PS3 limitations held MGS4 back

http://computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=187351

Why does he always blame his Tools?

because he is the best? and only human after all ;)

Same reason a lot of people here do - getting ideas way above their station.

Its easier for bad workmen to say "How can I work with crap tools?" than it is to say "I'm not good enough".

I think its an easy way out of not being able to produce what they thought they could, so they blame it on the system.

See, this is why I'll never be successful. When I do something wrong, I blame myself. You've got to have a big ego and you need to be a shameless "pass the blame" expert to get along in life. I once watched a pretentious video interview with the guy that began with him sitting in a darkened room, intently studying artwork and design documents before melodramatically tossing them into the air with a very serious expression on his face. He's a man truly in love with his own genius, methinks.

..this guy need some female touch...

I'll take the opposing view. This team is among the best of the best. They've got the talent and money to push the envelope. We're not talking about some amateur developer here complaining how they didn't get be-all-end-all dev tools for $100. Perhaps they actually did push the PS3 hardware to its limits and the hardware came up short of Sony's projections. They're not the first developers to state The Cell's limitations.

..hardware is always a limit, if you really want to push it out..there is nothing new about it...or maybe artist blaming his tool is not that good as its look like?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwrL9MV6jSk

They started the game on sony's projections for hardware performance specs which they overstated. Originaly the Cell was going to do the rendering too and claimed to be 1000 times faster than a 2ghzish pc. In the end it ended up being a bit of mixed bag and no where near the performance of Sonys claims.

I thought the videos I saw looked like MGS4 had migrated into a splinter cell game with some dodgy comic hologram props :)

Surely you should be doing your own benchmarks before starting a multi million dollar project? Just incase sony, who have told a few fibs before, might tell another one?

If you can't get the game to run properly on the console, it's your fault, not the consoles :D I can understand if it was multiplatform.

Sony didn't lock down the hardware specs until pretty late in the game. Konami was working with pre-release hardware. It's not that they didn't get the game running on the console either. He's just saying that his vision for the game was grander than the hardware allowed. He's allowed to say that and let's be honest, it's Sony that predicted to everyone this huge grandiose vision of what the PS3 would be capable of. Kojima and team have delivered software that pushed the envelope time and time again I think he's perfectly justified in saying that the hardware doesn't live up to expectations.

Well, Metal Gear Solid 2 pushed the envelope for the prologue in the ship only, which is long at most one fourth of the game. The rest is franlky sub par both gameplay and graphically wise, and the difference is so appalling it seems they developed a grand demo which took most of the time and budget in order to impress, followed by another game which was short on both. I felt almost cheated when I played the latter.

Giving a logical guess, during the development of MGS2 they noticed it would require much more time to keep up with the complexity of the first part of the game, and lowered their profile... which isn't very different from what we are reading about MGS4.

I didn't play MGS3 but from the movies it looked very interesting while not revolutionary graphically wise (after all they already did MGS2 using the same hardware and knew their technical and artistic limits).

Sony's choices for the hardware should look amateurish to industry veterans: for the results they were aiming to a multicore processor is far less important than a solid GPU. Games are all about illusion of realism and everything is approximated, so they only needed to push the graphics and a CPU core which excells at floating point calculations isn't simply suited for the job, except maybe for a few specific tasks such as physics (which anyway don't require high precision in gaming) and audio processing (which isn't needed to this extent). It's almost as if they really didn't know about what they were thinking. They also choose a processor which gives about 10% / 20% yield results (that is, at least 80% of the times a cell processor comes out it has less than 7 working SPE cores, thus being unusable for this job), which is not economically viable in the consumer market (the processor was in fact originally intended for research purposes) since you are also paying for the processors which failed testing, as often happens for example with professional audio equipment, with the difference that you are not getting any benefit out of it. Not to mention the need to reinvent the wheel from scratch for the engines available on the market, since are all based on a very different architecture (again, this doesn't matter in research since they would write anyway their software from scratch). When the price will be acceptable, the hardware will be already old (and it looks like it is already happening).

Ive heard that it wouldnt really be a sony machine if it wasnt a nightmare to develop on.

I have heard more than one report of the Cell being a pig to program for, and if the specs turn out significantly less than you were told, it compounds the problem.

I have always said that Cell is overrated and not really suited to be a CPU on a games machine. The GPU/CPU hybrid won't succeed unless it's as powerful as both separately and Cell made too many compromises between the two so as to fail at being that great for either job.

That said the PS2 also turned out to be less than Sony promised, and it still wound up being the winner and having the most good games.

So even if Cell underwhelms it doesn't mean the PS3 will fail. What I've seen of MGS4 looks pretty impressive to me.

Does this mean that the xbox360's hardware isn't as great either then? Because i've platyed both consoles and there isn't much to choose from when comparing games. I suppose no-one has really puched either of the consoles to their limits yet though.

..im wondering, how much Michelangelo will do if he started to think what he can do with just handmade sandpaper made out of smashed animal bones, eggs and sand and few pieces or rock, few hammers and his hands...yet..he didnt complain about it but did something what technology today cant achieve with all fancy laser thingy, related to the surface polishing...ahh..PS3 is guilty for my game..ahhh

Most people will tell you that the majority of multi-platform games on the PS3 are lazy xbox360 ports, so it's not exactly fair to compare the two directly.

Right now if I had to choose I'd pick a PS3 because of the blu-ray and that they seem more reliable. Neither platform has games that especially appeal to me so I'm in no hurry here to pick one. The best things for the xbox from my end are Live and arguably the best 3rd party support right now.

I'd still want a PS2 though. For example, I liked God of War on the PSP and now I wouldn't mind playing the PS2 games.

I think a major part of Sonys strategy all along was bluray. They put a huge gamble on it wining the HD media war. And the Cell in the PS3 compliments the player well.

I doubt they would have picked up as well as they have in the last 6 months if they had lost the HD war.

They swamped the market with cheap units that, most people that bought a PS3 and had a HDTV seem to have tried the videos. Some will have bought it as a cheap DVD player. And now that they have won, there isn't much point to 360 having HDDVD so its probably going to be a win win win for sony now.

I missed out on the cheapy PS3's that were going :o(

And God of War on the PS2 was quality!

I noticed that bluray players went up in price since they won the format wars. Sometimes as much as $120 with some brands.

the Cell actually is freaking powerfull. It has 45GFlops in FFT operations for example. This is as much as super computers.

Problem with the cell is, that its SPEs are comparable to a GPU, not a CPU, so its hard like hell to program it for "general usage" but for pure math usage its a genius hardware ... Can't wait to see what happens then they brickheads start to use it for AI instead of trying to push more eye candy trash through it because for NNs and the like its like a godsend present.