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[IbizaPocholo]

Dragon’s Dogma and Devil May Cry director says devs ‘felt really let down’ by PS3 hardware | VGC

Hideaki Itsuno claims the system architecture made it harder to pull off visual effects…

www.videogameschronicle.com

In a new video interview posted by Bokeh Game Studio, Capcom‘s Hideaki Itsuno has a conversation with Bokeh creative director and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama.

The pair discuss a number of topics as they look back on their careers in game development, but when the topic of the PS3 is raised, Itsuo expresses his disappointment at the hardware.

Initially discussing the tricks Capcom developers would pull off to make PS1 and PS2 games look better, Itusno recalled: “It was really about learning all the hardware’s specs.

“It was strange with the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 that we could work with so many semi-transparent layers. We could just pile them up to make visual effects.

“On the contrary, we couldn’t do this from the PlayStation 3 onwards. Everybody struggled during that generation. We really felt let down.”

Itsuno explained that he noticed a real difference between the development of Devil May Cry 3 on PS2 and Devil May Cry 4 on PS3, both of which he directed.

“That shift came right in between Devil May Cry 3 and Devil May Cry 4 for me,” he said. “We were told that we couldn’t even replicate what we had done before.

“For five years, all we had done was work with semi-transparent layers to make games look cool on the PlayStation 2. Once on PlayStation 3, we couldn’t even think of that technique. I think [developers] all over the world struggled.”

 

[Max_Po]

Everyone was....

 

[DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy]

Not trying to make this a console war thing but the beginning of the the 360/PS3/Wii era was pretty wild. I remember all these devs rescinding PS3 exclusivity. DMC4, FF13, and other Japanese games going from PS exclusive to multiplat. Hell Assassin’s Creed was originally going to be PS3 exclusive, and then it ended up running better on 360 (like most early multiplats).

Sony was hard betting on everyone adapting to their system and it backfired harder. While they learned from that, in retrospect it feels almost preferable to now when every game system is designed more or less the same architecture wise; or at least my nostalgia makes me feel like it was a more interesting console landscape. Every console maker was doing their own thing.

 

[01011001]

that happens when you shift from a GPU that was specifically designed for a low cost game console to a GPU that is just a PC chip that has been sightly modified

dedicated console designs can focus on hardware that does specifically things that the company thinks will help make their games look good for the new generation.
general purpose PC GPUs just do everything well enough but nothing especially great

 

[lh032]

PS5 is here. Come to Papa.

 

[EDMIX]

Sony was hard betting on everyone adapting to their system and it backfired harder

Yes and no.

With Cell...it didn't work out, but a the huge cost with Bluray investment worked well in the end cause that is now the standard today.

I also don't believe the lost multiplats had a lot to do with that, I think that had more to do with the delay of PS3 and 360 being out and available. I'd also give MS credit where its due, they didn't just get FF, GTA, Tekken etc support cause PS3 had cell, they got it cause they really, really turned things around at XB, fixed the controller and invested deep in Japan and really wanted to build those relationships.

So I can't say all that is based on a Sony backfire, MS did what they needed to and got support based on all of the positive changes they made.

in retrospect it feels almost preferable to now when every game system is designed more or less the same architecture wise

I agree with this 100%.

I'm all for everyone trying to be different, but ONLY when it benefits everyone. MS got it right with making architecture that was catered to the developer and those moving over from PC to console. From the original XB, they got that right and I think that is a bigger thing they've done that I don't feel they get enough credit for.

 

[DenchDeckard]

People worrying about the Series S and DEVs had to work with PS3 and its split memory etc. It was a complete POS for developers but no one in the fanbase seemed to care what DEVs had to wrestle with to work the system.

Now it seems to be a crazy thing that poor devs have a slightly smaller memory pool than they would like for 1440p. DEVs are paid to make things work and it's part of their job, Yes I wish it would be a piece of piss for them but some struggles come with the territory...nothing will come close to PS3 ever again I don't think.

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

The fact that we're still paying for the mistakes from that generation says it all.

It hurts me that we still play them through streaming and many of those PS3 games are locked in that platform like MGS4, Resistance trilogy, Ratchet & Clank trilogy Remake, God of War remasters, etc.

Hopefully Sony finds a way to give us native PS3 games with PS Plus Premium. That would be amazing considering what they are giving us for now, lmao.

