For months, fanboys have been arguing about which plattform will have the best GTA4 experience, there has even been rumours about exclusive downloadable content for the PS3 Okay, let me teach you about how DLC will work on GTA: The Xbox 360 is going to have 2 Exclusive episode DLC's. This is what has been annouced, no more no less. Now, Fanboys have been spreading rumors how the PS3 will have exclusive content as well. This is not likely, not by a longshot, unless Sony has paid R* for it (which they haven't), the PS3 will not recieve anything thats exclusive. It will however recieve downloadable content, thats a given. Why? It doesnt make sense from a business perspective to make exclusive content for the PS3, unless your getting paid for it. Now, R* has been paid for exclusive content for the X360, and it will make just that. Surely, with GTA being the money machine as it is, they are going to make more downloadable content beyond the initial 2 for the X360 (given of course, that they sell). We all agree so far? Good. Now, Rockstar have 2 choices about how to deal with future DLC after the initial two (which will be exclusive): Keep making exclusive content for each or just one of the platforms = MORE work and LESS money in return (your limiting your userbase with each exclusive DLC) or Make content cross-plattform = less work and MORE money in return There is absolutely no business logic that would support exclusive GTA4 downloadable content for the PS3, unless they are getting paid for it by Sony. Which is highly unlikely, given how Sony only promotes their exclusive games.

A new day, a new discussion at Beyond 3D.com It all started with somebody implying that the Xbox 360 has nothing but FPS games, so i decided to find out here are the stats for all games listed by gamespot. I came up with some very interesting statistics, this should be a one and for all fanboy argument closer, the X360 plattform actually has LESS FPS games than the PS3, percentage wise. Maybe the fact that the Xbox plattforms actually has good fps games, compared to the playstation plattforms is why fanboys run around saying mindless crap like that. STATS FOR PS3 AND X360 GAMES ---------------------------- Xbox 360: Totalt Annouced\released games - 284 | Total Exclusives: 109 | Total First\Second Party Exclusives: 32 Percentage Exclusives: 38,38% Percentage First\Second Party Exclusives: 11,27% By Genre| Percentage of total | Percentage Exclusives | Percentage First\Sec Party Exclusives Adventure: 44 | 15,49%|31,8% | 6,81% Action: 30 | 10,56%|50% | 13,3% FPS: 37 | 13,02% | 40,54% | 40% Tactical Shooters: 8 |2,82% | 25% | 50% Other Shooter: 14 | 4,93%| 64,29% | 44,4% W-RPG: 18 | 6,34%| 50% | 33,33% J-RPG: 7 | 2,46% | 71,42% | 60% MMO: 6 | 2,11%| 50% | 66,6% Sports: 53|18,66% | 7,5% | 0% RTS: 4 | 1,41%| 100% | 25% Turnbased Strategy: 2 | 0,70% |50 %| 0% Racing: 20 | 7,04%| 45% | 33,3% Car Combat: 5 |1,76% | 80% | 0% Other driving: 4 |1,41% | 25% | 0% Sim games: 3 | 1,06% | 25% | 0 % Mech Sim: 3 | 1,06 | 66,7% | 0% Virtual Life: 3 |1,06 | 66,67% | 50% Fighting: 7 |2,46% | 57% | 0% Plattformers: 6 |2,12% |16,67% | 100% Flight Sims : 4 | 1,41%| 25% |0% Party Games: 2 | 0,71%| 100% | 100% Rythm Games: 3|1,06% | 0% | 0% Misc Games: 1 | 0,355| 0 |0% ---------------------------- Note: XbL Arcade Games are NOT Included in statistics ---------------------------- PS3: Totalt Annouced\released games - 184 | Total Exclusives: 74 | Total First\Second Party Exclusives: 32 Percentage Exclusives: 40,21% Percentage First\Second Party Exclusives: 17,39% By Genre| Percentage of total | Percentage Exclusives | Percentage First\Sec Party Exclusives Adventure: 38 |20,65% |44,73% | 23,68% Action: 23 | 12,5%| 43,73% | 21,73% FPS: 27| 14,67%| 26% | 14,8% Tactical Shooters: 4 | 2,17%| 25% | 25% Other Shooter: 5 | 2,71%| 60% | 33% W-RPG: 10 | 5,44| 