Game Informer's E3 Grades + Review Scores

[scooby_dooby]

Less of the ad hominems please.

What you both propose is only possible by comparing retail game against retail game. The rest of us are trying to provide an amicable methodology relying on realtime footage from incomplete games.

Or playable game vs playable game.

You know, the same thing every gaming publication does when they give awards for E3? Doesn't seem to hard of a concept for them to accept.

 

[scooby_dooby]

They do not make a single solitary difference to rendering quality if the only difference is camera angles. No offense, but it's a ridiculous point, and you keep parroting it. Maybe you can't tell the difference between graphical quality and camera work, but don't assume others can't make the distinction.

They make a huge difference to the amount of detail you are actually able to see, and how it is presented.

No. The statement that cutscene graphics are always better than in-game graphics is patently untrue.

Oh okay...you got me on a technicality. Would the 'vast overwhelming majority of the time' be better? 99.9% of the time cut scenes are better than ingame, you wanna argue silly little technicalities go ahead.

 

[Hardknock]

Oh okay...you got me on a technicality. Would the 'vast overwhelming majority of the time' be better? 99.9% of the time cut scenes are better than ingame, you wanna argue silly little technicalities go ahead.

This is soo true. From Ninja Gaiden to DOA to Halo to anygame. The vast majority of the time the cutscenes use much higher detailed models and assets than the actual gameplay.

 

[Mmmkay]

Or playable game vs playable game.

You know, the same thing every gaming publication does when they give awards for E3? Doesn't seem to hard of a concept for them to accept.

All games at E3 are at various stages of development and it requires the experience of 'professional' journalists to evaluate how these games could compare as complete products. Most games have terrible framerates and very glitchy gameplay, but they still win several awards.

I wouldn't feel confident in making a judgement on how the game will look and play based on what I saw at E3. I can get a feeling, but it's not something I could put any weight behind until I saw the complete product.

But we seem to be discussing the other E3 games. What can we make of them? Because they too are in various stages of development and we should be able to make some kind of estmate on what they are trying to achieve graphically. Yes it's hard because there is no gameplay footage for most of them, but it's not a leap of faith either.

 

[TheChefO]

What you both propose is only possible by comparing retail game against retail game. The rest of us are trying to provide an amicable methodology relying on realtime footage from incomplete games.

Realtime footage != gameplay. While it does give you a better idea than cgi or render target, to me those don't tell you anything about the game and are merely used to sell the game (or in some cases attempt to halt sales of others). Look at my previous posts in this thread to get a better idea where I'm coming from because it sounds like we aren't all that far off.

I agree that without any other method of comparison, if all you have is a rt cutscene then it will give you some idea of what the game will look like. It will not give you a realistic comparison though to make statements like "this game looks head and shoulders above x game" when you're not even comparing gameplay in both.

If heavenly sword was demonstrated today for the first time as it was last year, it would be running around 10fps. At e3 Sony sped the game up to 30/60 (i dont recall which). This in combination with other "demos" made many question Sonys games but this one actually had the devs come out and say it was rendered using the engine but sped up for demo purposes. At this point, one could safely compare it's "gameplay graphics" to others as it was being rendered in realtime with gameplay at around 10fps. While this would still leave most skeptical of whether the final game could hit a smooth framerate, the time they had left to optimize the code was reasonable to expect a smoother framerate. Other aspects of the game were assumed to be optimized as well and in some cases improved.

Consider this example with the other games listed on the "all of these games look much better than assasins creed" post. How many devs have come out and said "this is a gameplay video which was sped up to show what we hope the game will look like when were done"? How many were actually playable? How many were even representing gameplay elements at all?

As I said, the factors I listed must be considered when comparing games. That doesn't mean you cant compare them unless all of those elements are equal. It means you must take them in consideration when saying "x game graphics look better than x game".

 

[Titanio]

They make a huge difference to the amount of detail you are actually able to see and how it is presented.

Depends on the in-game camera, but again that's independent of graphical quality. Most games with a reasonably free camera let you directly or indirectly manipulate the camera to focus on different things at different ranges if you wish anyway.

Oh okay...you got me on a technicality. Would the 'vast overwhelming majority of the time' be better? 99.9% of the time cut scenes are better than ingame, you wanna argue silly little technicalities go ahead.

