Bayonetta Dev Talks PS3 Version Problems

[ChromeAlchemist]

Heh. And I thought one of the selling points of the PS3 was its superior hardware.

Which is purposely harder to program for.

bunch of lazy developers not being able to do their job of developing

I can agree somewhat that this was a cock up, which is surprising as they are former Capcom code monkeys. But they're not the first dev team to say this. Valve and Factor 5 also expressed the difficulty they had with the hardware, for example. Even John Carmack, the guy your favourite devs pray to before they go to sleep even had problems. Oh well.

I've never understood why it was made harder to code for. If it's a technically better machine I can understand it being more complex but surely you'd go for both quality and ease of use?

I can sort of see their point that they want the games to improve in quality over time, but that just seems to pick on the early adopters which have to be at least considered the core market and their most loyal supporters.

It was a poor design choice. Basically their idea was that it would filter out the crap, and like you said, game graphics would progress over time. That's a poor excuse, because the devs should be free to make the games look as well as they can program, and 8 years into the product cycle chances are no one is going to base their purchases based on how much prettier Uncharted 3 (for example) is to Resistance: Fall of Man.

And graphical fidelity progresses over time anyway with every console! Look at God Of War 2 compared to some of the earlier titles on the PS2, or Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube compared to some early titles.

Kaz Hirai should have kept his mouth shut, and all would have been well.

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

i guess is harder to make ps3 games as some devs have said so but i guess is even harder because they keep trying to port games made for other consoles.

didnt COD4 developers activision say that the deveoplment on the ps3 version wasnt hard at all?

Depends on whether it was built for the 360 then ported, like many multiplat titles tend to be. I believe it probably was. That being said, IW are pretty skilled either way, and if the graphics whores are anything to go by, this game isn't pushing any boundaries visually.

 

[Pendragon9]

On the one hand, the evidence does show that the Ps3 version, being harder to work with, will suffer quality deterioration. It's sad, but true.

Then again, it's Sega, and they're a bunch of lazy asses who don't have a clue about anything they do anymore, so I'm not surprised they joined Valve in the great whine off. (even if they aren't the only ones making the game, Sega loves to spoil whatever they're working on)

Oh well. Some devs will just not like the PS3's hardware. What can you do?

 

[God Worm]

I'm reminded of an entirely different article which talked about what things would be like if the PS3 was the key system companies were developing for, how it would have a choke-hold on game development since it would cost too much to port it to a different system...

360 Got their first though, and now it's a struggle to get games ported to the PS3. Sigh. I was hopeful for Bayonetta too...Oh well, at least I can order a pizza off my PS3.

 

[Viruzzo]

I've never understood why it was made harder to code for. If it's a technically better machine I can understand it being more complex but surely you'd go for both quality and ease of use?

"Better" is a subjective term: it's more powerful by many standards, but it has a weird architecture that is harder to program for (and probably the SDK sucks too). The 360 on the other hand has a more comprehensible architecture, and thus it's easier to program for.
What Sony did was repeat the process done withe PS2: complex/weird/powerful architecture that takes a lot to get used to, and that will be fully exploited only in years of attuning by the developers. That was fine because the PS2 was predominant and there were many less multiplatform titles, but now the PS3 has come late to the party, and suffers from poor portability. Developing for 360 is faster and cheaper and you can easily also target PC, meaning that it's an ideal first choice for multiplatform development.
Bottom line: the PS3 is based on old concepts, and thus will not be exploited fully in a long time (even more so because it gets a lot of ports), and by then the 720 will probably have come out...

Oh well, at least I can order a pizza off my PS3.

That reminds me of /pizza. And makes me sad.

 

[Nutcase]

Bottom line: the PS3 is based on old concepts, and thus will not be exploited fully in a long time (even more so because it gets a lot of ports), and by then the 720 will probably have come out...

Er, no. It's based on new concepts, which is why it's powerful and why it's demanding to work with.

 

[Nutcase]

Someday people are going to have to accept facts and just admit that there are some huge bottlenecks that developers are forced to deal with on the PS3. Absolutely pointless bottlenecks that shouldn't have been there if Sony had cared at all about their developers.

Want to elaborate on that?

There is always a trade-off between performance and generality. Sony is veering farther onto the performance side than some developers would like. The games that do utilize the performance offered prove it's not pointless.

 

[AceDiamond]

What strikes me as a bit funny in all this "PS3 is hard to develop for" banter is that this complaint was more or less what sunk the Atari Jaguar (and really, that thing was hard to program for since it had 2 processors at different bit sizes), and cost Nintendo its market dominance when the N64 came out. But of course nobody ever really considers that about the N64, instead just considering it as the problem being related directly to its cartridge-based media, or because a lot of developers (Rare, Factor 5, etc.) managed to pull off pretty good programming tricks to make the N64 work better than expected with graphical tweaks it wasn't technically designed for.

I'm not saying anybody has become more whiny in the interim but I am saying that just because something is hard to program for, whether on purpose or as the result of bad design, it does not automatically make it "better". User-Friendly isn't just an old webcomic, guys.

Bottom line: the PS3 is based on old concepts, and thus will not be exploited fully in a long time (even more so because it gets a lot of ports), and by then the 720 will probably have come out...

Er, no. It's based on new concepts, which is why it's powerful and why it's demanding to work with.

