Does sony/microsoft prevent 3rd party devs from making games more "different"?

[Alkohallick]

Recall the 16-bit era when mortal kombat came to the snes and genesis how the snes version had speech but sega's didnt? (bad example i know). Why do game developers try to make 360 and ps3 versions as close as possible? I'm sure each system has its advantages\disadvantages, why doesn't that show up on a grander scale in games?

Sure there are differences in the current games, some worse than others, but it seems that its due to developers lack of ?time/money/knowledge? more so than lack of systems capabilities. I understand the first party stuff from SONY looks great but if they can do it why not 3rd party devs, and if the 360 is the more capable system why do I need to come here or read eurogamer articles to notice a difference?

I guess I just want to know where is that drive from the 360 devs to show something truly amazing?

 

[AlNom]

Time is money is time is...

 

[2real4tv]

Because the two systems are closer technically than what people are making them out to be?

 

[Alkohallick]

Time is money is time is...

Understood, but ive been doing a small bit of reading through the different threads and the word "parity" comes up from time to time. Not to sound ignorant but why shoot to make both ports as close as possible if one can be significantly better?

Not to say dumb down one version, well I my question is- Does it really take that much more money/time for one version to clearly stand out?

 

[sebbbi]

Does it really take that much more money/time for one version to clearly stand out?

Yes it does. You would have to finetune the gameplay twice and do all your gameplay testing and regression testing twice. And you would need to create and maintain two sets of levels, and fix all content bugs twice (for both versions). And if you want to have different sets of textures or models that is even more extra work. Simple engine features requiring small amount of code like antialiasing properties, filtering properties, game resolution, skipping some post process effects on inferior platform, using lower quality shadowmap filtering, etc are all cost effective changes. Anything requiring more than minor content changes tends to be very costly.

Changes to AI, physics and other game logic specific features are more difficult to implement, finetune and test, as those affect gameplay directly, not just the graphics apperance.

 

[Alkohallick]

Yes it does. You would have to finetune the gameplay twice and do all your gameplay testing and regression testing twice. And you would need to create and maintain two sets of levels, and fix all content bugs twice (for both versions). And if you want to have different sets of textures or models that is even more extra work. Simple engine features requiring small amount of code like antialiasing properties, filtering properties, game resolution, skipping some post process effects on inferior platform, using lower quality shadowmap filtering, etc are all cost effective changes. Anything requiring more than minor content changes tends to be very costly.

Changes to AI, physics and other game logic specific features are more difficult to implement, finetune and test, as those affect gameplay directly, not just the graphics apperance.

Thank you, that clears it up for quite a bit