3D Vision Blog

While checking out some of the latest games I’ve found out about an interesting top-down shooter that has turned out to be a real gem for playing in stereoscopic 3D mode with 3D Vision. The game I’m talking about is called Gatling Gears, developed by Vanguard Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts, and besides working well in stereo 3D mode it is also fun to play if you like this type of games. It renders almost flawlessly in stereoscopic 3D mode right out of the box, although there is no official 3D Vision profile for the game available yet, all you need to do is do some convergence adjustment and then you can play with very high depth levels for a really nice experience. Everything renders well in stereoscopic 3D mode, even the in-game crosshair is rendered in 3D, although the cursor in the game menu is in 2D that is only present at the menu, so it shouldn’t bother you. The only thing that is rendered in 2D are some HUD elements, but these are not a problem considering that the game needs to be optimized for more depth and just some objects sticking out for best experience (but you can play with convergence to make it suit your preferences best). The game is a fine example what you can achieve by making things properly, even though you haven’t planned the game specifically for stereo 3D gaming it turns out to be almost perfect. So I would recommend you to definitely try Gatling Gears in stereo 3D mode with 3D Vision.

- Visit the official Gatling Gears website for more information about the game…

EA CEO John Riccitiello has announced that Electronic Arts is planing to move away from stereo 3D games and go more towards social and online gaming. The reason he states in front of the company’s stockholders is that there are poor returns from these games as compared to other titles.

“We see really high returns in these markets and very poor returns focusing on 3D, so we are allocating our resources toward new innovations.”

“Frankly we have not seen a big uptake for 3D gaming. We have not seen a big uptake in 3D TVs in the home, at least not yet. We are not here trying to drive a market. We are here to react to what consumers are looking for.”

But don’t forget that in order to attract gamers you not only need to make a hit title game, but also ensure a proper stereoscopic 3D support, so that instead of gamers complaining all the time from very basic issues in stereo 3D mode they will be happy right from the start and spread the work to other fellow stereo 3D gamers about the game. This however is still a problem not only fro EA, but for most other game makers that want to implement stereoscopic 3D support and instead of attracting the stereo 3D gamers they are driving them away. Remember the fiasco that EA has with the hit title “Battlefield: Bad Company 2″ it was constantly being fixed in terms of stereo 3D support, but the new patches broke other things that worked properly with the older ones.

A more recent example with a hit game title that should’ve been 3D-ready right from the start, from another developer, is the game “The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings”. Instead of becoming a hit stereo 3D title it is getting a lot of bad feedback from gamers due to various issues in stereo 3D mode and patches for the game that are supposed to be fixing things are not doing what they should.

With such level of efforts (clearly not enough) from game developers to provide proper stereo 3D support and moving the focus from S3D PC gamers to the still not that much console 3D gamers I’m wondering what were game developers expecting. Probably the same thing that Hollywood wanted to do with 3D movie ticket sales, but you know, you cannot push higher sales of more expensive tickets for the 3D version of the movies and provide the viewers with crappy 2D to 3D conversion or bad quality movies and expect that to last forever. The entertainment industry should learn from their mistakes, but clearly they are not doing that and in the process they are hurting the 3D industry. Somebody has to drive the stereo 3D gaming market with a good example and not necessarily with the idea to make high profit in short time, but clearly this is not EA as apparently this has never been their intention.

Stereo 3D gamers are looking for quality games that work as they should in stereoscopic 3D mode and not for games that have a 3D logo and some kind of crappy stereo 3D support, because some game developer decided to profit a bit extra by advertising a game 3D-ready when it clearly is not. If a game developer does not understand this simple truth and does not follow what the customers actually demand in terms of stereo 3D support, then he has no right to complain from poor returns… it is as simple as that.

With the E3 Expo right around the corner there are rumors starting to appear that Microsoft is going to introduce native stereoscopic 3D support for their Xbox 360 game console. According to the unofficial information Xbox 360 may get a firmware update that will introduce HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic 3D support for native 720p gaming. But unlike all owners of PlayStation 3 consoles, a firmware update for the Xbox 360 will not introduce S3D support for all consoles, due to the fact that the first Xbox 360 consoles did not feature HDMI video output. This may open up the doors to much wider stereoscopic 3D adoption for the Xbox 360 console as currently there are just a few titles that support stereo 3D output and all these achieve it through a native engine supporting different output modes. Getting S3D support on a console level will make it easier for game developers to add that feature, but don’t forget that it is only a rumor for for now…