So Abadd, what did you think of the games shown at E3? A lot of people didnât appreciate Sony oiling the cogs of its hype machine again, thatâs for sure.
The PS3 is all hype and no substance, and yet, if it shipped today people would buy it in the millions on the promise of playing a movie. It makes me wonder if these people are being mind-controlled. And why is the media so damned one-sided? Some people donât seem to realise that competition is healthy for the industryâŚ
Hereâs what J Allard had to say about Sonyâs antics in a recent interview with The Armchair Empire:
[quote]Q: What do you think about Sony?s hardware?
Allard: I think they?ve mislead people being very specific about certain numbers in the press conference on Monday. We?re launching a product campaign, they?re launching a political campaign. They were clearly responsive to the system that we?ve designed. At the end of the day, our transistor count and their transistor count ? about the same. Then you have to dig to the next level. We have a unified memory architecture. We didn?t tell developers how to split it, [Sony] split it. Every one of our developers might split it right down the middle but who knows. In terms of through-put and performance, they talk about 2X the floating point performance. That?s not right. They neglected to mention that we have about 3X integer performance. They further neglected to mention that 80% of games construction mix is integer and 20% is floating point so when you weight it out, we?ve actually tuned it a little bit better. In the end, it?s basically a wash. I look at it and say it?s a wash. You can make the case for us, you can make the case for them. We?ll publish a bunch of details so you guys can all speculate but it?s basically a wash. But I can say there?s will be harder to program for. And we?re going to have better software support. Both of these machines are so sophisticated that theoretical performance doesn?t matter ? what matters is how much of that performance can be unlocked. The key to unlocking performance [of the hardware] is software.[/quote]
In all fairness, itâs difficult to tell at this point what was âin gameâ and what was CG. There have been media reports of people actually seeing some of the games in motion, but some have been all but confirmed that they werenât realtime. In the meantime, Iâm just going to sit quietly, and not care
The product lineup? Hm. I was very, very disappointed by the stuff out of Japan in general. Not a single playable next gen game out of anyone. And frankly, this next generation is really going to start showing the limitations of the anime/manga art style. Take DOA4, for instance. They have obviously upped the graphical prowess by adding lighting effects, cloth simulation, and more moving objects/details in the environments. Yet the characters themselves donât look that much more impressive than last gen. Why? Because anima/manga art style is purposefully devoid of detail. Itâs an extremely abstract and minimalistic style. Put that next to, say, Gears of War, and you start to see a big difference. With games that extensively use normal mapping, itâs much easier to see the jump in visual fidelity. With anime/manga art style, itâs hard to justify the purchase of a new version of the game when the gameplay is very similar to the last, and the visual upgrades are minimal.
Heck, even Namcoâs game âFrame City Killerâ is supposedly using the Unreal Engine 3, but hardly looks like it. Most likely an issue with the art style.
Overall, though, this wasnât a show about the games. I really appreciated seeing Shadow of the Collosus and it reconfirmed my undying love for that dev team, but other than that, it was hard to say.
Or rather, I canât actually speak about the stuff that was impressive
I donât see why, if the first game is good then surely someone will want more of it? I suppose this doesnât apply in some game genres like beat em ups but usually more of the same is what fans of a game wantâŚ
Also, I donât agree about the anime art style. Sure it has limitations but it also has STYLE. Used properly, I think it can look pretty spectacular. And the developers can use the extra power left for other things like impressively huge and detailed levels, tons of characters on screen, better AI and physics, greater special effects and what not. I mean, surely noone minds the minimalistic look of anime movies or comics even though another artist could always add more detail on the same scene, so why would they mind that in games?
Anyway I understand all you said propably applies to DOA but your statements sounded more general and I donât think they apply to just anything, only in specific examples.
I know a lot of western developers love going for realism in games, and now that graphics have made such huge strides in recent years, the tools are available with which to go all the way. I honestly donât have a problem with this, or gritty realism (notice how thatâs better achieved in films when they are filmed in natural light).
[quote=âAl3xand3râ]Also, I donât agree about the anime art style. Sure it has limitations but it also has STYLE. Used properly, I think it can look pretty spectacular. And the developers can use the extra power left for other things like impressively huge and detailed levels, tons of characters on screen, better AI and physics, greater special effects and what not. I mean, surely noone minds the minimalistic look of anime movies or comics even though another artist could always add more detail on the same scene, so why would they mind that in games?
Anyway I understand all you said propably applies to DOA but your statements sounded more general and I donât think they apply to just anything, only in specific examples.[/quote]
Actually, thatâs not really a correct assumption. The level of detail that you are seeing is almost completely achieved through lighting and texturing, not through the addition of polygons or streaming more data (which is what would be required to create "huge and detiailed levels, tons of characters on screen, etc).
The difference with something like an anime movie or a book or whatever is that itâs a different medium, and people expect different things. As Iâve talked about before, the game industry is still primarily a tech industry, driven by âthe next big thing â˘.â The issue with games is that games are constantly compared to each other, and that there are very specific camps in terms of who likes what kinds of games, etc. So, when the inevitable comparisons are made, games that sport that generic anime look will come out on the bottom.
(And what I mean is exactly that: games with a generic anime look. Like you said, it doesnât apply to everything⌠Some games sport a slightly stylized anime look, such as MGS or DMC, but those have higher levels of detail and realism than most others. Iâm talking about things like DOA, Shining Tears, etc.)
So building an engine that supports bump/normal mapping and uses it to the max doesnât have an effect to performance as opposed to an engine built for the same purpose but without intending to use any of those techs?
Agreed with the rest (especially the parenthesis).
Not really⌠Normal mapping and all that does take a considerable amount of power. Didnât mean to say it that way. However, the number of polygons in a level cannot simply be increased because you change the way something is textured (unless, that is of course, youâre limiting your polys because your limiting factor is texture memoryâŚ)