20% | 0% J-RPG: 9 |4,89 | 77,7% | 33,3% MMO: 3| 1,63| 66,7% | 33,3% Sports: 22| 11,95%| 22,7% | 20% RTS: 1| 0,54%| 100% | 100% Turnbased Strategy: 3 | 1,63%|66%| 0% Racing: 10| 5,43%| 40% | 50% Car Combat: 3 | 1,63%| 66,6% | 50% Other driving: 4 | 2,17%| 50% | 0% Sim games: 3 |1,63% | 100% | 33 % Mech Sim: 2 | 1,08% | 50% | 0% Virtual Life: 1 | 0,54%| 0% | 0% Fighting: 7 | 3,80%| 57% | 0% Plattformers: 5 | |20% | 100% Flight Sims : 1 |0,54% | 0% |0% Party Games: 0 | 0%| 0% | 0% Rythm Games: 1| 0,54%| 100% | 100% Misc Games: 1 | 0,54% | 0 | 0 --------------- Does Not Include PSN games. --------------- Source Material and stats in (.xls) excel can be download here Source files now has hyperlinks to every game, list of every game used in the stats, sorted by genre. -------------------------------------------- Genre definitions and definition of exclusive titles Genres are as defined by gamespot (2 "misc" games not included in statistics on both sides), Adventure and Action Adventure is counted as "Adventure". An exclusive counted as exclusive for CONSOLES, meaning if the game is coming to PC and 1 Console, its per definition exclusive. --- Personal note: I am a normal human being, thus there is a probability for error in both the source material and the statistics. Most likely some games that are 3rd party exclusive for Sony might be listed as 2nd party (because some of the games where not double checked, but based on my own memory, these are only big titles tho, so it shouldnt be many). Gamespot was used as a source for the listings, some games may have been annouced as exclusive or not exclusive but still be listed wrongfully, i have tried to fix such errors, but i might have missed a few. You might not find a particular game in the source material, simply because it hasnt been put into Gamespots Database yet. Don't argue with me about genre definitions, its what gamespot used as genres for the games. Link to the forum discussion at B3D: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37853

Since the PS3,Wii and Xbox 360 are all out thus making it current gen, i thought it would be fun with a discussion about the Nextgen consoles (PS4,Wii2?, Xbox 720?). It will be fun to drag up this old thread in 2011 or whenever than generation launches and compare our thoughts with reality. Here are my 2 cents: Technology What can we expect from a next-gen console, in terms of hardware? Multiple- GPUs? CPU's with 40x cores? Before we can answer that question, we need to ask when will the next-generation begin? How long will the consoles last? I would say it will begin somewhere between 2010 and 2011. What do you think we can have in the hardware department in a $400 (or $600) console in 5 years? I think it will look somewhat like this (numbers are based on the increase we have seen from the X360\PS3 compared to the Xbox) : - CPU with more cores than we are used to now. (definately alot of cores) - 4 GB's of RAM - 64mb of eDRAM (yes i know the xbox 1 didnt have eDRAM and if i compare the X360 to the PS2, the number shouldnt be this high, but i like that number ) - GPU (maybe dual cored?) with 1600+ million transistors (transistor count based on the 5,26x increase we seen in the PS3 vs the Xbox 1) based on whatever PC GPU's are pushing at the time. Storage media: Bluray or whatever wins + standart HDD. Resolution: 1080p (i doubt they will strive for higher resolutions, i certainly dont hope so) Things that will vastly improve compared to current gen (other than graphics) With exiting things like Procedural synthesis starting to hit the "streets" i think we will se vastly improved animations and destructibility in games. Photo-realism? After looking at screenshots from the Cryengine 2, im more confident than ever, that a dream that atleast i have dreamt about since i was a little kid, can be achieved, that