MikeB on 30 November 2008
@ nightsurge
Also, in reference to Mike B's comment on campaign scale, Resistance 2 does a great job with the graphics given it's scale, but I think Gears of War 2's scale is much larger and since every mission has multiple paths and different methods of making it through, I wouldn't call it any more linear than R2 (Yes I am assuming you meant Gears 2 when you were referencing the big budget linear game of great graphic detail).
I haven't played Gears 2 enough, so I won't comment directly on this. But Gears 1 was very much caged, the invisible walls are very narrow in this game, of course you can look through these walls to give the impression of scale, but technically limited spaces to move around in (the invisible walls) simplifies things a lot. You know beforehand much better the range of view available to the player and it's also a lot easier to pre-script events.
I think Gears 2 (or a game like Killzone 2) probably has seen more time by graphic artists spend on visually optimising the graphics assets. This is not a technical issue, if you spend days on a 16 color picture it may end up looking more polished than another asset drawn in True color (which is technically better) in a couple of hours. That's of course an exaggeration just to get the point across, Resistance 2 has great looking assets as well.
If Gears 2 had to be able to handle 30 (6 teams of 5) vs 30 multiplayer (6 teams of 5) matches instead of 5 vs 5 matches this would probably pose a problem on the 360.
Multiple of narrow paths is still linear more predictable game design, it just takes more space on disc if both paths include different assets.
