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More On PS3 and Xbox 2
News for nerds writes "The BBC has news about the next-generation game consoles, with comments from various third parties. According to Rory Armes, studio general manager of EA in Europe, they have already received the development kits from Microsoft, but not yet from Sony and Nintendo. He assumes Sony's PlayStation 3 will have a little more under the hood and be more cost-efficient than Microsoft's Xbox 2. Gerhard Florin, head of EA in Europe, remarks 'PS3 will provide graphics indistinguishable from movies.' Spider-Man 2 or Toy Story 2, that's the problem."
Would it be too much to speculate that Apple can easily come out with a iGame console similarly sized like a Mac Mini?
The article mentioned that "Microsoft is obviously a software company first and foremost, while Sony has more experience in hardware", so what then, can a software/hardware company like Apple do?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
when Nvidia said their GeForce FX series could render 6 Jurassic Park quality dinosaurs in real time. Long story short, this is bullshit and it'll be a while before we get such great quality.
http://ipod.fresh27.net/
"We have no idea what the two will look like, but that doesn't keep us from making Wild-ass guesses and then providing 'analysis' on them!"
This sounds like hype to me...how can you render on the fly as well as movies which use huge render-farms to come up with a static video? If he just meant cutscenes....well guess what, thats just the work of any DVD player.
...it seems Nintendo is all but ignored by the MSM, unless it's an article predicting doom and gloom for the country. I think Nintendo's system is definitely the one I'm most interested in seeing.
:P)
And anybody else upset that Microsoft wants to rush the next next generation? I still don't think this generation has been tapped out yet in terms of graphics and gameplay potential (maybe I'm just a bit bitter cuz I bought an Xbox last week
I love this comment.
"Graphics on PC games such as Half Life 2 will be capable on the new consoles"
In another 6 months, PC's will have moved on yet again to the next generation GPU's, leaving these things behind once more.
Maybe I'm getting old and all but I find with better graphics I end up forgetting about the game and just watching the game. For Halo I'd walk around for awhile just admiring different things while getting shot at by Convenant ships.
;)
Well not really. But I'd feel like I missed something whipping around on the warthog.
This can only be more true with movie like games.
Blurring the lines between cut scenes and gaming. Can't wait! Although I'll probably be too distracted to actually finish my objective
-Teiresias
Every time a new Playstation comes out Sony marketing types talk about how it will deliver movie-quality graphics to the masses in realtime. The truth is that it tends to perform exactly how you would expect it to perform, about the same as a high-end PC graphics card at the time it is released. Given how PC graphics cards aren't very close to rendering movies in realitime yet, I think it is safe to assume that any such statements made by Sony marketing are bullshit.
I read the internet for the articles.
We'll see Halo 3, Metal gear 4, Mario sunshine 2 and so on and so forth. The new consoles can't do much new because no one is risking it, they just want better graphics and the same thing over and over. That's just how the market is these days.
Tell me when we're seeing Virtual reality, because untill then "inovation" is a word Microsoft like to throw infront of their patents.
I like muppets.
"We can thrown more polygons around and have better AI but if it doesn't make for a better game then that's not very useful."
Sounds like everyone's goal is graphics realism and immersion. Isn't anybody trying innovate anymore? Thank God for Nintendo. You want immersion? You want to run...they gave you the power pad. You want to punch...they gave you the power glove. You want to shoot...they gave you the light gun. You want to play music...they gave you the Konga bongos. While Sony and Micsrosoft are trying to improve their graphics, Nintendo is actually immersing players in the game by innovating hardware...the only area left for innovation.
By "more realistic physics" it means collisions, physical chain reactions, complex shapes, more correct aerodynamic reactions, water simulation.
Think Half Life 2, but with objects being more realistic in reaction (all those crates acted like they were hollow and made of balsa wood... which, if you break them open, you discover they are!).
Consider a complex problem of an urban combat situation ala Black Hawk Down, but lets even make it more complex: a helicopter taking a hit to the tail, going into a destabilized spin, slamming at an angle against a building and sliding along, tearing things up as it goes.
These days, the results would be: the helicopter takes the hit, which blows it up, and the dead husk falls to the ground, maybe with some forward velocity retained. The building would likely be unharmed.
Ragdoll these days tend to look like dolls made of rubber. GOOD calculations are very CPU expensive, and multiple iterations are as well, so as few iterations of very fast low resolution calculations are used in physics these days to leave CPU time for other things, such as AI logic.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
I'm positive the next generation of consoles will be very nice to behold, but I also remember all of the hype surrounding the PS2 launch and how the PS2 was such a super computer that they had to ban exports to Iraq, and how it was "movie quality" and such... And then it came out, and it was a clear step up, but not nearly the giant leap the hype suggested.
I suspect we'll see the same thing here.
The other thing to worry about is that the increasing reliance of highly detailed art means games are going to take much longer to produce, cost a lot more to make, and those costs will certainly be transfered to the consumer. Not to mention that when you're making games that require 100s of artists and with artists being a limited resource, you'll be seeing less projects spread among less game developer/publishers, with less competition and thus less gameplay innovation...
So things aren't *all* rosy...
Still, I'm sure I'll buy the Xbox2 on release day... I'm a sucker for new things.
Let's see. Nintendo also made rumble paks, analog sticks, 4 controller ports, hard drive in a console (64DD), and the touchscreen in the DS. There are other things, but they haven't ended up being so popular, like the e-reader.
Hell Sony has been leaning on Nintendo's old SNES controller design for a decade now, only adding rumble and analog sticks after Nintendo introduces them.
Say what you want about Nintendo, but without their constant effort, console gaming would not be anything close to what it is today.
Maybe, just maybe, the poster was picking out three simple examples, and not attempting to be exhaustive. An illustrative sample if you will.
It seems to me that all this technology just increases the effort necessary to produce a given quantity of satisfying gameplay.
Once you add physics into the mix, every object needs to be broken down into more parts, represented in more ways, its possible impact on the game logic dealt with. (No point putting in a maze puzzle if you can bash through walls.)
So now you need hyper-detailed models with hyper-detailed textures and somewhat-detailed physics representations to produce something that looks as good as a second-tier film from ten years ago.
And the state of the art is, say, Half Life 2, a game which provides gorgeous graphics but runs you around on rails -- because providing that level of detail in a more open-ended game is simply prohibitively expensive. Indeed, by all accounts, Half Life 2's game play is unusually restrictive, even by the standards of First Person Shooters.
The key to me is choosing a level of design detail that suits the game you plan to make and then hiring an art director who can make the game look fabulous at that level of detail -- rather than maxing out the level of detail for the hardware currently available, and then producing the best game you can given the budget constraints you're stuck with.
The way things are trending we'll have games where you only get to visit one room because it costs millions of dollars to texture the pillows, insects, cracks in the wall, navel fluff, etc.