PS3 Mania In Next OPM

The jump from 2D to 3D was the biggest, and it's been getting smaller and smaller since then.

 

Well regardless these games are showing some great facial and bodily emotions that we just didn't get from the PS2 or Xbox.

 

A few observations:

-Resolution improvement looks better the bigger your TV is. On a 60" TV, the pixels at 480p are much, much bigger than they are on a 24" set. Even as HD gets cheaper, big TVs are still going to be expensive, and the difference will look less dramatic on smaller sets.

-On average, PS2 games didn't have very good image quality to begin with, with more than enough texture shimmer and jaggies to keep anyone annoyed. Katamari Damacy is also a horrible example--that game didn't have anyone gasping at its beauty when it launched.

-Lighting still sucked this generation. That's the biggest leap we're going to see. In 99% of games, shadows were pretty much just paintings on the walls, there were visible Gouraud shading artifacts in the majority of games, and you could light a blazing fire in the middle of a pitch black room that magically remained pitch black. Xbox games with non-sucky lighting tended to run below 30fps with loads of slowdown (some exceptions). Surfaces tended to look flat, dry and dull (2 out 3 consoles supported bump-mapping in hardware, so how come so few cross-platform games used it?). Carmack said back when he was making Doom 3 is that what makes an object look "real" isn't its shape; it's the way it reacts to light. To me, the lighting of the "Finally! Real 3D graphics hardware!" generation is on par with the geometry of the "Finally! The ability to process a few polygons without barfing everywhere!" generation--it's acceptable, but only a beginning.

-Lots of games this gen had bad framerates and worse animations. Games that have non-craptastic animations still amaze us. My friends, such a thing should not be!

I expect those last two things (lighting and smoothness) to massively improve in the new generation and be the thing that really sets it apart graphically from the old generation.

 

Light is everything, I fail to understand why all the emphasis at this point isn't put on lighting. If they spent all their resources just on making games more realiistically lit for awhile you would forget about polygon counts and those kinds of things for a long time and would be sufficiently blown away.

 

Well for example, if killzone comes as it was shown I think it will be pretty huge. I mean before real 3d they had 2d with "depth", like just a picture maybe but rotates, and when like wolf3d came it was most 2d sprites and so on eh? Maybe mario to wolf3d is a big step, but there are like 2d car games that look 3d you know
Shit I rember playing one on a really old computer, with those big ass 5" floppys, and the game only had one color, like brown-yellow and some shades, but still you raced like in pgr3, sitting in the cockpit and all.

Isn't this 2d too?

 

Lighting creates realism, but can't be taken in isolation. Which would you rather play (or look at ) : a current fighter like Tekken or DOA with a mix of polycounts, lighting and texturing, or an engine where the characters are made of blocks, crudely textured and lit with a realtime full GI and SSS lighting engine? Superb lighting and poor everything else would make all games seem like models, improving their 'absolute' realism but detracting from the 'relative' realism compared to what the graphics are supposed to look like.

 

Well of course not, but we are past that. I'm saying given where we already are in terms of polygon counts just focus on lighting that level for now.

 

Why not just go both and choose PS3.

 

What does that mean?

 

There are alway's trade off's. Pursue one and the potential of the other suffers.

 

"You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to weaksauce again."

You are lucky this board has automatic firewalls that keep you from getting neg repped too much...

 

Rules of trade offs does not apply to PS3.

PS3 is God.

 

Don't pin it all on ps2. Ps2 supported bump mapping, it just had to be implemented in a different manner as we all know. Up until 2004 i was disappointed in all of the consoles, especially gamecube. That's the system with the worst "image quality" reguardless of the so-called AA, fillrate suck horribly.

 

I keep forgetting that.

 

I think we get used to whatever is the best right now pretty quick. I was playing Oddworld Strangers Wrath the other day and this game is considered one of the prettiest on Xbox.. but man is it pretty ugly... Sure the particle effects are still to date very impressive especially dust effects in the towns.. very cool... But the character models, weak lowres textures and god awful voice samples(I dont know how they managed to make them sound so bad) really stand out.

 

I've gleaned some details about the other PS3 games in OPM, mostly from GAF (http://www.ga-forum.com/showthread.php?t=89818&page=1&pp=50).

There's no new media on MoH or Stranglehold.

The Darkness apparently looks really good. Some quotes from OPM/Starbreeze on it:

"The engine we used on Riddick wasn't really suited for the current generation of Hardware. This is OUR next generation - our second title with that sort of technology, which gives us a big advantage. With The Darkness we started with tools that were already developed for the core part of the technology".

"And as with every next-generation title, content production is key. It takes longer to create each individual part of the contents since it's so much more detailed." He zooms in close on a man with a 5 o'clock shadow, and we can actually see his pores and the hairs sprouting out of the follicles."

"It [PS3] is complex hardware. If you want to take advantage of it, you've got to rethink how a lot of stuff works. But for every revision Sony sends, the tools and technology and more mature. And when we develop technology internally here at Starbreeze, we tie it really closely to game design. That's the advantage of an in-house engine..."

On Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom:

- Plot isn't a sequel to the previous UL games, but skips around the timeline
- 3+ playable characters. (Brute, Mage and Knight confirmed)
- Hoping to use Cell to add more detail e.g. When you smash skeletons, you'll see bones ricochet individually off stone walls, etc.
- It'll be 1080p (according to OPM)
- Online is mentioned, but developer can't confirm specific modes or detail yet.

According to a couple of posters there, it unsurprisingly looks "OK", nothing particularly special - has a style similar to the second PSP game or Mark of Kri, apparently.

(Don't ask me, privately or otherwise, about scans - as far as I know there are none on the web so far!)

 

Sounds nice. I will pick the magazine up on the way home.

 

Cutscenes and "target renders" are generally not terribly indicative of how gameplay looks. How long is it before people quit saying "No wait, that's not indicative of next-gen" every time a hotly anticipated new video game turns out to in fact be a video game?