Lair to include civilian genocide, also more Xbox vs PS3 stuff

Because it’s a weekend and because when you cover topics like Factor 5‘s Lair, comparisons to Xbox 360 games always pop-up – this no matter how much you try to not make the unneeded comparison. When Julian Eggebrecht was interviewed by Mercury News, and was asked about what he feels are the differences between the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360, he said:

YouÂ’ll have a hard time if you port without having a PS3 game in mind when you created the 360 version. That is where a lot of complaints are coming from. They created the 360 engine with a unified memory architecture in mind, with the embedded frame buffer with its advantages and disadvantages, and not thinking too much in early stages about multi-core. If you try to get that over to the PS3, youÂ’re in for a bad surprise. The PS3 is all about streamlining about the two different memory pools. They are separate. You donÂ’t have to do tiling because you donÂ’t have an embedded frame buffer. All of these advantages of the PS3 turn into disadvantages if you donÂ’t start making your game on the PS3. Hence the griping. If you create first on the PS3, it is pretty easy to port it to the 360. A lot of companies coming on board now will probably start on the PS3 and move to the 360. The lucky thing for us is we didnÂ’t have to think about the 360 at all.

As for the memory limitation in next gen consoles compared to PCs Eggebrecht notes that although you’d always complain that you don’t have enough memory, 512 is probably the sweet spot.

Get more of Eggrebecht’s comments after the Jump

 

Because it’s a weekend and because when you cover topics like Factor 5‘s Lair, comparisons to Xbox 360 games always pop-up – this no matter how much you try to not make the unneeded comparison. When Julian Eggebrecht was interviewed by Mercury News, and was asked about what he feels are the differences between the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360, he said:

YouÂ’ll have a hard time if you port without having a PS3 game in mind when you created the 360 version. That is where a lot of complaints are coming from. They created the 360 engine with a unified memory architecture in mind, with the embedded frame buffer with its advantages and disadvantages, and not thinking too much in early stages about multi-core. If you try to get that over to the PS3, youÂ’re in for a bad surprise. The PS3 is all about streamlining about the two different memory pools. They are separate. You donÂ’t have to do tiling because you donÂ’t have an embedded frame buffer. All of these advantages of the PS3 turn into disadvantages if you donÂ’t start making your game on the PS3. Hence the griping. If you create first on the PS3, it is pretty easy to port it to the 360. A lot of companies coming on board now will probably start on the PS3 and move to the 360. The lucky thing for us is we didnÂ’t have to think about the 360 at all.

As for the memory limitation in next gen consoles compared to PCs Eggebrecht notes that although you’d always complain that you don’t have enough memory, 512 is probably the sweet spot.

I think it would have been a crucial mistake if either Sony or Microsoft had only 256 megabytes. I somehow have the hunch that both of them would have loved to. Tim Sweeney was very outspoken in the early days in the Microsoft circle. The 512 is probably the sweet spot. You have to figure out how to stream. Lair streams its geometry and its textures. If you have got enough assets which are streaming, the 512 megabytes are adequate. And if you have a large enough media to store those textures.

As for his opinion of Gears of War and ultimately the Unreal Engine, he said:

In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground. Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design. Our engine is always designed in a huge world bubble and that can be 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers. You can go anywhere at extreme speeds. Unreal Engine is dependent on the fact that you go relatively slowly through your world. With us, you can go through the world fast or slowly. If you are in night mode, or you are on the ground, you get all of the detail that Unreal Engine provides. But there is no way you can get the macro.

For those of you who are eager and have console zealot pitchforks ready, please note that Eggebrecht is not promoting Lair at the expense of the Xbox 360, he’s just promoting Lair period. To be fair, he even comments on other PS3 titles and how it supposedly doesn’t do what Lair does. Here’s his words:

Lair is also the only game which does all of its light in real time, and the atmospheric calculations. That gives us the day and nights cycle, the fluid dynamic simulations in the water. That wouldnÂ’t have been possible half a year ago. We needed more time for that. You need the SPUs for that. Extensive streaming. Ted Price mentioned in an interview that Ratchet is now the first one where they start to stream. I can understand why they didnÂ’t do it for Resistance. With Lair, you have to do it or you cannot manage the detail level and the expectations for the detail level and at the same time move around this world.

And finally, for those of you who are annoyed with Lair-to-other-game comparisons, and cross-platform comparisons in general, here’s what Eggebrecht had to say about a reaction to Lair during one of their focus tests (warning: may have minor spoilers):

In one level you havenÂ’t seen, you make it to enemy territory with a huge fleet and you start firebombing the city. One person in the focus group test said he didnÂ’t want to fire bomb civilians. You are asked by one of your buddies to do that. But he said it was morally wrong. That was an amazing comment. That is exactly the kind of questions that we want the player to have. Suffice it to say, the story does support that quite a bit. You should experience what the character is experiencing and the character experiences exactly that arc. It is an inspiration of wars of today and wars past.

Via Mercury News