Colin Stevens
PS3 Gamers Brace For A Rocky Ride
October 9th 2008 01:12
Throughout the life of the PS3, stories have emerged that have highlighted the difficulty developers have had in creating games for the PS3. Early figures suggested that the cost was prohibitive for most third parties as the advanced technology required a lot more manpower, time and expense. Add to that a dev kit whose price would stagger some second world countries and it looked as though second rate ports and first party titles were the immediate future for the console. Some developers are only now looking at bringing titles to the PS3 since the install base is just about reasonable enough to make a return on their investment. Take Valve, who have said "So whether or not you like developing for that platform, if they've got millions of people connected to that platform and buying their games you have to take it seriously." Sounds like a company ready to put out quality content...
And then there is the case of Rainbow Six 2. Vegas 2 designer Philippe Therien, from Ubisoft Montreal, said the team was "working really hard right now to put them on par graphics wise" but admitted that there will be "slight differences" between the two versions, including lighting.
Activision seem to have found a way around the problem. Throw resources at it until you have created the tools to make the job easy enough to manage. “Over the past year, our central technology group has created a proprietary set of tools for next-gen development that has enabled our developers to address the challenging PS3 architecture in efficient ways. Our tools allow us to identify performance bottlenecks in the PS3 and focus our effort in a targeted way to improve performance that would otherwise without these tools simply be a trial-and-error approach.” You can see from this how smaller developers would have an issue. Without the pure dollar grunt of a super power like Activision they have no chance at developing the necessary tools.
Surely though, at this point in the consoles life cycle, developers have gotten to grips with the machine and started churning out quality content?
It would appear not. The Unreal 3 Engine continues to create problems. Propoganda started developing titles for the 360 due to the widely known fact that U3 works best with Xbox. They even delayed PS3 releases so they could get their games “up to the standard of the 360 version.” And with the popularity of the engine, this is bound to continue as new titles license it for their games.
Ubisoft seem to have found a way around it though - throw 80-90 bodies at it. Their latest title Endwar has had this tribe of programmers recruited to do nothing but port the game over to the PS3. A massive investment beyond many developers.
All of this leads us to the cause for concern - Bioshock The Xbox 360 game of the year has just started to make its appearance on the PS3 and the reception has been chilly. Pixelated screen shots have sent the communnity into a fanboy feast of fury. The games community manager launched into damage control and addressed the matter by saying "one of the major goals for the team in creating the PS3 version of BioShock was to match the visual experience of the 360." She went on to say that "We did investigate rendering to true 1080 mode, but were not able to support it given the game’s memory demands." All this caused by attempting to adapt the game from an entirely different platform and obviously with an enourmous and difficult effort.
These issues have no real solution. The more complicated system that is the PS3 means through the growth of the console more learning is bound to be needed. If it is true that only 30% of the systems capability have been unlocked, we are bound to see another year or more before developers have the tools and knowledge to create a profitable product, shutting out many of them in the foreseable future and for those that can afford to go ahead, inevitable differences and bugs.
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