Shadow of the Eternals dev comprised of Silicon Knights vets, Denis Dyack is CCO
Silicon Knights seemed effectively dead after losing a costly lawsuit against Epic Games, being forced to destroy their games, and laying off most of their team. While the Silicon Knights official website remains online, it seems the X-Men Destiny developer is no more.
Shadows of the Eternals, a "spiritual successor" to Gamecube horror game Eternal Darkness debuted last Friday. Developed by Precursor Games, the crowdfunded project is said to be "from the creators of Eternal Darkness." But what does that mean, exactly?
An overview of the Precursor Games' Team page reveals a number of Silicon Knights vets--even if the studio's name isn't mentioned. For example, tech director Sean Thompson credits Too Human, while "lore-keeper" Ken McCulloch worked on Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness.
Intriguingly, Denis Dyack, the vocal head of Silicon Knights is on the company roster. But, he is not Precursor's CEO. Instead, he serves as chief creative officer. Instead, Paul Caporicci is CEO, having worked on Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes and Too Human. According to his profile, they established the company in July 2012--immediately after losing their legal battle with Epic Games.
These people now want $1.5 million to work on their next game. While fans have been long-clamoring for a sequel to Eternal Darkness, given Silicon Knights' recent track record, you may want to give pause.
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Shadow of the Eternals dev comprised of Silicon Knights vets, Denis Dyack is CCO.
Silicon Knights seemed effectively dead after losing a costly lawsuit against Epic Games, being forced to destroy their games, and laying off most...-
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Nope. I contributed, because another Eternal Darkness game would be awesome, and worth risking my money on.
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Nintendo holds patents on some of the things they did on Eternal Darkness
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Given how spectacularly S.K. went down in flames, I'd only put my vote behind this reformation working on another project if they were working under (or as part of) another developer.
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Yeah, I would never support Dyack-lead project at this stage. Seems like a big chance of my money evaporating into nothing.
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I won't be contributing to this but if they ship a final product that is decent, I'll be buying it. I just don't trust Dyack to deliver.
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Yep, they have no credit with me at this point.
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Too Human is 2nd only to Alpha Protocol to most underrated game of this generation.
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Alpha Protocol is a buggy mess. It's bad because the game is broken. It's a shame because there are a lot of good ideas buried inside this junk heap of a game.
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Still meaning to give this another go with a controller. Really liked so much of what I saw early on.
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Like I said, there's a lot of good ideas within the game. There's a good game in there that's trying to crawl out and make itself known. The game needed a few more months of polish.
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I heard it was buggy but fortunately when I played I never experienced any
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woa i'm in the midst of this article right now
http://kotaku.com/5955223/what-went-wrong-with-silicon-knights-x+men-destiny
guess i know how it all will end! -
Dennis Dyack - for all the bad press this guy's late 90's game dev attitude pulled, I can say from personal experience when I was working in the game industry, Silicon Knights had some valid reasons for their original claims against Epic. We had at least one game I was aware of first hand that had to have all multiplayer stripped out of it last minute due to lack of Unreal engine support as originally advertised.
Only Silicon Knights was in a position to try to strike back, while the large publishers, who did the licensing with Epic for multiple titles at once, had their hands tied and just sucked it up. As it turns out, you can see the state of the game industry after this generation, and my personal feeling is a certain portion of this turmoil was due to the monolithic control Epic had over the tech for the first few critical years of development. Thankfully that won't happen again, now that big publishers like Capcom, Square Enix, Take Two, Ubi, etc. have other engine tech available. They won't be caught with their pants down again as far as that goes.
Meanwhile, for all his reputation, some fair and some unfounded, Dyack sure as heck knows how to design a game with a commitment to very high quality, intelligent game play concepts. Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness and Too Human are all unique titles with a highly individual slant - nobody else out there does it quite like his little guild. I'd liken them to Quantic Dream, with less tech and better actual gameplay innovation. If this new CEO can keep Dyack in line as far as meeting deadlines, which was always their biggest problem, here's hoping a lot of gamers will be rewarded with excellent games going forward.-
Unreal Engine 3 had way too many defenders overlooking its shortcomings. It's still slow on PS3 (the example I saw was Shadows of the Damned), and on the third-party PC implementations of input code seem to have some jankiness (the "sticking" fire button in Singularity, and the sticking mouse buttons in Bioshock Infinite).
As for the alternatives to Unreal Engine 3 that the big publishers have, it seems like this:
EA: Frostbite
Ubisoft: Dunia (variant of CryEngine first used in Far Cry 2)
Capcom: MT Framework
Bethesda: Id Tech 5
2K: Rockstar Advanced Game Engine
Square Eidos: Crystal Engine
Epic also doesn't have that much to sell a new engine on, unless of course they have a huge unveil staged for Microsoft's event or E3.
Dyack didn't do himself any favors by being what was outwardly perceived as batshit insane when Silicon Knights first sued Epic. It ended up being a war of attrition, of who could pay the lawyers better, and Epic had an endless wallet, since they could print money with Gears releases and Unreal Engine revenue, and all that Silicon Knights did during that time was release Too Human and a bad X-Men game.-
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It's not like Unreal Engine isn't being used, but it's not the only engine the large publishers must rely on, like it was at the start of this current gen.
Capcom's in-house cross platform engine is what makes their PC ports what they are and are very good for their specific titles that use them. Same thing goes for all these other publishers.
Conversely, look what happened to publishers like THQ that relied heavily on Unreal, or publishers like Tecmo and Namco, that couldn't afford it right out of the gate. Hell, Namco would be toast if it wasn't for them cutting a deal with From Software. Tecmo's on the frikken brink, which is really sad, too. Even Square Enix was on shaky ground until they got their in-house engine stabilized enough to expand out with Eidos. They took care of their own engine first, and then bought out Eidos, not the other way around, if you notice…..
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I can believe that, but suing for the rights to the engine that they would then turn around and license to others as the "Silicon Knights Engine" was just too much for me to swallow.
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