Do Next-Gen Games Have to be 3D?

sudnshok asks: "Last week, an article was posted where an EA executive discussed the high cost involved with next-gen game development. While I agree that sports games do benefit from a high-resolution 3D environment, do all games have to be developed that way? Why can't game companies develop 2D games for these systems? I would assume the development cost would be much lower. As a gamer who grew up on the NES, I'd love to see a new 2D side-scrolling installment of Castlevania or Zelda. I'm curious if other gamers would buy 2D games for next-gen systems."

Look no further..

[Anonymous Coward]

The handheld market is still chock-full of 2D games, including the new installments of Castlevania and the like that you seem to be after. It's a helluva lot cheaper and doesn't waste the 3 gigahertz processors and state of the art GPUs the home consoles are built with nowadays. Buy a Nintendo DS and you are guaranteed access to a couple hundred good 2D games (counting that the machine plays GBA games as well). Looking at handheld console sales, it's a golden age right now for these machines - the DS is selling better than just about everything else, and even the underdog PSP has sold more machines than the original Xbox by now. Bottom line: there's just no point in spending $250-600 on a new system to make games with graphics the same as a $40 SNES.

That's not to say that there aren't those games such as the Xbox Live Arcade hits that aren't in 2D, but for the most part that's just a bonus feature, and not the reason the system is selling. Chances are if it's a retail game and it's 2D it's going to be handheld. And that's okay.

Re:Metroid

[CantStopDancing]

arthrograms

You keep on using that word. I do not think it means [webmd.com] what you think it means [wikipedia.org].

Re:Simple

[_iris]

Development costs would eventually be lower, but the initial costs would be much higher.

* There are costs involved with creating new content tools. Most studios develop new features for their tools to match the new hardware capabilities, but creating good 2D tools that allow creation with real-time preview is harder than you'd imagine. 3D space lends itself to intuitive controls and an abundance of places to put control points.

* Dinding developers and especially artists who want and/or understand how to finesse 2D would be very difficult at first. It is very hard to do 2D physics because often your calculations are constrained by the small geometry of the levels. It's hard to scale all 2D art after it is completed. A huge reason most of the 2D games today are Flash-based is because of the vector graphics. You don't see rich FF/Chrono Trigger/etc style backdrops in those games, do you?

* Most 2D games would require a higher-cost marketing campaign that their 3D competitors, because the ads would actually have to show the game-play in an illustrative manner instead of a knock-your-socks-off manner like most of today's TV-advertised games.

Viewtiful Joe was a fairly successful 2D game (although I think it is really 3D behind the scenes).