Most of you here know I have been discussing the potentials and porting challenges regarding the PS3's hardware since before the console launched. One thing became appartent though, this forum and other forums weren't ready for in-depth long term outlook discussions.
The release of games such as Uncharted 2 (which won almost every award it could win at the VGA awards in 2009) and God of War 3 (which in 2010 got the award for best graphics and used improved MLAA methods using the Cell's SPUs) helped opening up discussions somewhat and made people rethink their biases.
Some discussions I especially was assaulted upon by fans was for example my take on performing anti-aliasing on the Cell's SPUs a couple of years ago, this while saying it would be superior due to the Cell allowing for far more flexibility. God of War 3 this year demonstrated well what I was talking about and some upcoming games for 2011 such as Killzone 3 (FPS), LittleBigPlanet 2 (multi game gerne support) and Infamous 2 (electrifying open world game) are already confirmed to take this approach:
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOSnR9I1src
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akI6yjcOiwY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlp3Ynyp5Ks
Regarding the PSN vs XBox Live discussions, I always took the stance that for me the PSN is superior as I don't want to worry about myself nor my gaming buddies to (still) be subscribed for online gaming to begin with. I consider online gaming as something that should come out of the box nowadays. I played online games back in the 80s on the Amiga without paying extra (nor my online gaming buddies) to make use of such features beyond making sure I'm online and I don't want to see this changed.
Another reason why I stated the PSN to be superior is because there is far more flexibility for developers to tap into using the PSN. This is one of the reasons why Valve recently dramatically changed its stance with regard to the PS3, the PS3 is no longer a "disaster" for them, but even a better platform for them to work with than the XBox 360. It also allowed developers who wanted to take the extra mile to implement far more simultaneously online gamers to participate in online game sessions together with virtually no lag.
LittleBigPlanet 2 as talked about above is another good example, that simply cannot be done with offerings currently provided by XBox Live Gold, some examples of some early user created content currently already under development for the LittleBigPlanet 2 beta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh-JFB0YqB0 (Top down Zelda clone / Boss Fight)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy8SI73IWQc (Geometry Wars clone)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQl0LxVzOTM (RPG clone)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZvm4CGKjs (Pacman clone)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hnvfiT9WZI (Robot shooter)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMETqtugnMw (Mirco Machines clone)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZBSYRNTmNs (punch/slash game)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aj_J5k5sQw (shooter)
Seriously which game lover doesn't dig this kind of flexibility?
Regarding multi-platform development, it seems we are now really arriving at a turning point. In the past I recommended writing well designed code suitable for the PS3, which I stated would yield performance benefits for PC and XBox 360 gaming as well.
It seems top game developers are now taking this approach. Mass Effect 2 is of course the 360's highest rated game since the release of GTA IV in 2008 and is most often hailed as the 360's best showcase for its graphics capabilities. Although visually the game is a step behind the PS3 exclusives such as Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 and argueably from the RPG perspective games such as Final Fantasy XIII and Heavy Rain provide better visuals it must be a shock to fanboys the PS3 version has been greatly improved.
Mass Effect like many other games such as Bioshock are based on a heavily 360 biased Unreal engine. This may be due to Epic Games (the engine developer) dealings with Microsoft for exclusive games such as the Gears of War series. But this may be changing maybe due to potential competition from other cross platform gaming engines such as the new CryEninge (as used for Crysis 2):
Bioshock dev team: "So instead of declaring a "lead platform" and porting the game to the others, we’ve instead changed the game engine so that all platforms look (to a programmer) more like a PS3.
This means implementing a task-oriented task processor… that mimics the PPU/SPU split of the PS3. Writing code this way is more difficult for us, but has a key advantage: it’s both optimal for the PS3 *and* gives speed improvements on other platforms."
CliffyB (Epic Games) was positive about the PS3 recently regarding his cross platform game Bulletstorm:
"When you see the game on PS3, you will see the textures look crisp, the depth of field looks great, the particles look astonishing – it will very much take advantage of what the PS3 is capable of."
Of course cross platform games are unlikely to truly rival exclusive PS3 efforts on a technical level as exclusive developers do not need to build their core concept around the capabilities of the XBox 360 (for example the sharing of home made games in LittleBigPlanet 2). And it remains to be seen if 360/PS3 cross platform developers will for example move anti-aliasing on the Cell's SPUs for which they are superior and allow to free up additional resources for the RSX or take full advantage of Blu-Ray capacity as the game could become too large for having to fit onto multiple 6.8 GB 360 discs.
In any case I think 2011 looks very promising and looks to help enable people to understand the stuff I talked about since so many year ago! What's your perspective on 2011?
