That's not it at all, he's just trying to pull expectations down to earth. They get pretty out there when you guys get revved up proper.

Nothing wrong with excitement and anticipation - hell I'm a constant champion of those things in the face of relentless interwebz negativity - but there's being excited and there's being realistic.

Acert is our resident number crunching tech shaman, and this sugar high-esque gospel compells him to take action.

If they were high res or super sampled I don't think you can call them "direct feed."

Yeah, key word being possibilities.

I'm not disputing what you said, just rolling with that thought a bit. I think this gen has brought a harsh realisation that tech is way, way ahead of what most people can tap into already. To be honest, with things like Jak 2 ripping other companies a new one in terms of animation and with God of War 2 simply.. ripping heads off really, you could argue that the divide was there last generation too. I don't think it was quite this prevailent though.

Frankly, until game companies can effectively and consistently match one another's set bar for these things (new one obviously being Uncharted 2, I think few would contest) it's almost frustrating to think of the possibilities. In fact, I think my frustration now stems from playing THINGS AFTER UNCHARTED 2 and having to make due with essentially lower quality in every single area presentation wise.

What I'd like to see happen before any leap in technology - and it's probably already happening - is a way for companies to actually accumulate tech solutions. The great thing about UE3 (because I've been known to bash that in the past) that at this point it's a formidable, reliable graphics engine that consistently produces solid visuals, but it still can't make sure that a meaningful presentation milestone set by one AAA title has following titles kicking their shit into gear aswell.

Lip sync is my favourite pet peeve. I mentioned Jak 2 earlier and I distinctly remember that and Free Radical's Second Sight kicking off my appreciation for great, evocative facial animation in games and meanwhile Halo, frigging.. HALO.. IMPORTANTNESS OF MICROSOFTNESS FIRST PARTYNESS NESS-NESS had flapping puppet jaws. That jarring divide still exists between the top titles, and before that gap can close faster than it does right now, I dunno if a new generation is even something I particularly crave.

More than anything I'd like some consistency in visuals. Locked framerates. I get that 60 isn't realistic, but locked 30 at the very least. Why did we suffer slowdown on the NES and then suffer slowdown on the 360!? (okay, don't bother answering that, I'm not.. stupid or anything, but it's kinda bizarre when you think about it). I've never been much of a fidelity guy or a tech guy, I think lovely DS games look stunning, I still think Metroid Prime ranks among the prettiest games I have in my collection and that's all about knowing the limits of your tools and playing within that framework.

Thus, new generations for me is just about resetting everyone's knowledge and introducing the same fucking growing pains you've repeatedly been dealing with, waiting another 3 years before people get to grips with the technology and come down from their BUZZWORD HIGHS that puts bloom and blur and sepia tones everywhere and disregarding the usual things that you'd think would be bare minimum requirements now.

I honestly don't mind putting down the money. I'm not filthy rich or anything it's just that.. I eat, I hang out with friends, I write and I draw. Those things are pretty cheap (unless you're counting EMOTIONAL INVESTMENTS) so I can spend a lot on my favourite hobby. I don't shudder at the thought of a new console cycle because it means buying everything again, I do because I know it means the ground that is juuust starting to become firm under our feet would be pulled out from under us, and any semblance of consistency takes another 3 year break.

I... uh. I blame the champagne really.. this is.. wildly... obscenely... drunken-rantly off topic. Dear me. Well uh. Happy new year? :O

Ratchet cutscenes are realtime, complete with their share of shadows jittering and the occasional ever-so-slight slowdown tell, but Resistance has a lot of pre-rendered stuff in it.

I mention Jak 2 because I was talking about lip sync/character animation. My whole point is that a game can come along with a great system for element X, and no other company can actually capitalise on that, not learn from that or benefit from it unless they too throw tons of resources on it.

I find it frustrating that a great game like InFamous has thunderbirds like character animation when people speak, when Uncharted 1 had brilliant animation years ago. Jak 2 is fucking YONKS ago and there are still new games that don't even come close to what that one did.

Uncharted 2 is what it is thanks to accumulated knowledge and bars Naughty Dog has set for themselves. If the quality of games presentation on a whole is to rise, I think that needs to happen across developers aswell.

I dunno why you call it principle, and even less why you're against the idea that engines and systems for these things are established and re-usable. I don't see why you'd complain about the Speedtree of facial animation or something like that.

Well there's actually stuff happening on facial animation front, with a company specialising in it and handling.. uuummm.... a few games. They did AC2, which has scanned actors for models so it still ends up looking frrreaaaakkkyyyy, but Ezio himself is hand crafted and emotes well. I think if that becomes a trend and can take the workload off the developers doing their thing, that's awesome. That company will obviously improve at what they do, but as they improve, so will all the games they're involved with.

I just don't see every man for himself working when we move into even insaner visuals. There has to be some kind of pool of knowledge and tech for these things, and while there's UE3 and Havok and stuff already, there could easily be more for all aspects of presentation.

If compared to movies.. which doesn't really compare favourably of course since people will always look and animate like people unless you hire Nicole Kidman or Mickey Rourke.. but if you look at the tools they use it's absolutely obvious that one film's advances affect and informs another film. Breakthroughs are for.. other people to follow.. through.. the.. hole.. which.. someone else.. broke.

It's a symptom confined to gaming that a set of characters look like plasticy zombies compared to ones from 4 years ago, despite having a better script, better voice actors and better gameplay mechanics behind them. If you throw the most monsterous amount of power EVAHR WITNAZED IN A COONTZOOL onto their unsuspecting puppet faces to the point where you can see individual drops of sweat running over their greasy virtual pores, they're still just lifeless zombies.

That's what I reckon is so damn backwards about generational - and little else - leaps.


But hey! I'm a gamer! I'm a gamey game person that right now is playing through a recently unwrapped Playstation 2 game. I'm the dude arguing that UC2 *doesn't play well enough* to be my GOTY. I certainly don't NEED any of the above, I'm fully content with just playing awesome games. I'm just saying, on the subject of moving forward with visuals in gaming there are more pressing concerns than *MOAR POWAAR!!*.

Wow, what happened in here? It's 2010, I think we need a perspective reset.

I can say that the Reach trailer looks vaguely like what I'll see in the game itself because it does. That's the point of a trailer, to show you what Bungie are working towards this fall. They were completely up front about how it was made when there was no stringent requirement for them to do so. I see no reason to not take them at their word then, that the trailer was rendered by their engine with in-game assets frame by frame at a far greater resolution than normal and stiched together externally.

The consequences of this have been debated to death several times. Yes, it won't look as good technically. Specifically there are obvious repercussions with regard to running the same thing at a feasible resolution and resultant aliasing related artifacts.

But going into any more depth than that and throwing big technical words about is totally pointless because the reality is, we know about as much about how Reach will look when it ships as my mum does. i.e. very little. Regardless of how educated our guesses might be, they are still guesses and hence vagueness is the order of the day.

Getting all johnny-big-bollocks because someone made a throw away comment that heaven forbid, Bungie might iterate on that cutscene and try to improve it a bit between now and ship is about as useful as a chocoloate teapot.

Honestly, if current trends are bucked and there is a next generation of consoles in three years, the amount of gamers throwing themselves off of cliffs because it turns out they are only Wii style upgrades on current tech is going to be ridiculous. God forbid all this streaming technology actually goes anywhere, they'll be nobody left.