Hi everybody.
Yesterday I got the final PAL version of SH3 (no warez version). I'm about an hour into the game (savegame time) and I thought I might give a few impressions for you guys.
At first I never played SH1 on PS1, but enjoyed SH2 on PS2 very much so I'm obviously positively biased about the series (atleast from a gameplay side of things).
A few words on the overall technical quality of the game:
- loading times are on startup and every few rooms a bit long (5-10 seconds), but the most frequent transitions from room to room are very fast.
- sound quality is amazing. The title track is nice, but the ingame sound effects are nothing short than amazing in both sample quality and how they fit the games theme. Sound was a strong point of SH2 and SH3 is a nice improvement. It's a pity the game has no support for DPL2. A XBOX port with DD5.1 would certainly draw my attention.
Now on to graphics:
The game has two display options which influence graphics quite heavily IMO.
1) Noise effect: It's on by default and similar to the noise of SH2 but less pronounced. It definetly adds to the mood of the game and hides texture and edge aliasing quite nicely.
2) Display Mode: Default is normal which gives the whole game a soft look compared to sharp which brings out quite a bit aliasing.
I played with Noise Effect on and Display Mode Normal (the default settings for the game) which gives nice IQ with little noticeable edge and texture aliasing. The creepy feeling this settings get you is another bonus.
I played around for a few minutes with Noise effect Off and Display Mode sharp and it makes the games visual flaws stand out very clearly.
With the default settings (which I recommend) the graphics are gorgeous.
The amount of work that went into the characters (modelling and animation) is very visible. These are IMO the most realistic ingame characters I've ever seen on any platform. SH2 was definetly no slouch in this category so the improvement is all the more impressive. I'm sure the artistic side of things plays a large role in making these characters look as believeable as they are, but that's what good artists are for I guess.
Texturing is kind of a mixed bag IMO. Granted there are lot's of highres textures all over the place, and once again the art department get's a 10 out of 10 for there achievement, but I'm sure people will gang up on the texture aliasing when they play without the Noise Effect. With the default IQ settings I have no complaints about texture aliasing as the draw distance is very limited most of the time.
With the overall amount of scene complexity (there are loads of detailed objects lying around in some rooms) it's IMO quite an achievement to still fit as many High quality textures in those little 32Mb RAM. Adding MipMapping with proper trilinear filtering would certainly be nice, but may simply not fit in because of the added memory requirement. (this is of course speculation)
The shadowing seems pretty much identical to SH2, which once again was no slouch in this area. Vertex lighting is to me the most annoying visual flaw in SH3. I'm very sensitive to this so for most people it may be a non-issue.
If you put everything together you get a game with a visual quality which was thought to be impossible to realise on PS2. It has it's flaws (afterall game design is the art of compromise
) but the overall impression is strong enough, mostly thanks to the characters design, to overshadow them.
About the gameplay:
Hey it's Silent Hill so what did you expect?