 

[Kokoloko85]

Ultimately it was worth it for Uncharted 2-3, TLOU lol

 

[RoboFu]

Yeah I too miss dedicated hardware in consoles. That was a big plus for early gaming. It also made games vary greatly across different consoles which was a good thing. I understand how that would not work these days with astronomical budgets but I will miss it.

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

t for Uncharted 2-3, TLOU lol

And Infamous...Resistance trilogy, MGS4, lots of Atlus projects (Personas Catherine), God of War 3 and Ascention, Motorstorm, LittleBigPlanet and plenty of others.

 

[Three]

People worrying about the Series S and DEVs had to work with PS3 and its split memory etc. It was a complete POS for developers but no one in the fanbase seemed to care what DEVs had to wrestle with to work the system.

Now it seems to be a crazy thing that poor devs have a slightly smaller memory pool than they would like for 1440p. DEVs are paid to make things work and it's part of their job, Yes I wish it would be a piece of piss for them but some struggles come with the territory...nothing will come close to PS3 ever again I don't think.

You clearly don't remember the "lazy devs" meme when devs complained about the PS3 and its split memory. People cared but brushed it off the same way.

Now any dev complaining about completely less memory, split memory pool and significantly weaker hardware are brushed away as insignificant crap developers. This is more a lesson for those defending the hardware and shitting on the devs today than it is about the fans who shitted on the 'lazy devs' in the past.

 

[lh032]

Yes and no.

With Cell...it didn't work out, but a the huge cost with Bluray investment worked well in the end cause that is now the standard today.

I also don't believe the lost multiplats had a lot to do with that, I think that had more to do with the delay of PS3 and 360 being out and available. I'd also give MS credit where its due, they didn't just get FF, GTA, Tekken etc support cause PS3 had cell, they got it cause they really, really turned things around at XB, fixed the controller and invested deep in Japan and really wanted to build those relationships.

So I can't say all that is based on a Sony backfire, MS did what they needed to and got support based on all of the positive changes they made.



I agree with this 100%.

I'm all for everyone trying to be different, but ONLY when it benefits everyone. MS got it right with making architecture that was catered to the developer and those moving over from PC to console. From the original XB, they got that right and I think that is a bigger thing they've done that I don't feel they get enough credit for.

yea their bluray works perfectly. best disc format

 

[chromhound]

Sony was hard betting on everyone adapting to their system and it backfired harder. While they learned from that, in retrospect it feels almost preferable to now when every game system is designed more or less the same architecture wise; or at least my nostalgia makes me feel like it was a more interesting console landscape. Every console maker was doing their own thing.

What are the chances they go back?

 

[buenoblue]

I was a ps1 and PS2 super fanboy but when the 360 came out it looked great so I got one day one, also it came out way before ps3. I then picked up a PS3 like 6 months after release cause all the marketing around cell and 1080p HDMI gaming and I gotta say I was immediately underwhelmed. Everything just looked worse and ran like shit on the PS3. Still had some great games but yeah that machine was definitely not designed well.

 

[01011001]

While they learned from that, in retrospect it feels almost preferable to now when every game system is designed more or less the same architecture wise

I mean technically speaking the 360 and the PS3 also had almost the same architecture. sure one had an ATi GPU and the other an Nvidia GPU but those had very similar features.

and both systems had an IBM CPU and even used the exact same CPU core design.
the big differentiator was that the PS3 had only a single main CPU core with 2 threads + 7 SPEs while the 360 had a simple 3 CPU cores with 6 threads.

while the difference between them was certainly bigger than consoles today, it was far from the differences all 4 consoles the generation before had between them.
and the differences you saw in multiplat titles between the PS3 and the 360 were mostly down to the fact that developers had to try to use the SPEs in order to augment the underpowered GPU, which wasn't easy.

 

[Labadal]

The PS3 was a misunderstood beast, created by a genius madman. Oh, uncle Ken...

 

[ArtHands]

PS Vita releasing few years after PS3 was a double whammy.

 

[ACESHIGH]

Yes and no.

With Cell...it didn't work out, but a the huge cost with Bluray investment worked well in the end cause that is now the standard today.

