| WereKitten said: So, let me understand something. Choosing the techniques you're going to use to ameliorate performance instead of screenshots is now "tricks" or something that is in any way despicable? Let me gliss over the MSAA/QSAA thing for a while (technically KZ2 uses a MSAA technique). It's certainly true that the Crysis 2 engine, for example, will focus much more on dynamic lighting than the KZ2 engine. The guys at Crytek are going to sell an engine. As such their agenda is to show off a wide variety of effects and to fill in what is commonly known as a feature matrix. Now let's judge their resume objectively: Crysis was the epitome of the feature matrix mentality. It was basically: we'll cram anything we could in our engine. If you need a PC that costs $4k to run it, who cares. Sooner or later the hardware costs will go down and you'll appreciate it at your budget level. It's basically an engine where people actually got kicks out of bad performance ("look, this game is so great visually that it runs at 10fps on my setup"). Now, on consoles you can't work in the same way. The hardware is fixed and you have to optimize for it until you get your 30fps. I give the Crytek guys the benefit of the doubt as they are esteemed professionals, but their track record on their ability to squeeze excellence out of constrained resources is quite unproven right now. It might very well be that in the end they will be able to crank out an excellent multiplatform engine for consoles that exceeds dedicated engines such as KZ2's when used in a real-world scenario. But to judge from a list of technical features and engine demo setups is very naive: what counts in the end is how all of it (graphics, streaming, AI, physics) comes together.
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I remember Crysis running fine on high settings on my old 8800GT at nominal resolutions like 1280 by 720P. I don't believe Crysis was the result of anything but a desire to impart a certain look and environment onto the game. I don't believe there ought to be any doubt of their abilities to fit the game for 2 disntinct platforms (Console which means PS3 and 360 are almost identical on most counts) and PC when they have obviously set about from the start to do just that.
Arguing about track record is a red herring when they have staff members on board (Free Radical) whom are familiar with consoles and obvious technical expertise. I have seen few great studios stumbling on creating a console version and I suspect that fewer still from here on out will have problems due to vastly improved tools and libraries.
