MGS4 details from comic-con

[Bad_Boy]

figured it should be posted.

http://www.wii60.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3028

I basically gave him [the senior producer] an interview while he was picking out T-shirts, Kojima was off doing the same thing aboiut 5 feet away. Hedidnt seem to notice I was talking to him. I talked to him for about 10-15mins. Heres what I found out.

- No way it will fit on a DVD9. Wouldnt give me a number as how big the game will be. Said he couldnt do that, and nothing is been confirmed as how big the final game will be, cause "there still making it." But went on about how Sony is pushing HD content and in no way will it be possible to fit it on a normal DVD, and BD is totally necessary for MGS4.(he kept calling it BD) I brought up compression, but he didnt seem like he liked that idea. Forgot what he said. Basically they dont want to do that. I dunno. This lead into a question about resolution.

-MGS4 will be 1080. Im assuming 1080p, but he said 1080. He said Sony is "forcing" them to do it in 1080. He hesitated when he said this. Im thinking he could not find the right word, and chose to say "forcing." But didnt really mean that. As he continued to talk about it I assumed he meant "pushing". So anotherwards Sony is really pushing for 1080p on MGS4, and he said thats what it will be.

- wouldnt reveal whos grave it is. said you will have to wait and see.

-Expect MGS4 to be in playable form next E3. He gave me a "hint" as he put it, and said to expect it to follow like all the MGS games have done in the past. In that they were always shown in playable form for the first time in the same year they were released. Which all happened to be at E3. so its releasing in 2007, so expect it at the 07 E3. I sugested TGS but this is what he told me

- still learning the PS3 A lot of things are moving along nicely, but they are also struggling with other things. Because of this he told me this is the biggest MGS team ever, and they have tons of people working on the game. Since its a next gen PS3 game. Made it seem like it was kinda hard to develope on PS3 thus far.

-Tilt controller might be used for cracking necks. I asked him about the tilt controller, and he said there testing a lot of things out. I said how I thought it would be really cool if you could crack guards necks with the controller. He laughed and sai another team member came up with the same idea, and there testing it out. He kept reiterating the fact, "ther estill making it"

Kojima has idea's about another ZOEwouldnt confirm anything. But said he thought Kojima wanted to do another one, but is busy with MGS4 right now. Didnt know wether he meant there are already plans for a next ZOE, or already has ideas for it. Whastever it is, it means will will most liekly see a ZOE3 sometime in the future.

*thx to monkeymagic over at gaf for bringing it to my attention.

 

[Bobbler]

Good info (if not a bit questionable as to whether the person actually understood things exactly right). I'm curious about the 1080 part...

And, holy crap that forum/site is obnoxious.

 

[Darkon]

Good info (if not a bit questionable as to whether the person actually understood things exactly right). I'm curious about the 1080 part...

And, holy crap that forum/site is obnoxious.

along with it's members.

I like the idea of cracking necks with the tilt controller.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Is it me, or is that entire site designed just to snub PS3? If so, I find it odd they'd post an article on MGS4. I can understand Sony wanting to promote 1080p. They've a whole load of 1080p TV sets coming out and PS3 looks to be the only source for 1080p content for a while!

 

[StefanS]

Is it me, or is that entire site designed just to snub PS3? If so, I find it odd they'd post an article on MGS4. I can understand Sony wanting to promote 1080p. They've a whole load of 1080p TV sets coming out and PS3 looks to be the only source for 1080p content for a while!

That 1080p part sounds a little bit fishy to me. So far the screen shots, trailers, etc. we've been seeing were 720p. I think that guy just misunderstood that Producer, maybe it's just 1080i or upscaled to 1080 or sg like this.

 

[Bad_Boy]

That 1080p part sounds a little bit fishy to me. So far the screen shots, trailers, etc. we've been seeing were 720p. I think that guy just misunderstood that Producer, maybe it's just 1080i or upscaled to 1080 or sg like this.

Well to be fair he did mention kojima talking about the fact that sony is "Pushing" them for 1080. I dont really think Sony has really marketing/pushing 1080i as much as 1080p. Maybe something has happened in the last two months that is pushing it to a higher res. I think the guy has a pretty good understanding of video resolutions, or else he wouldnt have asked the question.

 

[StefanS]

Well to be fair he did mention kojima talking about the fact that sony is "Pushing" them for 1080. I dont really think Sony has really marketing/pushing 1080i as much as 1080p. Maybe something has happened in the last two months that is pushing it to a higher res. I think the guy has a pretty good understanding of video resolutions, or else he wouldnt have asked the question.

He's saying he talked to the unnamed senior producer and not Kojima himself, so there could be plenty of confusion involved. So far I'd take that part with a grain of salt unless we hear or see differently.

