| Smidlee said: First, it's not the same game which happen to take a hit in the reviews compared to AC2. |
I'll stipulate to that if you'll stipulate that Ubisoft has demonstrated more willingness to move the franchise to the weaker-in-nearly-every-way PSP than to the more powerful and successful Wii.
Nothing about something been impossible but the statement was
"Games like Assassin's Creed 2 or Modern Warfare 2 almost depend on higher-definition visuals"
Notice the word "almost." as someone mention you can play PS3/360 on a SDTV. It's just like PC games has a minimum system requirements and a recommended system requirements.
Yes, I noted the weasel word. I also noted that the author is clearly arguing in a manner that makes the "almost" meaningless.
"When you're rendering complex 3D environments like gutted war zones in Iraq or full-fledged Italian Renaissance cities and asking players to keep track of multiple objects in those environments, visual clarity--in particular, clarity at great distances--becomes advantageous, verging on paramount."
Assassin's Creed 2 doesn't render complex landscapes to drain performance budgets or high-five videophiles. Every square meter of the game's been carefully crafted with discrete game mechanics in mind...Spying any of this stuff without poring over buildings or other structures up close and personal requires visuals crisp enough to let you pick out arm-sized objects four or five rooftops over.
Dealing with enemies benefits from spying whether distant rooftop guards are packing bows or swords--drop the resolution to 480p and the same guards become indistinct, jaggy blurs.
Point is, visual clarity affects gameplay in measurable ways. That gets lost in kerfuffles over polygon and pixel counts as contests of muscularity. The corrective requires thinking about gameplay in a more broadly spatial and perceptive sense, then thinking about reaction time in terms of an environment's visual intelligibility.
...it'll probably dog arguments to port games like Assassin's Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2 over until Nintendo recognizes that HD-gaming is more than just aesthetic fluff and antes up.
It's a common rhetorical technique to dance on the edge of a conclusion, hoping that your reader will fall over said edge, while still leaving yourself enough wiggle room to plausibly say "that's not what I said!" In this case, I applaud the author: he walked the fine line VERY well. Nevertheless, his argument is clearly stated: he is saying that HD visuals are "verging on paramount" and that "visual clarity affects gameplay in measurable ways." According to the author the lack of HD "dog[s] arguments to port games like Assassin's Creed 2."
However, this does not prevent Ubisoft from making a similar game for the weaker PSP, while ignoring the Wii. And note that Reggie isn't asking for direct ports of games like Assassin's Creed 2: his direct quote is the he wants "this type of content."
There is a huge improvement when I play Forza 3 on a HDTV compared when I played it on SDTV. It's not just about graphics it's about resolution. The better the resolution the better I can see farther ahead up the road. Now something like Mario Kart with all the colors in the rainbow SDTV is fine but with a sim like Forza 3 it almost depends on higher resolution.
Forza 3 can't be played on SDTV's? Ah, you said also "almost." In that case, it doesn't depend on higer resolutions, and thus CAN be done in Standard Definition. Glad we (and that includes the article's author) agree!
