Source: http://www.playdevil.com/blog/5/easy-comes-easy-goes/
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EASY COMES EASY GOES:
Are you a graphical enthusiast? So I guess you're usually jumping form one platform from another, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, looking for the best version of a multiplatform game. Not mentioning PC here, let's go with home consoles. At first, games loo...
Posted by CaptainJSheridan on May 29, 2009 12:53 (7 days ago)
Are you a graphical enthusiast? So I guess you're usually jumping form one platform from another, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, looking for the best version of a multiplatform game. Not mentioning PC here, let's go with home consoles.
At first, games looked a lot better, and smoother, on Xbox 360. Then PS3 got even with some games, and sometimes better, but it was still rare. Then PS3 exclusives began to surpass Xbox 360 exclusives graphically. We can think about Uncharted: Drake's Fortune or Killzone 2 against Gears of War 2.
So, what happened here after all? Why did the Xbox 360, who was leading with a wide gap, started to lose graphically to the PlayStation 3? That's kind of a long story, which goes back to how videogames used to work.
In the beginning, videogames were suposed to be complicated to code for. Seriously, assembling the best hardware possible with the minimum cost was a lot more important than if it would be easy to code for.
So you get some stuff that looks illogical, like the fact that it takes more power to emulate an Atari than a NES. Even tough the NES was a lot more powerful, the Atari was a mess assembled the best they could at that time.
Why is that important? Well, you can see that every videogame was a piece of random assembled pieces, so there was a, atention here, "learning curve", to master all those pieces.
That started to go wrong with the Nintendo 64, which was too hard to program for in the beginning, and 3D was still new back then, but it really failed miserably with the Sega Saturn, which couln't decide if it was a 3D or 2D machine and it had so many bottlenecks you could sing "99 bottles of beer".
But there were advantages to this "learning curve", there was the impression that the console evolved during it's life cycle, and that worked on keeping it fresh with always new features popping up on newer games.
There is no best example than the PlayStation 2, which had a slow start with inferior ports from Dreamcast and games that didn't match the graphical prowness promised, but in the end, showed things like God of War and Shadow of the Colossus (now I'm starting to talk like Jack Tretton).
The first console to offer some exclusive benefits to developers, was GameCube, with the indirect texturing unit. It was the beginning of pixel shaders on videogames. God, does anything looks better than Rogue Squadron?
Most can probably recognize some of these effects, the easiest one to spot being that typical GameCube water, which is showcased on its best in Super Mario Sunshine. So what was the point? It was an easy to apply effect that looked good, but it was exclusive for GameCube.
YOu won't see multiplatform games using it, but you can see games from third parties, like Square Enix's Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, and Namco's Star Fox Assault, using it.
However, where did we see these effects used the most? Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, Star Fox Adventures, Pikmin, Luigi's Mansion, all launch games. As soon as the interest on GameCube dropped, so did the graphical effort for it.
The effects were there, but while some of them were easy to apply, others needed to be coded, so it was still a random piece assembled to guarantee cost. We gotta to remember that the GameCube was a robust piece of hardware, with incredibly high performance durable components with a great cost.
Everything changed with the first Xbox. While Nintendo has been around since the second generation (if you count Atari and odyssey as one generation), and Sony managed to build its own game culture from a ramification of the Super Nintendo on the PlayStation One and a natural growth on PlayStation 2, Microsoft just had no responsability for what it was doing, it was just about the money.
The Xbox just "ported" the whole PC culture to a black box and called it a console. It was the first to bring HDD, pushed Online play as a main pont, and a big focus on playing multiplatform games with better graphics and having lots of First Person Shoters.
That's not all they brought tough. The Xbox was the first to have full pixel shader support, with too much ease to apply all of their effects. It was like the Xbox was more a console of this generation than the last one.
Games like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Ninja Gaiden used them as much as they could, which makes them look better than most Wii games, that have no shader effects. It wasn't a problem back then, the Xbox was a few years late and it had to compensate a lot, it surely couldn't beat the already estabilished leader, PlayStation 2.
Now with the Xbox 360, the picture was different, they came before the PlayStation 3, with a superior hardware (yeah, I just said it) and easier to code for, because, just like the first Xbox, it was like developing for a PC. Wait, I thought this article was about games on PlayStation 3 that surpasses Xbox 360, what happened?
Two things, lazy developers and Unreal Engine 3.0. The first Xbox 360 games were just overly pixel shaded ports of last gen games, then Unreal Engine 3.0 came out and everyone got their hands at an stable engine that could render then good visuals with minimum work.
Problem here, Unreal Engine 3.0 is not optimized. It's an all around engine that couldn't run on its best on PlayStation 3, cause like all software that is too general, it demands a lot more ram than if it was focused on a specific task.
So they started to make small fixes for the PlayStation 3, like HDD instalation. So we have several developers that usually wouldn't make that great graphics, on a par with good developers that are just lazy, creating an incredible bland look on most Xbox 360 games, nothing looks too ugly, nothing looks too pretty.
What Microsoft did, was bad for the market, and it's also responsible for bad ports on the PlayStation 3 and even bad graphics on Wii, by making developers too lazy to make their own engines for their own specific purposes by using their talents.
It's not just developers fault, costs have skyrocketted and a simple solution like this doesn't look too bad, but it's hurting the industry. When they acept this stagnated position, they leave room for the PlayStation 3 to catch up, and surpass, by the natural evolution that the previous mentioned "learning curve" brings.
The problem? No one is learning on Microsoft's console.
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Before you take this the wrong way
, you should note that he means that the xbox360 can deliver better and better graphics BUT only when the developers drop the UR engine and work on there own engines to bush the 360 to new levels
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Hope you enjoyed this read.
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