I think what he was saying is that, since the PS2 had the same sort of deal in terms of complexity, Sony decided if it wasn't broke they shouldn't fix it, even though the PS3 was being launched last instead of first and is radically far different from Xbox 360 architecture. Basically he meant old concepts in terms of their hardware model, and not the technology itself.

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

GASP?!?! The PS3 is difficult to program for? This is such breaking news!

 

[lostclause]

I like irony, especially since I've got a friends who goes on about graphics in the PS3 being superior.
Anyway, this is one game ported badly by Sega, it doesn't require huge generalisations (except maybe don't trust sega).

 

[scotth266]

Heh. Platinum Games.

Funny game company titles aside, it sort of stinks for the PS3 owners. I really wish that Sony hadn't made the thing so hard to program for: if they hadn't, then the PS3 would have sold a lot more units due to having a lot more games by now.

 

[Shy_Guy]

Want to elaborate on that?

There is always a trade-off between performance and generality. Sony is veering farther onto the performance side than some developers would like. The games that do utilize the performance offered prove it's not pointless.

Um, the original Xbox gave much better performance, was statistically way more powerful, and was easier to develop for than the PS2. So why is it that the PS3, which was released a year after the 360 is giving everyone so much trouble and really proving to do nothing as far as improving games on a technical level?

Killzone 2 looks great, no doubt, but Sony collaborated extensively with the developers in a huge effort to show of the "power" of the PS3. They did a fantastic job, but they were being shown all the "tricks" they had to use by Sony. Sony can't afford to do this with every developer out there, and thus the supposed power of the great black box is wasted.

They easily could have just overpowered the 360 with a real gaming CPU and GPU, instead of trying to shoehorn the Cell in there and calling it a day. Had they done the former, we would not hear about all these problems from developers, and the PS3 really would be getting graphically superior games. Seriously, they had an extra year to work on all the specs and they release it with a GPU inferior to the 360's? Ridiculous.

Edit: On a different note, what I despise is that everyone tries to put the blame on honest, hard-working developers that have to put up with a shittily thought-out console design.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

Someday people are going to have to accept facts and just admit that there are some huge bottlenecks that developers are forced to deal with on the PS3. Absolutely pointless bottlenecks that shouldn't have been there if Sony had cared at all about their developers.

They cared about their developers, it's just that their methodology backfired.

By making it purposely harder to make games for, they were hoping of obtaining devoted developers who wouldn't waste time on other consoles. However, since this is not twenty years ago, most of them predictably opted for the easier to make console.

Had they been just a little more thoughtful, and made it easier to work with than the 360 then we'd be having crappy PC ports based on the PS3 version.

 

[Korten12]

it seems like making 360 is taking the easy way out. I mean I want to be a game deveopler when I am older and make games for PC/Playstation 4 or what ever playstation that will be out by then. I mean would you rather tell someone "Yeah I made my game on the 360 so It wasnt a challange." or "I made my game on the playstation which was harder to devople for but I got better results." (not saying ps3 exclusives are better this is just an example.)

also it seems that the fact that the person is saying that they will leave it be, shows that their really dedicated to the game equal for everyone /sarcasm.

 

[hansari]

...this game isn't pushing any boundaries visually.

Is it tolerably inferior now? Or is it still doing that buggy crap that hindered gameplay back when it was being showcased?

 

[Captain S]

All the modern consoles currently have serious issues. PS3 has complex architecture, 360 has a 1 in 4 fail rate, and the Wii has really crappy motion sensors (almost no games support motion plus so that is a moot point). I'll take my pc over any modern console any day. I must point out however that developers know how difficult the architecture of the PS3 is so if they want to port a game to it they should be prepared. Looks like they didn't care too much and did a bad port.

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

...this game isn't pushing any boundaries visually.

Is it tolerably inferior now? Or is it still doing that buggy crap that hindered gameplay back when it was being showcased?

You're asking the wrong person, I think. Hell I still think Resident Evil 4 looks great, and Spyborgs (a beat em up, if you haven't heard of it).

But if you go on Gametrailers, you'll find some snide bastards saying things like "OMG they need to change the wall textures in this game, I feel like I'm playing Counter-Strike!"

IMO, it looks great. But I really meant was, it's no Uncharted 2 or KZ2. Buggy? I don't remember seeing any of it actually, link?

 

[Shy_Guy]

They cared about their developers, it's just that their methodology backfired.

By making it purposely harder to make games for, they were hoping of obtaining devoted developers who wouldn't waste time on other consoles. However, since this is not twenty years ago, most of them predictably opted for the easier to make console.

Had they been just a little more thoughtful, and made it easier to work with than the 360 then we'd be having crappy PC ports based on the PS3 version.

So, they care about their developers so they make the console purposefully difficult to use? I'm sorry, that does not compute.

Crappy PC ports have what to do with anything?

 

[Booze Zombie]

The PS3's just hard to program for, combine this with a fuck up and you have a ruined game quicker than you can say "cock tease" (Bayonetta).

 

[DeadlyYellow]

So, they care about their developers so they make the console purposefully difficult to use? I'm sorry, that does not compute.

They sought to make their console purposefully difficult so devs would specialize in making for it and not bother with the other consoles, thus becoming exclusives.

Care being used in this fashion to pertain to patronage, rather than empathy.