small dream is photo-realistic games. Lets face it, sooner or later (probably later), the only thing that will prevent us from not being able to see the difference between real-life and games will be the fact that games will still be bottle-necked by the amount of pixels that our monitors\tv's are able to show. Will it be achieved in the next-generation of consoles? Probably not, but it will look extremely close. The potential is certainly there, Crysis, which is only a first generation DX10 game, but the environments are slowly getting to the stage where i cannot really see (read: care) about the difference anymore. Question: Will we get photo-realism during the next generation of consoles? Personally, i think we can get close, very close. It wont be look as real life, but it will be close. Close enough, to the point were casuals and most normal people wont care anymore. This of-course brings me to my next question: What happens when we achieve photo-realism? A friend of mine and i recently had a discussion about this, and he had some interesting view on the matter, he said that photo-realism is boring. When we achieve true-to-life graphics, and the initial buzz wears off, nobody will care about it anymore. We have true-to-life graphics in real life, its just a matter of opening our eyes, it will bore us. There is only so many amounts of polygons we can look at before we don't care about the difference anymore. Art direction will probably be more important than ever before, because it will be the only real way to differentiate your game. Other Questions: When we achieve photo-realism at say so many frames per seconds that nobody cares anymore, what will happen to GPU evolution? After we achieve photo-realism and the GPU's run photo-realistic games at super high framerates, will developers actually bother to develop new graphical engines? Would we bother to ever again upgrade the hardware (not after next gen, but after we achieve the above mentioned situation)? Only situation i can think of is not really performance based, but stuff like VR or "materix" like consoles, surely from a performance standpoint, nobody will give a rats ass about how many supergigaflops the PS100 pushes. So what are your thoughts on the future generation?

Why does Xbox fanboys keep moaning about how Great Xbox live is? How it cannot be copied by Sony? What exactly is so great and hard to reproduce here? What exactly does Xbox Live have to offer? Unified Service This is arguably the most time taking thing to produce, however good news for Sony fanboys, in case you didn't know Sony have a TON of experience in making unified services. O RLY? Ya RLY. Sony Computer Entertainment has produced a ton of MMORPGs (Everquest being their biggest hit). MMORPGS have these unified services that sometimes are even more advanced than what Xbox Live offers. Lets take a realistic look on what you need to make this unified service? You need a a lot of server bandwidth and servers that can connect players with each other. Does SCE have experience in this field? Yes. Is it particularly hard to do? No. Leader boards Again this is something SCE has a ton of experience with, and this is one of the simplest things to make. All you need is a way of gathering statistics (for example make servers or players send stats to a main server that collects and makes these statistics), and a simple php script. Down-loadable Content Again this is easy to do, in fact i recon Sony can make better down-loadable content considering they own something called Sony Music and Sony Picture Entertainment. What do you need to make this? You need to put crap on a server and make it accessible. Why do i post this? I dunno, I'm sick an tired of people talking about how great live is. Its easy to reproduce and can be done EASLY in 6months given the proper founding.

