Rants about Kojima and Yamauchi
By Valkyr 2 Comments
So yesterday I started playing MGS4 (yep a bit late in the cycle) and I discovered that it is a technical mess. Let me explain my feelings before thinking 'what the hell is he talking about mgs4 has the best graphics ever'.
A quick recap of the PS3 games graphics since launch
At first multiplatform games looked like shit compared to their 360 versions and exclusive AAA games were being bashed by the press for not delivering native 1080p and photorealistic graphics. As years passed, we learnt that it was better to render things at 720p or less and use that gpu free time to increase the overall beauty of games. Also the expertise of programmers using the Cell architecture showed us that engines developed exclusivily for the ps3 could have awesome results like Killzone 2, Uncharted 1, Ratchet and Clank(s) and later the critically acclaimed Uncharted 2. Finally someone at Santa Monica Studios took a new screen space antialiasing technique, optimize it and implement it in the God of War 3 engine using the Cell, delivering the most crazy antialiased game on a console to date, with very little artifacting here and there ( see an old blog post about it). The technique is already being used in the Killzone 3 beta and preview codes, stepping up from KZ 2 and getting really close to the 2005 target render trailer of KZ2.
Kojima the unethical
Kojima and his team has been bashing Sony for hypeing up the real effective power of the PS3 and have used that as an excuse to explain why the retail version of the game ended up looking like shit. 'We wanted to do self shadowing but we didn't have enough memory', 'The Cell processor was not as good as the Dev kit emulated one', 'The Dev kit had a nvidia 7800gt and the RSX is not so powerful'. So how did Guerrilla or Naughty Dog manage to add more features to the engine with the same resources?. The answer is that the MGS4 engine is a technical mess, we've seen this same picture when the Kojima team developed an entirely new engine for MGS3, apparently they always take wrong design decisions with the new hardware they have at their disposal, something that other more efficient developers are getting right from the beginning (with tighter budgets and less experience).
The sad part is that now Kojima is behaving in a very unethical way, using his critics towards the PS3 hardware to prevent his fans from hating him for not making more exclusive games for the platform and developing a new multiplatform engine for Rising instead of using a heavily optimized version of the old one to remake gems like Metal Gear 1 and 2, games that are only known by hardcore MGS fans and that represent an important part of the Metal Gear story.
Even the release of Uncharted 1 half a year before MGS4 was a proof that hardware was not the only and main constraint, of course that didn't prevent Kojima to avoid some questions during several interviews that were related to the amazing graphical superiority a game that was already out was having in comparison to its upcoming title, answering again and again that Sony exaggerated the power of the PS3 and wasn't enough to materialize his vision.
I know some of you may be thinking 'you can't compare a 2008 game to newer ones', the point of my rant is not the graphical quality itself is about developers blaming the PS3 instead of trying to find what went wrong with their games.
Kaz Yamauchi emulates Kojima
Another Japanese developer that is acting unethically is Poliphony Digital CEO who has recently said to the media that the hardware lacked the power to make GT5 the game he wanted to be. Again, the media and fans complaints (leaving matchmaking aside) were:
- Clumsy and convoluted UI/menus
- Premium cars look awesome but only 200 of the 1000+ cars are premium, the rest are mostly high definition assets ported from GT4
- Inconsistent graphical quality, again, some imported tracks that look like shit compared to the native GT5 ones
So, taking account that the premium cars and tracks are the best looking on any console game to date, have these complaints something to do with the hardware or we better start talking about a poorly distributed working time during a never-ending developing cycle?
To end my rant, I'm f* tired of developers blaming the hardware at this point of the cycle when we already have some working examples which show that applying the right wizardry you can get insane results like the ones we all know.
I was going to post about other stuff too but this is already a wall of text, see ya!.
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