No, still. Not in my experience. I know there are some high profile examples of special-case rules in cutscenes in some games, but not on the scale you suggest. I'd say most games with realtime cutscenes that I've experienced, have in fact displayed no perceptible rendering quality difference in-game.

 

[Mmmkay]

Yeah, we seem to be fairly close to a consensus but as Titanio said, we appear to be just on opposite sides of the same coin.

Consider this example with the other games listed on the "all of these games look much better than assasins creed" post. How many devs have come out and said "this is a gameplay video which was sped up to show what we hope the game will look like when were done"? How many were actually playable? How many were even representing gameplay elements at all?

Just because a game isn't playable, does not mean it didn't demonstrate gameplay footage. FFXIII's realtime sections showed a turn based battle and a forest 'outfield' camera pan. Both of these can be seen as demonstrating facets of its gameplay. Naughty Dogs' game was realtime according to the developers and its game footage seemed to try and demonstrate gameplay. Whether it is achievable in the final game is up for debate but it wasn't trying to emulate a cutscene. Heavenly Sword and MGS4 we covered already, and the other titles are fillers which we don't know enough about.

As I said, the factors I listed must be considered when comparing games. That doesn't mean you cant compare them unless all of those elements are equal. It means you must take them in consideration when saying "x game graphics look better than x game".

We will never know dev time or budget unless under exceptional circumstances, and we hardly ever get the luxury of comparing games of the same genre. And just as an aside, I consider Bad_Boy's post which started this whole mess to be a bit on the hyperbolic side in terms of how he expressed his opinion but not to the extent that it invalidates it. For the most part we are comparing PS3 games on pre-release hardware and toolchains.

 

[TheChefO]

Titanio-

If the gameplay graphics were as high quality as your suggesting, why didn't they show them? Why didnt they do what NT did last year and say "this is our game sped up to match our target fps, but right now it's running at Xfps"? Wouldn't that make a much bigger impact than some cutscene question mark that doesn't give you a clear idea for what their game will be like? Or perhaps they are going for the maximum graphic impact regardless of how representative of the gameplay it is to help hype and consequently sell their game(s).

Again, I'm not saying the games will look like garbage. I'm saying we don't know what they will look like because we have no idea how representative they are to the real gameplay experience. If devs would come out and say what the situation was for the ones that were "representative" of gameplay then we could better guage them. But the ones that were not even psudo gameplay in that they were strictly cutscene dynamic camera etc, we have no idea how the gameplay graphics will turn out in those. As has been discussed there are many examples of cutscenes of many types that do not match gameplay graphics. Some cutscenes do. We don't know in these titles but knowing the goal is of these companies is to sell games I would lean to the side of cutscene graphics> gameplay graphics in these instances.

 

[TheChefO]

Naughty Dogs' game was realtime according to the developers and its game footage seemed to try and demonstrate gameplay.

Good post and I see your point, but statements like this one ^ from Naughty Dog push me into the skeptical camp as in my mind I would think it much more impressive to let journos play the game if it is indeed realtime. If it was realtime why not at least have a realtime camera pan to drive home the point. The lack of these things lead me to believe it was as realtime as Heavenly Sword was last year. The difference is Ninja Theory didn't lie about it and actually said what the status of the game was and these guys are continuing to mislead the public. I don't doubt the talent of the team as they have shown great technical ability in the past two gens of playstation and I expect the final game to look better than the trailer shown. But why would they lie about it? Why not just say the truth whatever it was with the game? Perhaps they are under strict orders from Sony to not show a potential weakness and keep their hype machine going but it still leads me to be skeptical of their "game demos" at this point.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I'd say most games with realtime cutscenes that I've experienced, have in fact displayed no perceptible rendering quality difference in-game.

I'd say you're not being completely honest.

 

[Mmmkay]

Good post and I see your point, but statements like this one ^ from Naughty Dog push me into the skeptical camp as in my mind I would think it much more impressive to let journos play the game if it is indeed realtime. If it was realtime why not at least have a realtime camera pan to drive home the point. The lack of these things lead me to believe it was as realtime as Heavenly Sword was last year. The difference is Ninja Theory didn't lie about it and actually said what the status of the game was and these guys are continuing to mislead the public. I don't doubt the talent of the team as they have shown great technical ability in the past two gens of playstation and I expect the final game to look better than the trailer shown. But why would they lie about it? Why not just say the truth whatever it was with the game? Perhaps they are under strict orders from Sony to not show a potential weakness and keep their hype machine going but it still leads me to be skeptical of their "game demos" at this point.

