Slashdot Mirror
Early Killzone 2 Reviews Looking Good
Reviews are beginning to appear for Guerrilla Games' upcoming first-person shooter, Killzone 2, a PS3 exclusive that has received a great deal of hype over the past several months. The reviews are mostly complimentary, but not overwhelmingly so; Ars Technica says it has "some of the best graphics yet seen on the PS3," and is a "solid take on the war-gaming genre." They also acknowledge that this is the latest game being held up as a standard for how good PS3 games can be, though the PS3 may not need such validation anymore. Edge Magazine is critical of the story, saying, "you could play the levels in random order to little ill-effect," but found the gameplay redeeming enough to warrant a 7/10. Concerns were raised early about the quality of the controls, but Guerrilla Games has affirmed that no changes will be made. Though the game won't be out for about a week yet, rumors of some fairly typical DLC plans are already cropping up. Giant Bomb recorded some video showcasing Killzone 2's multiplayer a while back.
EDGE (a magazine which has been going rapidly downhill for the past few years)
Personally, I wouldn't agree with that. Edge provides solid reviews, and they actually use the full review spectrum (i.e. if a game's crap, it gets a 1 or 2, not a negative write up and a 6)
While Edge is sorely missing someone of the calibre of Mr Biffo in their columns section, and their gaming comic, Crashlander is trash, they're the only review that I (as a dev in the industry) actually want to read (although Eurogamer's reviews are starting to become equally as credible, although sometimes they're still a little too easily distracted)
Having read the review in question, I can also understand exactly why it is lower than the average. The game seems to be competant and pretty, but not anything 'great' in terms of gameplay or pushing the FPS genre forward. Which sounds like 7/10 to me.
Baka Drew
Gears, Vegas, GRAW and many other games not only have cover systems, but implement them better than Killzone. That it also sticks doggedly to a first-person view so you can't see much while in cover isn't a significant innovation, if you ask me.
Yes, Edge got rather carried away with their review of Halo 3. However, 7/10 is if anything better than I'd expect to see at the bottom of that text - they've reviewed tonnes of PC FPS titles like that and given them 6/10.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You're somewhat in the right direction, but not entirely right. The main difficulty programming the PS3 is not that it's particularly hard to break up a game engine/ AI/ graphics effects/ whatever into enough threads to keep the PS3's SPU's busy, the hardest part is actually scheduling the threads to prevent memory contention, stalling SPU processes, communicating inputs & outputs etc. It's a step back from writing code and having the compiler do all the hard work, only having to track the interaction between 2, maybe 3 threads that run all the time. With the PS3 you'd be handling the same 2 or 3 threads on the PPU, plus tens, maybe even 100s of 'micro-threads' distributed over the SPU's, constantly starting, pulling data from RAM, spending some time processing, pushing back the result, etc.
It doesn't really help that game engines are generally based on existing codebases and ported between architectures all the time either. It's not easy to extract high performance from a game engine that has to run well on the homogenuous 3-core architecture of the 360 as well as on the heterogenuous 2+7 core architecture of the PS3. And let's not forget the split-memory architecture, where half of the main memory effectively has zero bandwidth to the CPU and should only be accessed from the GPU. Which leaves only 256MB of RAM or a major headache laying out your data in memory.
Last but not least you're right about the GPU: the 360 GPU has significantly better fill-rates, especially when complex shaders are used. The Cell in the PS3 can be used to offload graphics stuff and not be limited by shader performance, but again it's not easy.
I believe the KZ2 engine was designed from the ground up for the PS3 architecture, which probably explains why it looks so good compared to cross-platform PS3 titles.