| Squilliam said: Of course you need to remember the majority of improvements and 'technical prowess exhibited thus far are feats of artistry rather than feats of technical talent and coding. This is the reason why the art team far exceeds the size of the programming team for any game out there, because they are the ones who truly make the most difference to how a game looks. Any time you get a talented developer and you give them a lot of time and money to work with you can recieve a very artistically sound game. On the other hand if the game design is very challenging technically you can have unlauded technical showcases because the results of the artists work aren't as obviously represented on the screen. For instance if you take games like GTA 4 and Red Dead Redemption you have games which cannot as obviously be an artistic showcase because of their open world nature and the divided attention of the artists who cannot optimise every second of gameplay but represent top level technical showcases appreciated by those who know as much if not more than linear titles. In general if you take a great team and add a great quantity of money to them then you can achieve a great looking game pretty much on any platform which stands above the majority just as you can have a movie with a great quantity of money like Avatar be a technical showcase for CGI and 3D effects. My 2 cents. |
I think your spot on with your second paragraph. Part of why games like Uncharted and God of War 3 can look so amazing is partly to do with their game design. The actual game design has a massive influence on both the technical and artistic merits of these games. The views in Uncharted 2 for instance looks spectacular, but only a few select areas are actually traversable so greater effort can be put into the views vs open world games like Oblivion.
Technical feats like fighting on the Titans in GoW3 and in a collapsing building in U2 are also acheivable due to the nature of the games.
