Slashdot Mirror
PS3 Issues Caused GTA IV Delay?
Dr. Eggman writes "According to statements made by Michael Pachter on Gamasutra, 'The Rockstar team had difficulty in building an exceptionally complicated game for the PS3, and failed to recognize how far away from completion the game truly was until recently.' The article goes on to describe an agreement between Rockstar and Sony not to favor the 360 by releasing their version first, necessitating the delay on the 360 as well. Pachter's comments are interesting, because all Take-Two has been willing to say is that 'technological issues' were causing the hold-up. "
RTFA. The first paragraph of the article:
Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter says Take-Two management has "stumbled badly for the first time" with the delay of GTA IV, and said that he believes difficulties porting the game to the PlayStation 3 are to blame and that the company's new green light policy appears to be a failure.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
As the first article states, it's only the uninformed opinion of a financial analyst that PS3 development difficulties were responsible for the delay. Of course, the financial analyst also believes the PS3 version is a port of the 360 version, when in fact the PS3 has always been the lead platform for the game. Shows how much his opinion is worth.
Rockstar says they have challenges on both platforms (likely Cell development on the PS3 and stuffing everything onto a DVD-9 on the 360). Nothing to see here, folks...
I'm reading the exact sentence you quoted, but I'm getting a different vibe from it.
The quote says that the difficulty was specifically in porting the environment. Not "the PS3 is hard to develop for," or "we developed this in parallel on the 360 and PS3 and the PS3 version has been harder to do." Just that they developed it on one, and porting it is more difficult than they expected.
I'm happy to blame Sony for a ton of stuff, but it's too early to lay this at their feet.
This seems to feasible as all the press demos I've heard about have been on the 360.
Here's one I could find on short notice.
I'm not aware of Rockstar ever showing the press the game engine running on a PS3.
Anybody have examples of that?
--Just because you can doesn't mean you should--
But I think it's fair to blame this on the PS3, because their stupid architecture is the one that deviated from the standard.
Who said there was a "standard" gaming architecture? What part of the PS3 is not standard? It has a processor, a motherboard, a hard drive (hell, the 360 doesn't even adhere to that standard), RAM, a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray disc drive. I know, it's the wireless card that's throwing Rockstar off!
Want to dive in deeper? You have to deal with threading in the cell, core duo (2), and of course the PowerPC. The only difference is the division of the work to the cells, and Sony has released software to help deal with that. The 360 has that newfangled Unified Shader pipeline versus the PS3's traditional pixel/vertex pipeline.
So what's exactly not standard? The fact that you have those mysterious cells that no one knows what to do with? It's all API'd out at this point. Sony released help for developers at the GDC six months ago. So I don't think it's really a good argument to say that it's such a craaaazy hard platform to program for anymore. There's help there if they want this.
Even Pachter said, this was a failure of management to figure out that it was taking so long. They should have known this weeks ago. I personally was surprised to find out that they were going to be able to develop this game so quickly - look at MGS and FFXIII, they're taking much longer.
Considering the RAGE engine is initially developed for the 360 (Table Tennis), its a fair assumption to make.
Also, Rockstar isnt the only ones having problems. Its widely known that EA sports games on PS3 are currently running at half the frame rate of the 360 version. Also, every Unreal Engine 3 based game on the PS3 this year has had major technical issues (slowdowns, glitches). Its not like its the PS3's fault. 360 was a year ahead of them, and developers are more familiar with it.
Take Two really cant afford this slip. They are in big trouble as it is, and this might sink them (or force them to sell out to another company). They should have gone the traditional route of timed exclusive on a platform (either PS3 or 360). They would have been able to get a nice chunk of change from the console maker plus been able to completely focus on that single platform. And in 6 months they could port it to all the other systems.
Actually... to extend your simile, it's like an 8-cylinder (not necessarily a 'V') where two of the cylinders are of one size and run on standard gasoline (PPE) and the others (SPE) run on diesel and are a different size and crank length (to reflect the differences in capabilities) and there's no timing belt or single crank shaft or valves :) It's up to the programmers to keep the cylinders fed at the right times and synchronize all of them properly and in ways such that the power can be applied efficiently to the transmission :)
25/50 gig BluRay drive standard
20/60/80 gig harddrive standard
360
3.5/7 gig last gen DVD drive
No standard harddrive You forgot one:
PS3
No demo of GTA 4 ever shown in public, or private that we are aware of.
360
Demo shown at E3 using the engine developed on the 360.
-- toolie