We only ever found out about Heavenly Sword because we milked it out of the lovely developers. It's pretty much unheard of to get that level of community support for a game in development. I do not think it is a legitimate assumption to say that because they did not prove it was realtime then it can't be. Especially when the status quo for any kind of game footage is to provide as-is and that's it.

 

[Titanio]

I'd say you're not being completely honest.

I'd say you ought to have a little more respect, frankly. And that's where you go on ignore. If you can't accomodate and accept the views of others as sincere even when they do not correlate with your own, or moreover if you openly charge them with dishonesty because of that, you're not fit for debate. And I for one will debate no more with you, just for that.

If the gameplay graphics were as high quality as your suggesting, why didn't they show them? Why didnt they do what NT did last year and say "this is our game sped up to match our target fps, but right now it's running at Xfps"?

We're talking in very general terms here, so maybe you might like to concretise things to specific footage because it's difficult to talk specifically about every piece of footage. They're all different. If you're talking about Naughty Dog's game, they did say in an interview afterwards that everything was realtime from their engine. Parts of that trailer could in fact have been gameplay. That's one piece of footage, for example, that I have little difficulty accepting. Eight Days, for example, is a different story.

I mean, again, you're entitled to your suspicions or reserved judgement. I have no trouble with that at all as long as there is a consistency there. But others may be more willing to take things at face value where they believe it is reasonable to do so, and that should not be a problem either. I mean, you can feel free to point out where you think one should be suspicious, but broad statements about "cutscenes" and assumption probably won't cut it.

 

[Nesh]

Titanio - If the titles were in gameplay form there would be no argument. The fact that the demos were not playable suggests target render. RT graphics is one step closer but as we know from many prior examples, RT graphics != gameplay graphics. While that doesn't mean they won't achieve the presented quality in a cutscene or perhaps even the presented quality in gameplay, it also doesn't gaurantee they will. Until they do demonstrate the games in playable form, we can not accurately judge and compare the games graphic fidelity to other games which are showing gameplay elements (framerates aside).

No they donnt suggest this. They suggest that the gameplay isnt in a state from which people can get the right impressions yet.

FF13: was confirmed real time, the battle scenes was most likely from gameplay footage.

MGS4: Hideo isnt the kind of person that tends to present target renders. From past offerings it is evident that he always delivers the exact quality shown in his traikers.

Naughty Dog's game: Confirmed 100% real time and the kind of visual quality we are going to get. With other words it wasnt a target render. It was real time footage from a PS3 kit, made it into a trailer which was cut and pasted to give a more cinematic feel.

These developers arent Sony anyways to suggest that Sony presented target renders as real time footage to hype up games that wont be in the same quality.

Although the possibility that these games will be downgraded exists, it is smaller There are more chances they will look as good, if not even improved (Hideo stated he was going to improve MGS4, and it did feature slowdown in the trailer which is something that if Sony wanted to hide, or make it look better they would have done it)

They werent demonstrations of the game-enegines. They were demonstrations of the games.

 

[Arwin]

Guys, guys, please calm down ...

I may have missed it, but most of the gamesites that gave AC these awards didn't do that based on the CGI movie that most of us have seen, but instead on the playable version that was shown behind closed doors. They then reported back to us lesser beings that the playable game matched up to the CGI.

Similarly, reports in several magazines made a point of marking the in-game and the cgi/animation, and there was a nice consistency in the graphics. So basically, I think it is fair to assume that AC looks decent.

What I assume is that the backstage people fell for the animation and the crowd behaviour in AC and it's that which gave it its edge. For static graphics, I actually think HS has the advantage and I really like its art direction, and the interactive physics show promise too. If the two games continue as they do, then I think there will be two factors distinguishing the two.

- AC is an Unreal Engine 3 engine game. Although I get the impression that developers can still customise most aspects of that engine and there is probably a lot of interaction with Epic's developers, games using this engine actually can (and do) pay a lot more attention to Art direction.

- AC is a game that will implement all the ideas that the Sands of Time people had but couldn't implement in the previous generation due to technical constraints.