 

[Bad_Boy]

He's saying he talked to the unnamed senior producer and not Kojima himself, so there could be plenty of confusion involved. So far I'd take that part with a grain of salt unless we hear or see differently.

Wouldnt the senior producer of the game know about as much as kojima knows? Even if it were a confusion in the resolution, he did say that MGS4 will be the resolution Sony is pushing for. And we all know what resolution Sony is pushing for.

I'm just pointing out what I see in the thread, maybe somebody should pm the guy or something to see if he can clear up what happened.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That 1080p part sounds a little bit fishy to me. So far the screen shots, trailers, etc. we've been seeing were 720p. I think that guy just misunderstood that Producer, maybe it's just 1080i or upscaled to 1080 or sg like this.

They said 1080. I was giving reason why that might be 1080p. Of course, 1080i is also worth pushing for 1080 native sets. Either way, I'm sure Sony would rather devs target 1080x than 720p if they want to flog 1080p TVs. And the more 1080p games, the better (if people can actually see the difference )

 

[Proelite]

I wonder how uncompressed textures are going to work for consoles, especially when your resolution is 1080p and your ram is less than 256 mb.

 

[xatnys]

Assuming this is all true, aside from MGS4, I'd definitely like to see a new ZoE! O_O

 

[hey69]

I wonder how uncompressed textures are going to work for consoles, especially when your resolution is 1080p and your ram is less than 256 mb.

maybe they talk about ingame movies etc. not per se textures

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I wonder how uncompressed textures are going to work for consoles, especially when your resolution is 1080p and your ram is less than 256 mb.

Surely they're using basic DXTC though? It'd be stupid not to. I presume the reservation with compression is things like high-compression JPEG or audio compression to fit the data onto DVD. eg. If they're using 25 GB data, and to get that down to 9 GB you need to go lossy, I can see a preference not to if you don't have to, keeping best quality.

 

[Proelite]

Surely they're using basic DXTC though? It'd be stupid not to. I presume the reservation with compression is things like high-compression JPEG or audio compression to fit the data onto DVD. eg. If they're using 25 GB data, and to get that down to 9 GB you need to go lossy, I can see a preference not to if you don't have to, keeping best quality.

I don't think MGS 4 uses any prerender cutscenes. From the looks of the game, the textures are not that ultra sharp, so I don't know why it will be using beyond 7 gigs of spce. 7 gigs! If they fit uncompressed textures on the Blu-ray, they would have to compress it again in order for it to fit in the vram. If they are using basic DXTC and have basic audio, I don't why the game would take more the 7 gigs. PC games with ultra high resolution textures are barely using 2 gigs. Could it be that we're getting a 100 hour game with levels of content that are unprecedented? Make it happen Kojima!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You might also see marked improvements in texture quality for the final game over quickies for the trailer. Or just lots of textures adding variety to the environments but not duplicating them. If there's say 9 GB of textures, that's 9000 1k textures. Seems an awful lot

 

[El Leone]

Well, MGS always have alot of audio, so I'm guessing that adds to it as well.

 

[Proelite]

You might also see marked improvements in texture quality for the final game over quickies for the trailer. Or just lots of textures adding variety to the environments but not duplicating them. If there's say 9 GB of textures, that's 9000 1k textures. Seems an awful lot

An awful lot of artists, or artists pulling in awful amount of hours. That's maybe why Kojima is currently living at the office, as do a lot of people on the team.

 

[Bad_Boy]

I believe kojima is sending some of his team members to a variety of countries to get source material for the game. Theres supposed to be many different places snake will be able to go, more so than the previous MGS's. Not just taking photos for textures but audio and video of the culture and environment as well. I'm interested in what countries Kojima has planned.

 

[Deepak]

Assuming this is all true, aside from MGS4, I'd definitely like to see a new ZoE! O_O

Yeah! ZOE ZOE ZOE, three times!:smile:

 

[Farid]

I wonder how uncompressed textures are going to work for consoles, especially when your resolution is 1080p and your ram is less than 256 mb.

He didn't specify anything, in this "interview", concerning the reason for their supposed high storage space requirement.
Also, the RAM available for graphical operations (texturing include) on PS3 is higher than 256MB. Texture reads from the XDR pool could suffer from latency penalties, mainly if RSX didn't have a sufficient amount of texture cache available for these operations; and as far as I know no details about the latency hiding and the texture cache configuration have been disclosed publically yet (And no, I won't be the one who will disclose them.).

Anyway, is that supposed to be a picture of Kojima that is posted on that linked thread? That doesn't look like him; but then again I'm not a specialist, nor a fan, of the dude, so I guess I'm definitely not in position to recognize him or not.