God of War Collection – Blu-ray Disc Compilation

[AlNom]

hm.. Bluepoint Games... any expectations/impressions

 

[patsu]

Wowza. I really hope this is a solid BC solution that can be easily extended to other titles, if for no other reason than being a fabulous technological achievement!

Bah... geeks !

I bet it was a relatively expensive port to the new GoW engine.

If they can handle an edge case like GoW, then hopefully other developers are inspired/encouraged to follow through. ;-)

The Gran Turismo and SingStar series are taken care of by the import of car and song library respectively.

 

[joker454]

Pretty obvious buy I wonder if they just took the assets from the first two GoW games, and used the PS3 engine from GoW3 to recreate the first two GoW's. So maybe they didn't bother with PS2 compatibility and instead just recreated the older games with the modern engine. The 're-mastered' and 're-worked' wording makes me wonder if that's the route they took.

 

[marcus_rocks]

Pretty obvious buy I wonder if they just took the assets from the first two GoW games, and used the PS3 engine from GoW3 to recreate the first two GoW's. So maybe they didn't bother with PS2 compatibility and instead just recreated the older games with the modern engine. The 're-mastered' and 're-worked' wording makes me wonder if that's the route they took.

That is the route they took but not with GoW3 engine. Blast Factor was rendered at 1080p by Bluepoint Games.

 

[Gradthrawn]

Pretty obvious buy I wonder if they just took the assets from the first two GoW games, and used the PS3 engine from GoW3 to recreate the first two GoW's. So maybe they didn't bother with PS2 compatibility and instead just recreated the older games with the modern engine. The 're-mastered' and 're-worked' wording makes me wonder if that's the route they took.

In your opinion, which method is probably the most feasible and economical? Would one be easier to do than the other?

EDIT

Although, how easy or feasible the emulation route is would probably be greatly dependent on how GoW uses the GS and how far they've come along (if at all) with soft emuatlion of the GS. So, perhaps a better question would be what do you think the difficultly would be in taking the PS2 assets and using them in the new engine?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Pretty obvious buy I wonder if they just took the assets from the first two GoW games, and used the PS3 engine from GoW3 to recreate the first two GoW's. So maybe they didn't bother with PS2 compatibility and instead just recreated the older games with the modern engine. The 're-mastered' and 're-worked' wording makes me wonder if that's the route they took.

That seems very likely. And dull.

 

[RobertR1]

That seems very likely. And dull.

Dull from a technical perspective or leading to a dull presentation?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Technically dull. It means the game is just a reusing of an engine with content replacement, and has no application for other BC titles.

 

[RobertR1]

I think the BC ship has sailed....

Personally, I think putting the resources into redoing popular games, bundling them together and selling them at a good price is the way to go. It's hard for me to go back and try to play last gen games but having them redone (well) with AA/AF and so on is good news to me. It'd be an interesting poll on a bigger site.

BC vs GoW Collection example.

 

[Cornsnake]

I hope they re-release more PS2 games like this.
Imagine SotC without the slowdown and in 720p...

Even better if they would offer it through PSN.

Oh god yes. If there is any PS2 game I'd like to see get this treatment, it's SotC. There have been rumours about a rerelease quite while back. And Ico was rereleased along side SotC in europe.

 

[joker454]

In your opinion, which method is probably the most feasible and economical? Would one be easier to do than the other?

A re-worked version seems both easier and more beneficial to me. It would essentially be a port so a tiny team could handle it, and it's more beneficial since it lets them test and improve their current pipeline, everything from scripts, tool chain, renderer, etc, assuming they are using their own internal tools and engine.

The PS3 hardware has been available for 4 or so years, so at this point there is either a technical reason to not have PS2 emulation, or a business reason to not have it. If it's for technical reasons, then the GoW team is stuck in the same boat as everyone else, meaning it's a really tough problem to solve. If it's for business reasons, then the GoW team is also stuck since Sony won't want one studio shipping PS2 emulation as everyone will point to that and wonder why they can't play all their old PS2 games.

So...re-worked might be the only the way to go. Personally I prefer that, since a proper PS3 engine will fix many of those PS2 rendering issues that emulation would just carry over, and I didn't like the blur that would happen when upscaling PS2 games through emulation back when I had the 20gb launch PS3 model. It makes it more exciting also, as now I'm really curious what a re-worked GoW 1&2 will look like, whereas if they were just emulated I'd know exactly what to expect.

