witchy
Banned for good!
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http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2007/10/29/exguitar_hero_developer_bashes_ps3.html
Ex-Guitar Hero developer bashes PS3
October 29, 2007 9:40 AM
This one is all over the blogosphere. Jason Booth, previously of Harmonix and now part of a fresh start-up, Conduit Labs, has blogged about the limitations of the PS3 hardware. He attacks what he sees as the myths surrounding the system - that it's more graphically advanced than the 360, that Blu-ray provides advantages and that developers will draw more performance out of the architecture once they master it. He claims, instead, that intrinsic hardware issues mean that developers are always playing catch up to the Xbox capabilities:
...getting equivalent performance out of the PS3 requires a lot of work unique to the platform, and in many cases, even with all these tricks, you still won't see equivalent performance. Thus, many ps3 games have simplified shaders and run at lower native resolutions than the 360 versions. On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling.
His conclusion?
Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community. They are going to loose hard this round because of it, and I hope that in the next round they take lessons from this round and produce a more balanced and usable machine.
It's an interesting piece, although certainly not the only point of view I've heard from developers - Epic chief Mark Rein has mounted a robust defense of PS3 on several occasions (one here), and, of course, Brian Hastings of Insomniac provided a witty pro-PS3 anti-Wii tirade (see here) on the company's website.
The thing is, next-generation videogame development is now so enormously complex and demanding, almost every studio (and everyone within each studio) is going to have a different play on the intrinsic advantages and disadvantages of each platform, based on their own personal experiences. Having an opinion on a piece of games hardware is now almost a political undertaking, similarly fraught with personal prejudice and conflicting data.
The console war is a modern war - fractured, partial, almost incomprehensible to the layman. These voices from the development community are dispatches from a foreign land, fed through the static of individual experience and technological mumbo-jumbo. The only evidence we can really trust is the games.
Ex-Guitar Hero developer bashes PS3
October 29, 2007 9:40 AM
This one is all over the blogosphere. Jason Booth, previously of Harmonix and now part of a fresh start-up, Conduit Labs, has blogged about the limitations of the PS3 hardware. He attacks what he sees as the myths surrounding the system - that it's more graphically advanced than the 360, that Blu-ray provides advantages and that developers will draw more performance out of the architecture once they master it. He claims, instead, that intrinsic hardware issues mean that developers are always playing catch up to the Xbox capabilities:
...getting equivalent performance out of the PS3 requires a lot of work unique to the platform, and in many cases, even with all these tricks, you still won't see equivalent performance. Thus, many ps3 games have simplified shaders and run at lower native resolutions than the 360 versions. On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling.
His conclusion?
Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community. They are going to loose hard this round because of it, and I hope that in the next round they take lessons from this round and produce a more balanced and usable machine.
It's an interesting piece, although certainly not the only point of view I've heard from developers - Epic chief Mark Rein has mounted a robust defense of PS3 on several occasions (one here), and, of course, Brian Hastings of Insomniac provided a witty pro-PS3 anti-Wii tirade (see here) on the company's website.
The thing is, next-generation videogame development is now so enormously complex and demanding, almost every studio (and everyone within each studio) is going to have a different play on the intrinsic advantages and disadvantages of each platform, based on their own personal experiences. Having an opinion on a piece of games hardware is now almost a political undertaking, similarly fraught with personal prejudice and conflicting data.
The console war is a modern war - fractured, partial, almost incomprehensible to the layman. These voices from the development community are dispatches from a foreign land, fed through the static of individual experience and technological mumbo-jumbo. The only evidence we can really trust is the games.