I also don't believe the lost multiplats had a lot to do with that, I think that had more to do with the delay of PS3 and 360 being out and available. I'd also give MS credit where its due, they didn't just get FF, GTA, Tekken etc support cause PS3 had cell, they got it cause they really, really turned things around at XB, fixed the controller and invested deep in Japan and really wanted to build those relationships.

So I can't say all that is based on a Sony backfire, MS did what they needed to and got support based on all of the positive changes they made.



I agree with this 100%.

I'm all for everyone trying to be different, but ONLY when it benefits everyone. MS got it right with making architecture that was catered to the developer and those moving over from PC to console. From the original XB, they got that right and I think that is a bigger thing they've done that I don't feel they get enough credit for.

You know what MS does not get enough credit for? The Xbox 360 controller for PC and x input. It made playing PC games on a controller extremely easy. I have no doubt that this move plus steam and others is what made PC gaming the juggernaut that is today.

Before 2005/2006 controller support on PC was dogshit.

 

[MikeM]

Yep. PS3 was dogshit overalll. I’m glad PS4 and PS5 went to more standard architecture which is why we have such good back compat.

Still have my fat boy PS3 tho.

 

[Lux R7]

i read Dragon's Dogma and my heart skipped a beat, i thought we got a trailer or something for DD2

 

[I Master l]

PS3 hardware as a design was shit but it provided the needed generational leap over the PS2, not sure transparency
issue is specific to PS3 or just the side effect from using traditional gpu compared to the frankenstein rasterizer that
was used in the ps2 but either way most people would prefer ps3 graphics over ps2 grayish low poly graphics with
some transparencies

 

[alabtrosMyster]

“That shift came right in between Devil May Cry 3 and Devil May Cry 4 for me,” he said. “We were told that we couldn’t even replicate what we had done before.

I'm not surprised, in the God or War (1&2) remake on PS3 everytime you would open a chest with a lot of semi transparent orbs bouncing out the frame rate would tank really hard for a brief moment.

I think that the water ripples in some water surfaces is missing, but that may be a different reason (missing feature?)...

Anyway, say what you will of what Sony ended up doing with it, the ps3 was a mess.

 

[SEGA_2012]

PS Triple is the best Playstation of all time. Deal with it, Itsuno

 

[Punished Miku]

i read Dragon's Dogma and my heart skipped a beat, i thought we got a trailer or something for DD2

Even better, we got a t-shirt. Hoping for some sweat pants next.

 

[Evil Calvin]

"Dragon’s Dogma and Devil May Cry director Hideaki Itsuno says devs ‘felt really let down’ by PS3 hardware"​

Timely comment

 

[Godot25]

Can't blame them.
Can you imagine going from "Top of the world" status to selling half of a consoles in next generation while devs hating you because you created unnecessarily complex system and by that you relegated your platform to be an afterthought in terms of creating port? All while loosing hundreds of millions dollars selling most expensive console on the market?
I don't think it is very popular thing to say, but I view PS3 in first few years as a bigger failure than Xbox One.

 

[Big Baller]

There are more layers to this

 

[REDRZA MWS]

The cell. Which is exactly why almost all 3rd party games looked and performed better on 360.

 

[Kilau]

There are more layers to this

But they aren’t transparent.

 

[RoboFu]

For the people who didn’t read…
He talks about how it was very different from ps1 and 2 .. not that it was underpowered.

 

[Team Andromeda]

And yet people still bang on about the Saturn being hard to work with and thats the reason why it didn't sell so great...

 

[Shut0wen]

Amazing how many people defend the ps3, imo its one of the worst consoles ive played on, 2nd worst being the wii but playstation 3 just made every rockstar game unplayable until gta5 and every bethesda game was unplayable to, hit frame rate so hard even games like killzone were hitting 20 fps but mostly playstation devs used a shit ton of blur to hide this

 

[SmokedMeat]

And yet people still bang on about the Saturn being hard to work with and thats the reason why it didn't sell so great...

Anyone who says that is delusional and wasn’t around back then to see the fuck ups.

 

[Puscifer]

that happens when you shift from a GPU that was specifically designed for a low cost game console to a GPU that is just a PC chip that has been sightly modified

dedicated console designs can focus on hardware that does specifically things that the company thinks will help make their games look good for the new generation.
general purpose PC GPUs just do everything well enough but nothing especially great

This is easily the dumbest post on neogaf.

