Development Progress (Patreon)

There's lots of depression surrounding the gaming industry. Derivative designs. Exploitive business practices. Exploitative work practices. Middling sequels. Etc.

So let's dive into something that's kind of cool.

This is Shattered Horizon, a bespoke multiplayer FPS set in space. Released in 2009 exclusively for Windows Vista via a requirement for DirectX 10. You probably then don't need me to tell the story of how hard this game flopped based on that alone.

Quake 3 might've succeeded in the 90s with a (at the time) risky requirement for Hardware Acceleration, but Shattered Horizon's DirectX 10 command certainly didn't repeat it.

It was surprisingly developed and released by Futuremark, the sister company to Remedy Entertainment, who split to pursue benchmarking software over big budget video-games. That original intent speaks very much to what Shattered Horizon was, because it was very much in the same vein as Crysis.

Despite Futuremark's small development team, like Remedy, they utilized their own internal engine built specifically for this game, rendering large open-ended space levels where zero gravity players could approach anything from any angle. Whether it was the map size, engine, optimization, number of players, Direct X 10 features, or all of the above, the game as a result was one of the most if not the most demanding of its day.

According to Futuremark, only 50% of Steam Users had a computer capable of running the game, let alone, running it at optimal performance.

I remember watching gameplay videos of Shattered Horizon and being blown away by its lifelike depiction of a space war, so it was super exciting last year to finally boot it up on my computer, even twelve years after launch… and after twelve years of progress, Shattered Horizon looks to my modern eye, like an Unreal Engine 4 Demo made by a couple College Students.

In-fact, the closet game to Shattered Horizon in the modern day is Boundary, running in Unreal Engine 4, made by a team that's likely even smaller than Futuremarks.

However… that's not an insult.

Honestly, it's pretty fucking cool.

It's pretty fucking cool that one of the most demanding, unique, and far out there multiplayer concepts of the late 2000s can now be made out of the box by a tiny development team for a fraction of the costs and time.

My persona bias of game development optimization rather than fidelity is being met, and it's being met real hard via Unreal, Unity, and even Blender. Generations of people my age, growing up pissed off by the slow speed of the tools we use, have grown up to build the tools themselves, making it better for them and everyone else in the process.

It's a really awesome thing to see such an advanced game from 10+ years ago seem so quaint by comparison.

Sure, it's harder to get excited about graphics these days, as we're not making much of a notable leap in fidelity, but if that means the next batch of games like Shattered Horizon are easier for developers to make and players to… well, play, I can only be optimistic.