- NT looks like a bunch of talented graphics and developers. It is hard to predict what they can do, but we can all see what they have done so far and it looks pretty impressive. However, we've only so far seen the one arena. Just recently a few shots have been released with other areas, and some of them look pretty different and good. The physics effects of the game also look very decent.

- NT is already known (though not well-known) for having considerable technical prowess, but their previous game just lacked good art-direction. This time around, however, things look a lot better.

All in all, I have to say that I wouldn't know. I think that statically, NT currently looks better, so I'm assuming that behind the scenes, the animation in AC must be pretty spectacular and pretty much as reported by the big gamesites and magazines. At the same time AC uses the Unreal Engine which should be capable of some pretty amazing stuff, helping games to achieve some awesome results before the PS3 is even released. The Epic team has a great number of clients this time round and look set to really deliver.

And then of course there will be people who think that pseudo-japanese style beats medieval style and vice versa.

I'm not writing off Resistance yet either. Although I'm not an FPS fan, this team is known for playability and technical prowess, and Resistance is showing some very impressive physics at excellent and consistent framerates. If they can do anything to give the graphics direction a little more mass-appeal, maybe a bit more flashy effects here and there, the game could do very well graphically too.

And that reminds me that Warhawk went with a demo of a graphically inferior build to instead show off the new controller. We'll see if that is true.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I'd say you ought to have a little more respect, frankly. And that's where you go on ignore. If you can't accomodate and accept the views of others as sincere even when they do not correlate with your own, or moreover if you openly charge them with dishonesty because of that, you're not fit for debate. And I for one will debate no more with you, just for that.

Sorry but your position is extremely hard to believe, 'most' (as in the majority? )games you've played show no perceptible difference between cut-scene and ingame? I find this riduclous, as most anyone could tell you this is not the case in the vast majority of games. I find it doubly hard to believe as it just happens to support your argument that it's completely valid to compare cut-scenes from 2007 to ingame graphics from 2006, what a coincidence

 

[Bad_Boy]

I am going to conclude my posts in this thread with this...

I honestly dont see how anyone can say with a straight face that PS3 exclusive games are not matching or besting 360 exclusive titles. Just looking at the titles I listed...FF13, MGS4, Heavenly Sword, Naughty Dog's title, DMC4, Getaway, 8days demo's, R&C, ut2k7, Lair, etc. Maybe you just are not looking at the same images and video that I am. All of these were confirmed real time at some point and time and theres not much anyone can say against that. The important thing that I have mentioned serveral times about that list is that they are looking amazing, very very early. I think its safe to say those titles are mostly 2007 games, minus probably one or two. And thats the impressive part. It's not about comparing the 07 games with 07 games, it's about looking at the graphics they are achieving now And then realising how much development time these titles still have. They are obviously superior over other ps3 games in the pipeline, and arguably 360 games. Either the graphics will expand into better gameplay, or we will see improvements in graphics. I doubt graphical downgrades will be of discussion when the time comes except for those obvious CG trailers. (killzone, motorstorm, etc.)

I'm not downplaying gameplay or anything, as we cant even begin to compare that yet, but graphics is an important category of it's own. FFXIII seems like its in a league of it's own, closest game to cinematic cg films imo. I'm not saying 360 games dont look amazing either, please dont interpret my posts as so. GOW, Mass Effect, Halo 3 are some amazing games graphically I am definately looking forward to. But to say ps3 games dont even come close just sounds ignorant. Maybe its something artistically you dont like (example ut2k7 + gow) which I can fully understand, but technically and graphically it's moot. I understand its a iffy topic because everyone probably has their favorites and it brings up a lot of arguments, but lets be real here.

ok im done w/ this thread.
edit: just note that this is my personal opinion.

AC is an Unreal Tournament 3 engine game.

before somebody else pokes fun at this. Unreal Engine 3.

 

[TheChefO]

They werent demonstrations of the game-enegines. They were demonstrations of the games.

Nesh I agree with your post in general except this part. Game to me by definition means you have some control over what happens. There are other newer psuedo "game" scenes which are game/cutscene hybrids (like re4) but that is a grey area. To me they are still targets until they put a controller in somebodys hand and say "here it is". Even if they don't have the gameplay ready, thats fine. Where's the camera control?

