I recently heard about an interview involving one of the people who currently works at Mistwalker and has worked at Capcom and other developers and agrees about the state of the tech being used by the industry, and Japanese companies generally falling behind in recent years. I mean look at a lot of major developments in recent years: things like the Havok physics engine, Unreal Engine, the real time lighting and shadows pulled off by id software in Doom 3, the recent demos shown of the technology going into Star Wars: The Force Unleashed; it's all way ahead of almost anything that any Japanese developer has done on there own. There are still exceptions, such as Kojima and his team who still know how to build a great engine with some pretty unique features no one's ever thought of, but in general the engine technology put together by western companies blows the stuff you see developed in Japan out of the water. I think it's the tendency of Japanese developers to develop a different engine for every game that I mentioned before that is partially responsible for this. There's not necessarily anything wrong with the tech gap though; I still think a lot of the most fun and creative games come out of Japan, but the best tech is by far being made in the West.Originally Posted by Hsu
I don't know that the former is necessarily true, but the latter is definitely going to be a big thing with the new gen.
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