If you have a playstation 2 and you haven't played God Of War, you must. Mind you, this ain't a kiddie game, it deserves the big M it carries. It's simply one of the best games I have seen done on the Playstation 2 on all levels- graphics, art, music, gameplay, technical prowess.
Things that I find incredible:
* No environment repeats itself, it's all custom. This gives the game a very "movie like" experience.
* Music is well triggered at the right moments. Excellent music.
* Key aspect: game doesn't insult the player (often, or at least much less than other games) - you die, you restart at a resonable point. The game even gave me a camera hint when I didn't figure out something. Gives the player choice on replenishing health vs magic, etc.
* Key aspect: game streams from the PS2 *all the time* and does this extremely well. If the PS2 can't catch up you will see a brief animated loading on the lower right while the game freezes.. but it's rare and I suspect it has to do more with my aging PS2.
Yes, these huge environments are all interconnected by streaming. Amazing how well they do this. I realize Soul Reaver did this too (and on the Ps1 no less) but in God of War there's just so much art and content it seems.. this is no easy feat. You hardly notice the bigger streaming points.
* Key aspect: the game really feels like an epic experience. There are parts that are simply mindblowing in their presentation and this is all realtime. There are cutscenes, which integrate seamlessly for the most part, but there are also areas that it's all the PS2 pumping those polygons.. amazing.
* Key aspect: hardly any slowdown. There's some but it manifests itself as missing frames more than slowdown, and it's really on the not so often side. Amazing. I think this game is pushing the PS2 in incredible ways.
* Nice story and presentation of that story.
* Key aspect: nice controls. The game feels like it can reward the more hardcore while keeping a low barrier of entry to the game for the casual gamer. After failing a part of the game 3 times, the game asked if I wanted to restart one level of difficulty lower. Nice (no, I didn't switch to a lower difficulty :-) ).
If you have a PS2 you must at least give this game a rental (I would say buy).
I would guess the "missing frames" behavior is because they do there main game ticks like I've been doing them since Gary Symons taught me at SolWorks. Basically, your logic tick and render tick are completely uncoupled. You render a frame, figure out how much time passed during the render and run as many logic ticks as you need to (with a fixed delta) to catch the simulation back up to real time and then render your next frame. The only drawback to this method is if you don't have checks in place, it can get into a "feedback loop" where the gameplay can never catch back up.
Posted by: Paul | April 16, 2005 at 10:10 AM
If I remember correctly the game we work on can handle a drop to 30 frames, but after that it does manifests as slowdown....
Posted by: Raist3d | April 17, 2005 at 10:44 PM
there was tearing in the graphics, which usually means an unlocked refresh rate, which I didn't think Sony allowed, but basically I'd say the whole game was time, not tick, based
oh, and they get away with a lot by making characters with low rez textures and then pulling the camera far enough back that you don't notice it. They're all fairly low poly too. You can see both tricks up close a few times at the beginning. I'm pretty sure they swap in better textures for cutscenes.
still, a really fun game, and the environments are some of the best I've ever seen in a game. There's a lesson to be learned here about game polish, but if you watch the making of vids at the end, you can see that they took 3 years to make the game, with about 1 year of crunch, which isn't exactly a streamlined process, particularly for so short a game, no matter how perfect. Kinda like that last run on sentence :) Anyway, the point was that game companies should all aspire to this level of polish and professionalism in their game. They should also avoid that sort of work schedule, though. 3 years for a 10 hour game smacks of not enough design up front and a lot of wasted effort.
Posted by: crowdpleazr | April 19, 2005 at 10:36 PM
Yes, there's tearing in the graphics. I forgot to mention this and in my eyes is about the only thing that mars the incredible graphics. Jak & Dexter 2 also had tearing but in that game, imho it was very obvious.
It doesn't show up at all times though. I wondered for a moment if there's a lack of hardware double buffering (maybe needed that extra vram?), but this could be wrong.
I see they took 3 years to make the game. In my book quite frankly, I don't think this detracts from the outcome because I have seen 3 year games that do not resemble this kind of quality.
I honestly don't think this implies necessarily wasted effort - at least one you can avoid- necessarily. Tuning those levels properly through focus testing I don't think it's a trivial task. But I am not going to defend this view too much because I realize I could be wrong, I just not "sure enough" this way.
As for the work schedule... well... a one year crunch is definitively hell. At the same time isn't that what this industry has become in many ways when great products like these are done?
In your opinion how do you compare this to Blizzard products - Diablo II took at least 4 years, Warcraft 3 took at least 3. World of Warlcraft? At least 4 (how many times they showed it at E3? at least 3). I would think Blizzard games overall are fairly polished and I have also heard stories that they are crunch-city.
In this context it would be easy for me to understand something like World of Warcraft (since it's so friking huge and to test is probably hell for balancing issues), but Diablo II and Warcraft 3...
What you think? Or does the PC environment adds to the inherent complexity (non-unified platform development issues).
Posted by: Raist3d | April 20, 2005 at 07:21 AM
"What you think? Or does the PC environment adds to the inherent complexity (non-unified platform development issues)."
Let me clarify that last sentence- yeah the PC will definitively add complexity because of the non-unified platform issues, but if the complexity added then would justify the cycles that Blizzard has to the point of saying there can't be true wasted avoidable effort.
Posted by: Raist3d | April 20, 2005 at 08:44 AM