The Halo3 team had no problem doing this even though the gameplay was not ready yet. Part of this was of course not needing to sell people on H3 so much and more proving their tech.

Even with that you still cant compare halo3 at this point to other games which are in playable form as this is an unfair comparison. "in-game trailer" to other "ingame trailer" is fair only if they are both proven to be realtime from an unbiased source. In the case of Naughty Dog I would say if they were able to capture realtime video from their game in progress and had the time to edit the material, why not dump the demo code to a behind the scenes room and at least prove that one of the most visually impressive games on show at e3 was indeed realtime. No offense to anyone but actions speak louder than words. Obviously the Halo team felt the same way as they were sure that they would also get questioned afterward regarding how legitimate their "demo" was.

mmkay - agreed that is a special case and most of the time we don't get the inside scoop. But as I said the fact that it was not playable or proven realtime in any other way at the show and Assassins Creed was tells me that the journalists were correct in giving the nod to the game that actually was a game on the show floor instead of one of the "movie"s that could potentially be proven great but at this point I don't think they deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt.

 

[mckmas8808]

TheChefO making a playable demo could take a few months. Maybe some of the PS3 devs didn't want to use 3 months to make a playable build. Supposely Lair is playable, but Sony didn't want people to play it because it didn't run well enough in their opinion.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I am going to conclude my posts in this thread with this...

I honestly dont see how anyone can say with a straight face that PS3 exclusive games are not matching or besting 360 exclusive titles. Just looking at the titles I listed...FF13, MGS4, Heavenly Sword, Naughty Dog's title, DMC4, Getaway, 8days demo's, R&C, ut2k7, Lair, etc.

It seems to be more a matter of faith than anything. You've got some here that won't take anything other than 'someone-playing-the-game' to be 'game' footage, and as most PS3 games are in development without refined playable demos, it's not surprising there's not many out there. Then you get others who are willing to take in-game engine trailers and non-playable demos as indicative of the game. I'm something of the latter. Devs aren't likely to develop one engine for demos or cutscenes and another for gameplay. The only real likely differences will be poly coutns and texture res, things that gobble up resources that can be scaled. Lighting engines, shadowing, and all the special sources there in the non-playable footage should be there in the playable footage.

As I suggested earlier, is there a precedent to believe otherwise? Have there been many game-engine trailer shown that don't show what the actual game is like? Seems a very subjective area. We've seen on this board before how some people can think MGS cutscenes/trailers are leaps and bounds beyond the actual game, while other are adamant that there's no difference at all in quality. And obviously there's no solution. Each person express their opinion and leaves it at that.

It's also not a problem in any way, except when people are trying to compare systems. If you want to try arguing 'this whole system looks better than that whole system' then your not comparing like with like, which is also a fundamental limit of comparing different games on different systems too.

For me, I look at some trailers for PS3 that look great that haven't been confirmed realtime and think 'yeah, right. If you say so...', and I look at others that look good that the devs have confirmed realtime or ingame and think 'there's some real purdy games coming for that platform, and some of them look interesting as games too!' and I occassionally see another game trailer that's unconfirmed realtime or not but looks so bad it doesn't matter. I'm not seeing anything that I'd class as below what I see from XB360 trailers and I'd say the games are looking fairly comparable in graphics. That's my take.

 

[TheChefO]

The only real likely differences will be poly coutns and texture res, things that gobble up resources that can be scaled. Lighting engines, shadowing, and all the special sources there in the non-playable footage should be there in the playable footage.

Shifty I agree with most things you said in your post and in general I have no problem with the thought that overall ps3 games will be equal in quality to 360 games. The issue is that in your quoted section you mention things that will affect the quality of the graphics in the final build. We've seen too many times where a realtime demo has been shown 1year+ prior to release only to have the end product take a step back from what was shown. How big the step is could determine where one ranks the game visually with others on the market at that time. Will this happen with the games listed? Maybe not, but to compare them with other games which are so much closer to release (6months+) is what I find rediculous.

The other things you mentioned could also change. We saw this with Halo2. At this point it is very early in the game of what to expect out of ps3/360. While it is great we have some samples to compare and contrast to make statements like "I trust what they will bring to market" I find a bit mislead as I can't find any games that are close enough to market to base those statements on that look anything like the games which are getting so much praise.