Playstation Heroes

[Van_Fox]

I dunno about you guys, by Sly looks pretty kick ass in next gen graphics.
Now I really hope they make a Sly 4.
Story Trailer HD - PlayStation Move Heroes

[FurryJackman]

It's the gimmick right now... But I hope those are some of the high-rez models coming soon for sequels for each series on the PS3.

[Van_Fox]

Ratchet and Clank, well their still continuing that series. Jak and Daxter is over because of of low sales numbers of the last game. And Sly is in the process atm. So thats 2 out of 3, and its more than a gimmick. its a pretty damn good product.

[FurryJackman]

No, I'm speaking for the PS Move. All freaking mini-games and stuff...

[Van_Fox]

True, but this is a story game, more than just mini games.

[Nayr]

What, no Crash Bandicoot?

Regardless, it looks awesome. I'm looking forward to it.

[Van_Fox]

Cause these are Sony exclusive characters. Other characters like Spyro and Crash are multi-platform.

[Nayr]

Ah yes, he woulda been fun to play as though

[FurryJackman]

Just saw the Reviews on the Run review for this. Why are Sly's slippers black now?

But anyways, I still think the shading is too stylistic. The art style looks TOO Ratchet and Clank and not as much of the other series.

Steve and Raju gave the game 6 and 5.5 respectively. I agree with them. It's a mini-game collection and nothing more in terms of story. I mean, a "Game Show Planet" sounds like something a marketing department made, not a creative department in any sense...

[Van_Fox]

It would have been better if it wasnt Move centered. If it played third person plat former it probably would have sold better.

The graphics, well the cinematics, look amazing, thats Pixar quality right there> I hope Sly 4 looks just as good.

[FurryJackman]

What would amaze me is if that was rendered 100% in real time, which I doubt. That was surely pre-rendered.

This is why video editors are in demand at gaming companies at the moment.

[Van_Fox]

I dont think gameplay and cinematics will ever have the same graphics. If it takes years to make pixar quality movies, then imagine how long it would take to make gameplay with that quailty.

[Selkit]

Realtime graphics are not much more difficult to pull off than convincing rendered imagery. It's a function of having enough raw computing power. There are some lighting techniques and quirks of realtime 3D that make certain artistic effects tricky to pull off (2011, and we still don't have a lightweight way to handle alpha blended transparency, unless you want to start doing horrendous things with buffering), which can at times make a cutscene more desirable than realtime rendering. Nothing they've depicted in the video can't be done in realtime with today's technology, however.

[Van_Fox]

Then it would take like 20 years to make a full game with cinematic gameplay graphics. Ever noticed that in cinematics the characters hair shows each strand, yet in gameplay its all meshed together? To my knowledge hair is and Extreme process to do, even with todays technology. Take Advent Children for example, the main reason Red XIII only got so little screen time was because his fur was hard to animate, and thats from Japan, whos leading in this technology.
Anyway, graphics arent important about the game, its the gameplay. Play with your hands, not with your eyes.

[Selkit]

Actually Van, that's a bit of a fallacy. Hair and fur are very easy to visually produce. The real trick is making them *move* like hair and fur, not look like it. Games can convincingly fake it and have done so as early as the Gamecube era (Starfox Adventures; Fox McCloud's character model had tufted, alpha masked fur), so long as it doesn't have to collide and flow. There's a fairly good reason why realtime game characters typically do not have flowing masses of hair. It's hell on soft-body physics to animate. Limited by computing power, not art techniques; There isn't a system or game console on the market that can convincingly simulate a semi-fluid soft body in realtime, though given five more years I'd wager they'll have nailed that. After all, soft body cloth, plastics, procedural flesh warping and similar were considered 'impossible' for real-time until the advent of PhysX. By and large, pre-rendered content is dying out slowly but surely as the amount of raw computing power that can be thrown at a problem increases. Hell, I remember having to bake the vertex lighting in an Unreal Tournament map in 1999, and in 2004 having actual SM2 shading available in UT2004, not just FirePaint. Come 2007 with UT3's advent and we had full realtime illumination that could actually influence surface shading and blend seamlessly with SSAO. Only a year later with Mirror's Edge on the same engine, we got procedural soft-body destruction, with plastic sheeting and windowblinds that would tear or flutter apart in crumpled messes when shot. And long prior to all of these techniques, game developers have found very clever ways to fake a variety of effects.

Simply throwing time at a problem, is not how the industry fixes art issues, Van. They throw technology at it, and failing that, they throw stage magic at it, to hide the seams and brandish the shiny. I know this firsthand, having had to solve issues like how to cope with overlapping alpha-blend surfaces, or how to work in material blending in an engine that lacks native vertex-painting ability. And yeah-- gameplay should really stop taking a back-seat to graphics, unfortunately. Mostly a fault of having the same stale console control methods to work with, alas. You can only do so much given two shoulder buttons, fiddly thumbsticks and a variable assortment of simple buttons. If it wasn't such an easy target for casual-gamer shovelware, the current motion controllers could have such potential. Well, except the Kinect. No tactile feedback? No overlap sensitivity? No instantaneous control feedback? Yeah, okay, shovelware's about all it can handle.