 

[AlNom]

Are there any presentations or slides that go into the technology of the original two games

 

[patsu]

I think the BC ship has sailed....

Personally, I think putting the resources into redoing popular games, bundling them together and selling them at a good price is the way to go. It's hard for me to go back and try to play last gen games but having them redone (well) with AA/AF and so on is good news to me.

Yap ! They should do it to more games even if there is no "PS2 Port SDK".

....

I agree !

 

[zed]

I have zero interest in the GOW games but as others have said
SotC + ico I would love to see, prolly the only console games last generation I wanted to try out

 

[Ben-Nice]

I'm not sure what this means for the final product

IGN: What we understand about the port, for lack of a better word, is that it's now at 720p, it runs at 60 frames-per-second, it's got anti-aliasing going on...

John Hight: 2X anti-aliasing...

IGN: Did you all do anything with using higher-resolution textures? Is there any way that the art has changed, or the number of frames of animation or anything like that?

John Hight: That's a good question. So, we're still kind of evaluating, but we were prepared to upgrade the textures, at least on Kratos on both games, but honestly it's looking so good that we're thinking, you know what? It's probably better to keep it in its pure form. We're playing around with potentially swapping out textures on some of the user interface and the fonts just to make them a little more readable. It looked great back on the PS2 on a regular TV, or even an HDTV, but once you get into an HDTV running at 720p, some of the text gets a little weedy, so we are going to swap that out.

ModEdit:
Link to interview
-AlS

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Can someone post whatever interesting stuff is in that interview. The IGN page just wouldn't load on my stressed connection.

 

[djskribbles]

Not much to add on from what was already quoted above. There most likely won't be any GoW III demo included as they feel they don't have anything that is release-ready; they're just trying to get this done by the holdiays (so maybe still possible?). The games will be exactly the same, nothing will be added (other than trophies of course) or removed.

 

[deepbrown]

Not much to add on from what was already quoted above. There most likely won't be any GoW III demo included as they feel they don't have anything that is release-ready; they're just trying to get this done by the holdiays (so maybe still possible?). The games will be exactly the same, nothing will be added (other than trophies of course) or removed.

The GOWIII demo has been present at E3 and lots of other on the road shows. It should be ready for the disc. Well maybe.

 

[AlNom]

Can someone post whatever interesting stuff is in that interview. The IGN page just wouldn't load on my stressed connection.

They also pretty much confirm that it is more of a port instead of some endeavour towards a more general BC solution.

 

[patsu]

Here's the part about the porting...

IGN: Let me start with some more generalized questions because the hot issue these days is backwards-compatability with PlayStation 2 games. So to clarify first off, is this package a "port" where you actually went in and changed the code to work on the PlayStation 3 as a PS3-specific title, or is this something that's running inside of an emulator?

John Hight: Well, I don't necessary agree with just the terminology "port", but given those two limited options, then we'd have to put it in the "port" category. We haven't developed general purpose code that would now work for every PS2 title out there. Basically what we wanted to do was we wanted to remaster [the games], and we've done a lot of things to not only have it run on the PS3 but also make it look better, perform smoother and have a little bit extra functionality.

IGN: So how difficult was it for you to move it over to the PS3? A lot of people wanted to see God of War go there, but also things like the Team ICO stuff and a lot of other classic PS2 games. How difficult was it to move the game over, and do you think that this would be something feasible for other studios to do?

John Hight: Well, that goes back to how games were developed in the first place. For us, it wasn't too difficult because, and I'll brag on our engineering team, but the code they developed is pretty straightforward, well-documented, we don't do a lot of assembler programming, it's all straight C… Some teams have developed their own scripting language or whatever that would then require a translation of that interpreter over to the PS3 - we don't do that, it's straight C, so it made that aspect a lot cleaner. Plus, the other thing is that we've had very little attrition in our engineering team in our history of this studio, so the guys that originally wrote the code for God of War 1 are right here. Some of them worked on the port, some of them were able to offer, "Oh yeah, this is what's going on here. This part of the code's important" or "Don't worry, that part of the code's not important, you can ignore that", so it made it go a lot smoother, to have those guys around.

I wonder what he meant by the first sentence.