The truth about 3D gaming

Game developers break it down so you don't have to.

At gargantuan video game trade show E3 last week, 3D gaming showed its hand. Sony, with the likes of Killzone 3, is pushing 3D hard. Nintendo, with its exciting new handheld the 3DS, isn't far behind. Microsoft, remains sceptical, but that doesn't mean 360 owners are excluded from the fun. It looks the business, but questions surrounding the impact of the tech remain. Will visuals suffer if they're in 3D? Is it just a gimmick? Is 3D better than motion control? Here, in a series of micro chats, game developers give us their answers.

Sucker Punch's Chris Zimmerman, development director on inFamous 2

Q: How hard is it to make games run in 3D?

CZ: Well, it's hard.

Q: I've heard games that support 3D won't look as good as they would without.

CZ: Yeah. The 3D support is a challenge because in some ways you're drawing everything twice; drawing everything for the left eye, drawing everything for the right eye. There are clever ways around that, and I think people will be discovering those because it's such a compelling experience. If you play a game - especially the right kind of game - in 3D, it's just great. It's just more exhilarating. It's a matter of people coming to terms with the technology and figuring out how to use it best. At the beginning of every console cycle, the games are cool, they're better than they were the last console cycle, but somehow over the five, six, seven, eight years that you have a PS3 or an Xbox 360, the games are getting better and better, but the hardware's not. The hardware is fixed, but the games are getting better and better. The reason is people like me have more and more time to figure out how to use the stuff that's there. The same thing's going to happen with 3D. You'll see some games that are really cool with 3D this year. And two or three years from now, you'll see stuff that's even better because people will figure out what's important and what's not important and how to best take advantage of it.

Q: Killzone 3 didn't look like it was suffering because it's in 3D.

CZ: No, it didn't. Those guys are great. They do some really incredible work. It gets harder and harder to do video games. It's harder to do these games than it was to do a PS2 game. That was harder than a PSone game. The teams have to grow. The teams that don't grow, don't get better; they're going to get left behind. The Killzone guys are not getting left behind [laughs].

Q: You're confident, then, that 3D games won't have poorer quality visuals than they would otherwise?

CZ: You know, I don't know. If they're smart they'll do the game in a way, where if you'd have 3D support turned on, maybe some things get a little bit different. Maybe it's like games that have split-screen. It's the same sort of thing in some ways. It doesn't necessary hurt your game. It just may run in a slightly different mode. Maybe you have less stuff on screen, running in 3D. Maybe less pedestrians or cars. Maybe the explosions aren't quite as bright. But that doesn't stop you from having it run in the way that's perfectly best for it, when you're running without 3D turned on. The game knows. The games knows whether you're trying to play it on a 3D TV or not, and they'll let you choose. So I don't think the fact that the game's actually adding 3D will really make the 2D worse.