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kain_kusanagi on 06 November 2012
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Sal.Paradise said:
kain_kusanagi said:
JustThatGamer said:
bananaking21 said:
uncharted 2/3 would have been impossible on last gen consoles


No, they could have easily been made on last gen consoles they just wouldn't have looked as good obviously. 

Most of the big moments in God of War 3 would have been impossible last gen due to being completely incapable of rendering a 2000 foot tall interactive enemy (no, nothing in GoW2 or SotC comes close).

 

And I'd assume only big and/or complex games like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, GTA IV or the Mass Effect series wouldn't have been possible last gen without major sacrifices. I believe the majority of games this gen could be completely achievable on last gen hardware with very minimal sacrifices. 

Is the titan in that picture really that big, or is Kratos just tiny?

Think about it like this: Two characters are rendered at the same time. Scale one down, reduce it's detail, and drop it on the other character's shoulder. Now it looks like one is huge, but really you just have a character being rendered like any other. Could it be done last gen, maybe not, but is it really that impressive, I don't think so. It looks great though.

Nah, it's full size. 

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/gaming/rendering-god-of-war-iii

When God of War III comes out on Tuesday, March 16, for the PlayStation 3, gaming will have its own Burj Khalifa—Kronos, the 1600-foot-tall boss.

At the risk of banging an old and extremely battered drum, God of War III's use of scale is another example of a technical trick that, according to Filippov, only the PlayStation 3 can pull off. Although previous games, including God of War titles, have featured large enemies, the new game's Titans are presented not as scripted events or optical illusions. They are fully-rendered, exceptionally detailed character models, with stable proportions (Kronos's hand doesn't simply swell as it approaches, as the Colossus's hand did) and shifting textures that push the limits of the PS3's hardware. Although the Kronos fight was a technical challenge, a sequence where Kratos travels the length of the Titan Gaia was even more complicated. "The Gaia scene is an example of something that wouldn't fly on the [Xbox] 360," Filippov says. "The reason is you need to recalculate that entire surface—all of Gaia's skin—and you need to calculate collisions for all the dozens of enemies climbing on and sticking to that surface." 

In that particular scene, Kratos has to navigate the craggy, earthen skin and foliage covering Gaia, as up to two dozen enemies at a time make their own way around the Titan's body features to attack him. This is where the PS3 shines, Filippov says. As Gaia's body moves (she's locked in her own fight, even as you're fighting across her) the Titan's skin conforms to those movements, textures shift, and the enemies' artificial intelligence reassesses the best path to take. Each of Gaia's actions forces a recalculation of the entire environment and the characters that inhabit it. In fact, what might be the most impressive feat yet of the console's famous synergistic processing units, or SPUs, is what you don't see—limbs and blades drifting through the wildly changing environment. The entire scene, which includes multiple moments when the camera zooms out until Kratos is barely a pixel in size, features realistic collision detection, as dirt, trees, leaves and combatants (both titanic and comparatively tiny) crash into each other. The result is a scene that not only tops every previous game in terms of epic-scale characters, but uses the PS3's much-vaunted processing power to focus on, quite literally, a million minute details. After all, it's not the size that matters. It's the number of SPUs you have handy to constantly recalculate it. 

Read more: God of War III Colossal Enemies - God of War III Review - Popular Mechanics 

When a developer of a 1st party company says something can't be done on the competition I tend to take that statement with a grain of salt. Filippov hasn't developed a 360 game so he really can't say what can and can't be done on it any more than you or me. He's the lead programer and he should be proud of his programin tricks, but of course he's not going to divulge those tricks.

If you take all the processing power that it would take to render and entire level and then use it to render one big character you'll be able to do some pretty cool things. There's nothing in GOW III that is impossible on 360. Regardless of what Filippov says, they used tricks to make it look more impressive than it technically is. But that's what a god developer does. They take what they have and they pull out what they need. That's why Halo 4 looks so incredible and has such huge environments. In Halo 4 the level is a sprawling vista, in GOW the titan is the level and Kratos is a small scale character on a large scale character. It's a trick. A clever trick, but a trick none the less.