http://www.geforce.com/#/News/articles/battlefield3-interview
PC-lead development: Scalable to a wide variety of PC specs, therefore, scalable down to console specs.
Console-lead development: Throw in anti-aliasing for the PC version and call it a day.
According to Gamasutra, a recently released report from the NPD Group claims online gaming increased by 10 percent in 2009. Furthermore, the number of games purchased via digital distribution increased by 20 percent in the same period, marking a 19 percent increase over the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of gamers that play online decreased by 2 percent. The overall increase in online gaming was the result of gamers playing online longer -- an average of eight hours per week, up from 7.3 the previous year.
Breaking it down by platform, the PC sees the most use overall with 85 percent of PC owners playing online. Among gaming consoles, the Xbox takes the online cake, with 43 percent playing it online. The PS3 and Wii both tie at 30 percent, though it's worth noting that PS3 online use is up 10 percent over the previous year.
Source:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/04/npd-online-gaming-up-10-percent-in-us/
The PS3's Blu-ray format offers developers plenty of space to fill. But the Xbox 360 doesn't use Blu-ray, it uses DVD. That makes things tricky if a studio is planning to release a multi-platform title like Lost Planet 2.
In a recent interview, Lost Planet 2 producer Jun Takeuchi said Capcom had to cut a significant amount from the game. When asked how development was going, he replied, "There wasn't especially any big trouble. More than those kind of difficulties, the edited content was way too much and dealing with that was more difficult than anything."
"This time, truly, the content that was cut was significant," Takeuchi added, "and at the end, we had to wrestle with disc space."
Takeuchi went on to expand on how difficult it was to make those cuts, saying that it was a situation in which the team was on the verge of crying as they shaved down their game to fit on the disk — though Takeuchi is most likely being facetious. The upside to these cuts? "I think we could be able to add that content at a later date as downloadable content." Everybody wins!
The original Lost Planet was first released as an Xbox 360 exclusive and eventually ported to the PC and the PS3.
Sources:
http://kotaku.com/5474476/capcom-wrestles-with-xbox-360-disc-restrictions
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/02/18/takeuchi-lost-planet-2-faced-difficult-content-cuts/
by Mike Schramm (Joystiq)
It turns out there once were many more labyrinthine paths and dungeons in Final Fantasy XIII, but they got cut. An interview (in Japanese) over at FF-Reunion with art director Isamu Kamikokuryou ("No you!" to his friends) has him saying that the team removed enough extra locations from the title to make up a whole other game entirely.
Sections cut include a secret base for Snow's hero squad, a character's home that included a park, and even a zoo inside one of the game's amusement park areas. This is all more impressive when you consider that Square Enix is expecting to need three DVDs to hold everything that's still in the Xbox 360 version of the game. But FFXIII completists, don't worry too much -- we're sure some of that content will appear sometime during the game's 10-year cycle.
Sources:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/13/square-enix-cut-a-games-worth-of-content-from-final-fantasy-xii/
Soldiers who grew up in the burbs playing video games instead of shooting varmints in the country, or avoiding trouble in a bad neighborhood, are singled out by Army research as particularly poor at spotting roadside bombs.
Writes the Los Angeles Times:
Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.
Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.
Note, this isn't explosive ordnance disposal, they're talking about riding in a humvee and picking up details that someone might have buried explosives in the road. This is important because, of bombs discovered before they went off, like 90 percent of them were found because someone's spidey-sense went off.
The story quotes a sergeant major who finds the research fits with his own observations. "The gamers are very focused on the screen rather than the whole surrounding," he said. Country boys and hood rats have a more finely-tuned radar - that head on a swivel mentality when you're potentially in a dangerous situation.
Sources:
http://kotaku.com/5393102/gamers-not-great-at-finding-explosives
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bombs-vision28-2009oct28,0,36980.story
Yasuhide Kobayashi, Senior Vice President of Sony's Japan Studio, revealed internal research from Sony breaking down the estimates of revenues other Japanese publishers take from their home market. Their figures have it that Koei gets 91.8 percent of its sales from Japan, followed by Tecmo with 89.6 percent and Square Enix at 86.6 percent. Japan Studio of Sony pulls 66.9 percent, which is still outpaced by Konami (74.8 percent) and Namco Bandai (76.8 percent.)
Source:
http://kotaku.com/5362014/sony-japan-studio-chief-we-have-to-develop-the-global-title
With developer Naughty Dog owned by Sony and all, you likely didn't hold out much hope of seeing Nathan Drake on your Xbox 360 (except in Shadow Complex, of course), but Naughty Dog president Christophe Balestra took a few moments to explain to Ars Technica that technical hurdles would be equally insurmountable. "First of all, we fill the Blu-ray 100 percent," Balestra said. "We have no room left on this one." How many of those gigglebytes were used to capture the proper sonic resonance of Nolan North's chiseled good looks? We'll likely never know.
Admitting that Naughty Dog only used around 30 percent of the PS3's SPUs (or in more technical terms, "magic") in Drake's Fortune, Balestra said his team is using 100 percent of the system's power for the sequel. Perhaps more importantly, the team is also passing on its knowledge and techniques to third-party developers.
So, you heard it here first: All future PS3 games will look this good. Confirmed.
Source:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/27/why-uncharted-2-couldnt-work-on-xbox-360/
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