Have we hit the technology wall?

[rocketpig]

Sqrl said:

rocketpig said:

The_vagabond7 said:
The result is slight legend. It costs a ton of money to add each strand of facial hair to a character model, and each bump to a monster's skin but the end result is impressive for the first ten seconds you look at it, then it's like anything else.

That's not true at all. For games like Mass Effect, bad textures would kill the story. Watching the game on a 50" screen, I often forget that I'm playing a game. It feels like a friggin' movie. I'm 10 hours into the game and it still amazes me.

Of course, the game also has more than its fair share of technical faults...

 Did those kill the story?  I guess I am just not following you when you say a texture would kill the story, yet it still has technical faults.  But more over, I have seen screenshots with textures that make me cringe.  I don't think misplaced textures would ruined the experience for me though, but I guess people have different standards in that regard.

It is rather odd to me that so many people have such a high opinion of this game and whenever I look at its videos, screenshots, reviews, etc... I try to get into it but just can't.  Its just strange how completely different we are looking at this.  It has nothing to do with it being a 360 game as I am still expecting it to come to PC down the road.  Actually my PC is probably the reason I don't have plans to buy a 360.

The entire dialogue & conversation system would suffer greatly if Mass Effect wasn't able to bump those great textures, use depth-of-field, etc. One thing people are forgetting is that these graphical achievements allow companies to stop using the bloody cutscene. The graphical engines are allowing gorgeous movie-like interactive situations instead of sitting there watching a cutscene.

Simply put, nothing like Mass Effect was possible last generation. The entire structure of the game's storytelling system would have needed changing because old hardware wasn't capable of the interactive cinema-esque shots put together by BioWare.

PS. Videos and cutscenes don't do Mass Effect justice. Not at all. The game does a fantastic job of immersing you into the story and giving you a really epic feeling.