felt better than future games.
(Translator’s Game: AAA game — Industry term for high-budget, high-profile commercial games usually produced by large studios or publishers. The term became widely used to describe games with major development budgets, large teams, and extensive marketing.)
As expected, big companies really were nice.
But it was not as if later developers did not know that filming scenes with Hollywood actors was good.
At this time, Hollywood actors’ appearance fees were much lower, and since the game industry was not yet very large, actors also treated it lightly as a side job, which made it even easier to set their fees lower.
During this era, even actors who had appeared in massive hits like Star Wars could be hired for hundreds of thousands of dollars if negotiations went well. But if someone tried to do something similar in 2025, it would basically cost tens of millions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions.
It was simply a method that could only be used in this era.
Insu enjoyed it for a long time.
And what he felt from it was that the current era was clearly focused on the possibilities of 3D.
To be more precise, the concept of 3D itself had already been proposed decades earlier, and in the 1980s, it had been used in films and showed the possibility of being used in entertainment.
Afterward, it was first used in things like console games in the 1980s, and in the late 1980s, as computers developed and genius developers like Raiden Cole created 3D games that ran in computer environments and achieved great success, many developers began following their lead and making 3D games.
In truth, this was not an easy thing to do, but America was the center of advanced technology, games, and the computer market, so technical skill and capital gathered there. Because of that, several convincing products somehow emerged, and Insu could now enjoy them.
If things continued like this, proper 3D games would likely appear within one or two years, just like in his previous life. In truth, the current 3D was not real 3D, but rather something called 2.5D, where sprites were rotated to make them look three-dimensional.
3D, huh...
For the time being, he planned to focus on servicing TLF Online, which had been developed in 2D, so there was no great urgency. Still, Parallel Soft would eventually have to adopt 3D.
Of course, they could still make plenty of good games in 2D, but since reality itself was made of 3D space, it was difficult for 2D to beat 3D in the field of experience.
Moreover, games were fundamentally virtual reality. Whether through reproduction or imagination, players ultimately had to perceive that virtual world in their heads in order to become immersed and feel entertained. In that sense, 3D, which allowed an experience closer to reality, was bound to have an absolute advantage.
This tendency would only become stronger as technology advanced and games relied less on the player’s imagination.
If they simply wanted to follow the flow of the era, there would be no need to develop everything themselves. As the game industry developed, tools would inevitably emerge accordingly, and the most important part among them would be graphics, especially tools related to 3D.
However, if they were not satisfied with merely following and wanted something ahead of the era, they would have to create those tools themselves.
It was still the introductory stage, and there was also a transitional period left, so they had some leeway. But time always passed. Especially now, when everything was developing at such a rapid pace, he needed to keep it in mind somewhere in the corner of his head at all times.
By mid-June, the alpha test ended, and they truly began running toward completion.
But by completion, he did not mean that everything would be finished and ready for official service. It only meant reaching the form of a playable game that had been built according to the initial plan.
In truth, even after beta testing ended, they would refine systems and fill in content they had not yet managed to include, so it was hard to call it one hundred percent complete. Still, that was how it felt.
“Don’t relax just because we’re almost there. This is the point that determines the game’s final level of polish.”
In truth, what Insu said now was only a slightly altered version of something he said at every stage.
It was probably true of any kind of work, but game development was something where, no matter the stage, if they did not do it properly, not only would the level of polish drop, the game itself might not run in the first place. There was no part they could just gloss over.
But there was also a reason he went out of his way to say this.
They were now in the process of filling in content. The parts where they had to think hard and squeeze out creativity, such as developing systems and finding bugs, had already passed. This was now a stage where they simply needed to do the labor according to the methods they had already planned, so people could easily relax and work mechanically.
If that happened, mistakes could appear and quality could drop. But because it was just content, there was a low possibility of errors causing the game to fail to run, making problems harder to discover.
For example, a typo or awkward sentence in quest text would not stop the game from running, but it could break a gamer’s immersion or make the player unable to understand how to proceed.
Moreover, even though this kind of content had a low technical difficulty, it was exposed directly to the outside. In terms of appearance and the player experience, it was actually more visible, so saying it determined the game’s level of polish was not completely wrong.
However, unlike the pressure he gave the team members, this was a relatively easy period for Insu.
As already mentioned, since there were no technical challenges and the work was centered on simple tasks, the mental burden was lower. When distributing work, he also did not pile a huge amount into his own bowl like before.
That made sense. Now that there were twenty team members, there was no need for him, the team leader who already had many things to pay attention to, to take on so much simple work himself.
If he completely took his hands off things, his instincts would dull and it would become difficult to participate in development, so he would maintain a certain amount of work. However, it was time to gradually reduce his proportion of work as a coder.
Honestly, if it turns out the same whether I do it or someone else does, it’s better to just hire more people and pay them to do it.
Until MFN, he still thought they needed to save money, but from TLF2 onward, they were already free from financial pressure. They were not overflowing with money, but they were no longer in a situation where they had to cling to code by force just to save a small amount of cost.
With this new leeway, he began looking more at the overall development situation and leaning more toward his role as “team leader.”
Not only that, he also had enough room to slowly check on WET.
“It’s grown a lot.”
“Right?”
Instead of going to the WET Business Team when he did not know that much about that side and needlessly making the people working there feel conscious of him, Insu went up to the office where his parents were.
Hyein looked satisfied with Insu’s reaction.
[Daily visitors: 1,253,027]
Only a few months earlier, the number of visitors had been around one hundred thousand per day, but now it had increased twelvefold. This was partly because the internet itself was spreading quickly, but it was also because Hyein and Seongcheol had worked hard, going around and promoting the site. Naturally, she could not help feeling proud.
This was truly a period when the internet was expanding explosively.
“But competitors have appeared, right?”
“Yes. That’s right. EverNest is especially threatening.”
Parallel Soft was not the only one that sensed the arrival of the internet era. Moreover, the idea of a portal site was not difficult, and since the early spread of the internet, similar concepts had already been shared through PC communication services and the like.
Because of that, latecomers had begun appearing at the start of this year. Even if they had the concept, it was the first time implementing it in reality, so most of them stumbled and were not particularly frightening. But EverNest was the exception.
It was a portal created by a developer who already had considerable recognition through PC communication services. He recruited partners through PC communication services, received investment from various places, quickly shaped the service into something usable, and began aggressively promoting it.
Still, because WET had started earlier, had a polished design, had differentiated content such as community boards, and had also worked hard on promotion, it was maintaining around fifty percent more visitors. But in such a turbulent period, that level of gap could be overturned at any time.
“At least the boards seem to have settled in.”
“That’s right. The atmosphere has become almost like PC communication services.”
This time, Seongcheol answered. As someone who had originally used PC communication services a lot, he felt quite satisfied that the message boards run by his company’s service had become as active as the PC communication services he used.