It pisses me off that some people still claim that Killzone 2 was real-time at E3 2005. So how do i know it was all pre-rendered? Lets take a look at this video, when shown at E3 2005, it blew everybody away, everybody thought this is what killzone will look like, Phil harrison (Sony CEO) even went as far as saying its all real time rendered. Now back in 2005, the PS3 devkits ran at the following settings: 2.0 ghz Cell CPU 256 MB XDR RAM (256bit) Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB GDDR3 (256bit) The Cell being a completely new architecture and according to John Carmack (one of the most famous developers ever - creator of Doom and Quake series, when it comes to graphics engines he is "the man") said the Cell architecture was a **** to code for. Okay, so we got a CPU that's seriously hard to code for and a regular PC graphics card. (The CPU is also weaker than a AMD FX-60 but we can save that discussion for another time). Okay so how on earth did Guerrilla Studios (a studio that's not particularly known for being talented at making game engines) pull of something this amazing? They didn't, and here are the reasons why. List of flaws in the whole "this is real-time" thing 1.First of all, it looked better than any PC game out there, that should ring a bell. PCs always have superior hardware, we had SLI rigs back in 2005 didn't we? PC's had much superior raw graphical horsepower (2x 7800GTX 512MB gpu's running on SLI) yet none of the developers had a game that looked remotely close to this. 2. PC's are much easier to code for than a brand new architecture, hence it should be impossible to make something that blows everything else out of the water when you already have inferior specs. 3. It was NOT shown at E3 2006. If it was real-time back then, we would see more of it at this years E3. If you already got a perfect game engine running at 60fps, how hard is it to at least make another movie? Or make a demo that we could play? Everything needed would already be ready, game engine, textures, models, everything. Why wouldnt they have a demo or more "real-time" footage of a movie that blew everybody away at E3? So how would a small time developer studio beat the talented big developer studio's like ID Software, Epic and Monolith when they are running on inferior specs? Frankly they didn't, Guerrilla didn't even make the movie, ArtVX did , (they had the Killzone movie as a list of merits on their site, until recently) ArtVX is a Scotland based company that specializes in making CGI movies. I know a lot of fan boys are gonna ask for some kind of proof, so here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CQ1qxxWLQ&search=Killzone%20gamehead This is a GameHead interview of with Tim Miller from Blur Studios about the E3 Killzone video last year. He says Blur turned down the chance to work on the movie and also refers to the company in Scotland (as in ArtVX). Ofcourse, games will eventually reach this level of graphics, just liked to point out the fact that the render itself was a fake.

Unlike what a lot of people think, the amount of storage is different from console to console regardless of the media device being used. Each console has its own way of utilizing space. In this post i will compare how a next generation version of GTA might look on the two consoles (in terms of size). Reason i chose GTA4 is because so many fan boys were all going: "Like OMG the new GTA will be super huge and use up an entire bluray, X360 go home, liek lolz" or something to that extent. The x360 is heavily based on compression, the ps3 does not, in most cases it only has 2:1 compression ratios. For example the x360 can compress audio at a 14:1 ratio and still get cd quality sound. (near lossless 0,1% quality lost ) They also got 4:1 texture(rumours say 6:1 but i don't have a credible source for that) and 4:1 model compression (lossless). It also has a heavily VMW compression for movies (3 hours 720p qual = 9gigs - dunno what ratio that is - but this is not lossless compression ). The advantages of bluray may not be as big as you think. Lets compare the gta games on xbox, pc and ps2. GTA3 (xbox) - 700mb GTA:VC (xbox) - 1.5 gigs GTA:SA (xbox) - 2.3 gigs GTA 3 (ps2) - 1.5 gigs GTA:VC (ps2) - 3.2 gigs GTA:SA (ps2) - 4.4 gigs Even tho the PS2 version included exactly the same as the xbox version , but had worse texture quality, the game was almost twice as big. Lets take a look at what a next gen GTA might be in game data uncompressed: Textures - 8 gb Map - 2gb Audio - 16gb Models - 3gb code and misc - 1gb Uncompressed total = 30 GB Now lets see how a next gen GTA might look on a ps3. Textures (2:1)-4 gb Map - 2 gb Audio (2:1)- 9gb Models (2:1)- 1.5 gb Code and other misc - 1gb PS3 total = 19 GB How would this play out on the x360? Textures (4:1) - 2 GB Map - 2 GB Audio (14:1) - 1.28 GB Models (4:1)- 0,7 GB Code and misc - 1gb X360 security files - 1.5 GB x360 total = 8,48 Now unless the game is to use CGI movies or other HD movie footage, you would need to use immense amount of regular game files to file up a game. Sources: http://vision.pcvsconsole.com/?article=2 http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODk3LDIsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0