Drink Me
Alice shrinks due to Quake 3 engine's limitations?
Earlier today we reported that Raven's Brian Pelletier had revealed that one of the main reasons why the company's first person shooter "Star Trek Voyager : Elite Force" was a little on the short side was because of limitations of the Quake III engine. At the time we said that "we will have to wait to see whether the other games due for release over the next year which use the engine will suffer the same fate", but now it looks as though oddball third person action game "American McGee's Alice" is having the same problems.
"We have been forced during development of Alice to scale some levels back from their original design to keep the file size of the [maps] from getting out of hand", Rogue's Bobby "Xcalibur" Pavlock has revealed. "Obviously the maps would take longer to load [if they were larger], and we've all seen how up-in-arms people can get when it comes to load times. We are trying to keep our maps for Alice under 8Mb, and believe me, in the Quake 3 engine it's very easy to make a map that exceeds 8Mb."
"So it's kinda a catch-22... of course we want to make huge freakin' maps, fully detailed, with loads of gameplay that you could run around in having fun for hours, but unfortunately technology and the average player's systems aren't up to that yet". As yet there's no word on whether the same problems are affecting development of "Return To Castle Wolfenstein", "The World Is Not Enough" and all of the other Quake 3 engined games currently under construction, but it's certainly starting to look as if those stunning graphics are coming at a cost for developers using the engine...