Firebird Studios: Dedicated Graphics Department for Xbox 36

[Masakari]

I can agree with Uncharted 2, that game has great, great graphics. But not Killzone 2, it's so stylized that it's like saying X cel shaded game has better graphics. The polycounts in KZ2 aren't anything special, the textures are lower res and blurry in a lot of spots, it's the art direction that makes KZ2 stand out. It's not in the same league, graphically, as Gears 2 or Uncharted 2 or GT5 or Forza 3, where everything is high detail, and doesn't compromise.

People also forget that these Xbox games have had, for the most part, 2 year dev cycles, while almost all the PS3 titles you can name (God of War III, GT5, Killzone 2, Heavy Rain) have had double that. It's like expecting that, I don't know... Serenity, the Josh Whedon movie, have cgi as good as Star Wars - it can't, it took less money and less time to make. If you give me 1 month to do a model, I will do it, but if you give me 2 months, I will do it better, it's just how it works.

Which just makes Naughty Dog even more relevant, they managed to knock U2 out 2 years after the first one. Of course, it helps that they had the funding to form the internal Sony ICE team, but still, very impressive.

There's a reason PS3 is particularly strong now, and that's because they took forever to release some of these titles. So now they are (graphically) very strong because they have had the time to understand the system, the flipside of that is that the PS3 catalogue was very behind the 360 one for the first few years of the gen.