Phil Harrison busts out the doublespeak (again)

[Wrestlevania]

The PS3 and Xbox 360 are two very powerful beasts, and I doubt we've seen the best of it yet. Look at God of War on the PS2, I never thought that was possible, it's one of the few games I've been shocked by, and this late in it's life?

This is the universal law of console gaming; the most technically-impressive games appear right as the console nears the end of its life. I assumed most people were familiar with this concept.

I believe that Rockstar themselves said they had to squeeze a bit to get San Andreas on one dvd, and that's not even a very good looking game, and doesn't include very complex physics either. I believe it will be much less restricting for a developer to have more than enough space than having to constantly think about what they can keep and what they have to remove.

Placing this sort of constraint upon a developers is a very good thing in my opinion; it forces them to evaluate what's intrinsic to the experience and what's just window dressing.

And physics has nothing whatsoever to do with the storage medium -- it's driven purely by the guts of the console and the competancy of the developer programming it.

Make a few dozens variations and run them through a randomizer that creates more variations for you? Wouldn't that work to a certain degree? Maybe not, I'm not an expert, not even slightly knowledgable on this kind of stuff, but I do believe a lot of developers uses some kind of generator tools for these kind of things?

Not really, that's why you have ever-growing hordes of artists nowadays.

We can't make larger amounts of textures because we don't have the manpower to do it.

Witness the on-going content debacle concerning Gran Tourismo HD. Polyphony Digital are claiming that the reason they're including precious little in the main release is because development time per car has leapt from 10 weeks per vehicle to 6 months, because of the demands now imposed on them by next generation technology. I'd be surprised if they were using any more than a DVDs worth of space right now either, so things are already much more complicated even before you factor in the grossly increased disc capacity of Blu-Ray.

[Marek]

And if games are going to get past the size of Oblivion, we'll see a lot of strip downed X360 versions, whereas the PS3 versions will be 100% since it's using Blu-Ray.

More likely the opposite. Developers tend to create games for the least advanced console and then scale up. Look at how Xbox and Gamecube were way more powerful than PS2 last gen, but the quality of a lot of Xbox and Gamecube titles suffered because they were being cross-developed for PS2.

Also (only saying this as a matter of fact) the reason San Andreas barely fit on a DVD (as far as I am aware) is that a lot of information is repeated on it many times. That's required for streaming content easily from the disc, i.e. the less the drive has to skip around the faster the stream of data.

[StarEye]

I believe the developers choose to develop for the most popular console, not necessarily the weakest one. If the PS3 ends up being the most popular, there will be games that either don't get an X360 port at all, or will be stripped down due to lack of space.

Oh, and if repition is required to for streaming content, what stops the Blu-Ray having the same?

And DanJW, I'm sure there will be smaller games as well.

And I loved oblivion for a long while, but it was a bit empty in the end. And it kinda looked the same anywhere you went. Morrowind was a lot more varied, although I didn't like that. I prefer the colorful style of Oblivion. But let's there was more variety, that would've required a lot more space, wouldn't it?

And I do believe the PS3 is powerful enough to bring us an Oblivion with a lot more variety. I'm exceted to see how Gothic 3 turns out, on the PC.

[StarEye]

This is the universal law of console gaming; the most technically-impressive games appear right as the console nears the end of its life. I assumed most people were familiar with this concept.

That's besides the point. I was just saying to the naysayers that the console just isn't powerful enough to stream a more varied number of textures, and saying that I was shocked at the graphics from a game that came in the end of it's life. I know the most technically impressive games appear at the end, and I used it as a proof that people always underestimate the consoles. I belive that seeing the true potential of the PS3 is still far way off, but people still say the consoles just not powerful enough to manage the numerous times more textures deal.

[Wrestlevania]

I belive that seeing the true potential of the PS3 is still far way off, but people still say the consoles just not powerful enough to manage the numerous times more textures deal.

You're just repeating what I said, but in a more obscure way.

[StarEye]

You're missing the point, I'm saying that people shouldn't prejudge a consoles power this early in it's life (it's not even out yet). That's why I think the Blu-Ray could be put to good use, if the PS3 proves powerful enough to stream a much bigger variation of textures. We'll se eventually how the Blu-Ray business ends up as, I think MS' decisions to use DVD instead of HD-DVD was a mistake, as they now have missed the possibility to use the HD-DVD format for games. Well, they COULD use the HD-DVD add-on for games too, but then I think that would be a very unwise marketing decision. After all, if you have to buy both an Xbox 360 and the HD-DVD add-on, then you might as well get a PS3 instead.

[brkl]

I'm quite certain later PS3 games will use a significant portion of a Blu-Ray disc's space. That's still a very minor part of PS3's performance -- so minor that Sony hasn't even advertized Blu-Ray as something that will help gaming. To add that cost just for games would be sheer insanity. To add it for the media war is just a gambit.

[Wrestlevania]

Gaming certainly doesn't need [blu-Ray] for manifold reasons, two which immediately come to mind being that:

1. [...]
2. Suddenly, vastly increased media capacity encourages greater reliance on eye-candy to provide the actual "meat" of a game

And if you're going to call me a liar on that second point, you need to recall what happened to gaming when CD-ROM first showed up in the early-to-mid 90's...

Of course, I didn't mean to imply this was going to be a phenomenon exclusive to Blu-Ray. Good ol' Team Ninja, the shameless Tits 'n' Ass merchants that they are, have already done it in a next-gen stylee.

Is this going to promote another platform shift for the Dead or Alive franchise? Who cares knows...

Which reminds me: I still haven't checked if that arcade intro 'unlock' code for DoA2 works on Dreamcast, or not.

[SpiderMonkey]

More awesome doublespeak:

"The issue is trying to isolate the vibration feature from the motion sensors. Is it technically feasible? Absolutely. But the balancing act that you need to do, is to be able to present the controller to the consumer at an affordable price."

The extra $200 for the Bluray drive is totally worth it, just for the gaming purposes, as Phil Harrison has just told us. But an extra $20 to put rumble in the controller is too expensive for consumers. WTF?

Link

[Wrestlevania]

Sony exec's are hilarious, aren't they?! They should be on the stage I say!

Oh wait...

Anyway, you cut the quote short:

[The] balancing act that you need to do, is to be able to present the controller to the consumer at an affordable price. Either that, or we'd finally get raped out of existence by those patent lawyers!

[StarEye]

Eh, I've never really cared what the hell they're saying anyway. All I care about is the games, and the PS3 will certainly have enough of those.

If I were to boycott a company because of suspicious activities or statements, I'd never have an Xbox either.

[Marek]

I don't think the Xbox team was ever particularly suspicious, even going back to the Xbox 1. They had to work very hard to cast off the ballast of Micr0$haft!!11's reputation in the PC arena. I didn't find them sympathetic at first either, but guys like Ed Fries and Seamus Blackley were totally awesome.