An article on PC Gamer talks with Mojang's Markus 'Notch' Persson and Tobias Möllstam about 0x10c, their upcoming space simulation. "The goal is to have it feel a bit like Firefly," says Notch. "You can try to land on a planet but you mess up and, instead of having the ship just explode like it would in real life, the landing gear gets broken. Then you have to try to fix that by finding resources. Instead of the adventure being flying from here to here, it’s: I set the destination, oh god I hit a small asteroid and the cloaking device broke. I think they really nailed that kind of emergent aspect in FTL." They also include a link to this trailer showing footage of a "first draft" of an "art test" for the game.
Slashman wrote on Oct 13, 2012, 02:16: Because of course, halfway decent graphics means that the rest of the game has to be crap. Gee...I wonder how The Witcher 2 team did it?
And what could The Witcher 2 have been if they didn't spend so much time on art? The percentage of the average "Triple A" game development team made up of artists increases every year.
Plus certain concepts, like freely designing your own starship like in 0x10c (from polys, not from blocks), would be complicated immensely if we were dealing with some kind of "halfway decent" graphics. Good luck getting fancy textures to look nice over arbitrary shapes.
You mechs may have copper wiring to reroute your fear of pain, but I've got nerves of steel.