EA Sports boss Peter Moore says there may be “cool moments” in 3D games but he believes most gamers don’t want to sacrifice the smooth frame rate of 60 FPS in order to get them.
There are a couple of reasons why EA Sports has yet to leap into the 3D craze in spite of all the hype surrounding them, Moore said. 3D games on the PlayStation 3 run at a maximum of 30 frames per second and he believes gamers would rather have the silky smoothness of 60 FPS, especially since 3D doesn’t have much to add to the current crop of sports games anyway. And it ain’t cheap, either.
“I’ve seen a couple of our games running in 3D [behind closed doors]. There are some cool moments, but there is a cost for my development teams to do it. There is a tax on the hardware – you know, you need two cameras, there is a frame-rate issue… You’ve got to bring it back up again,” he told CVG. “I don’t think gamers want to sacrifice a smooth frame-rate. In other words, games that are current running at 60fps going down to 30 just for 3D.”
“The other thing is, you’ve got to be able to play the game,” he continued. “You play FIFA from a top-down perspective. You play Madden from a top-down perspective. The higher the camera is, the less the impact of 3D happens to be.”
Some genres beg for the 3D treatment and a top-down 3D view of a football field, hockey rink or baseball diamond would be cool, but would it add enough to the game to justify the expense of making them? Actually, I kind of think it might; it may not be cheap but if 3D takes off to the extent that Sony is hoping, a move to the third dimension could be the next big thing for sports videogames.
