“We’re building several games at different scales,” Sweeney started, describing their main project, “We’re building Fortnite, a PC online game which is a fun, sort of Minecraft meets Left 4 Dead. It’s a 35-person team. It’s not aiming to beat Call of Duty in terms of graphics. It’s more of a Pixar art style and a limited project in scope, just aimed at fun as opposed to massive breakthroughs in scale.”
He then added, “We’re building a bigger, triple-A shooter project that hasn’t been announced yet.”
According to Sweeney, the developer is ”trying to master development at every scale,” mentioning two ”really tiny projects with two or three guys working together as a team for a few months in small scale game development.”
He also went on to state than in ten years, games will finally be photo-realistic.
”It’s continuing to improve at Moore’s Law rate,” he noted. “Things are going to get really interesting. We’ll be able to render environments that are absolutely photo-realistic within the next 10 years, like indistinguishable from reality level of graphics.”
He added that graphics weren’t the be-all, end-all, however, and that things like AI would need to improve.
”That just moves the challenge of graphics to the problems we don’t know how to solve,” he cautioned, ”like simulating human intelligence, animation, speech and lip-syncing.
”There are still lots of areas in graphics that require ongoing research for probably the rest of our lives before we come close to approaching reality.”