 

[01011001]

This is easily the dumbest post on neogaf.

Then you should have no issued explaining why right?

 

[Team Andromeda]

Anyone who says that is delusional and wasn’t around back then to see the fuck ups.

I was there and almost everything used against Saturn could have been put to SONY and the PS3. Not great launch software, expensive at launch and to manufacture, 3rd parties games looked and run worse and very different to programme for and complicated CPU set up

The End

 

[Spyxos]

But I've read so many times about this one detailed tree in Uncharted 3. Which would only be possible on the ps3.

 

[solidus12]

Still can’t believe how good God of War 3 looks on PS3

 

[01011001]

Still can’t believe how good God of War 3 looks on PS3

a developer controlled camera helps a lot when you wanna do impressive scenes.

the framerate was pretty bad tho, actually hanging in the low 30fps range in many scenes and it basically never hits 60fps

 

[ProgenitorCastle]

There are more layers to this

 

[Kataploom]

The cell. Which is exactly why almost all 3rd party games looked and performed better on 360.

I find it embarrassing that they made the same exact mistake Nintendo did with the N64 and got almost the same result if it wasn't for Shuhei Yoshida taking the steer from Kutaragi... At least they didn't have a proprietary physical format limiting them this time around...

dedicated console designs can focus on hardware that does specifically things that the company thinks will help make their games look good for the new generation.
general purpose PC GPUs just do everything well enough but nothing especially great

Yeah I too miss dedicated hardware in consoles. That was a big plus for early gaming. It also made games vary greatly across different consoles which was a good thing. I understand how that would not work these days with astronomical budgets but I will miss it.

Nah, let that die, devs don't like that, I for once wouldn't like having to do more unnecessary work just because... More standard technology also brings us way better BC without having to plan 2 generations ahead as MS did with xbox

 

[March Climber]

Itsuno with the PS3:

Now imagine him and his team, who still managed to make Dragon's Dogma on PS3 hardware, creating DD2 with PS5's power.

 

[a multicultural team of v]

PS3 hardware as a design was shit but it provided the needed generational leap over the PS2, not sure transparency
issue is specific to PS3 or just the side effect from using traditional gpu compared to the frankenstein rasterizer that
was used in the ps2 but either way most people would prefer ps3 graphics over ps2 grayish low poly graphics with
some transparencies

Yeah I think this comment is being somewhat misconstrued because while he only says PS3, he only says PS3 because nobody in Japan gives a shit about Xbox so that is obviously what he is going to mention. In reality the PS2 was a bizzarre as fuck architecture maybe even moreso than the PS3, and because it sold so many units developers invested a ton of effort into getting the most out of it. The problem is the ways to get the most out of the PS2, and the capabilities of the system, were so out of whack with every console coming after it (including the 360) that it was a nightmare to totally rethink the graphic design of games, let alone deal with the jump to HD.

I mean the PS2 had freaking 2.4 gigapixels of fillrate for games that generally ran below 480i. Developers were literally just painting special effects (like alpha blending) onto the framebuffer because they had the fillrate to do so. That type of rendering was impossible after the PS2 because GPUs simply render graphics differently and fillrate was never the bottleneck.

Also, I'm no expert here but apparently the rendering method Pixar used may have been able to be adapted to a PS2-like system design very well, so if Sony kept doubling down on it with the PS3 and PS4 we could have some very, very interesting looking games right about now. Until raytracing at least, now raytracing is used because we have the computational ability to brute force it now.

 

[Coloress_Kafka]

People blame Kutaragi but I really blame Howard Stringer for cutting the budget.

Kutaragi was insane but he wasn’t an idiot, it was clear there was gonna be a strategy of developers using CELL in a more generic sense and mainly brute forcing things with the RSX early on. But when Stringer cut the budget it seemed like RSX never got the features/power they originally intended.

 

[DeepEnigma]

 

[Umbasaborne]

The fact that we're still paying for the mistakes from that generation says it all.

It hurts me that we still play them through streaming and many of those PS3 games are locked in that platform like MGS4, Resistance trilogy, Ratchet & Clank trilogy Remake, God of War remasters, etc.

Hopefully Sony finds a way to give us native PS3 games with PS Plus Premium. That would be amazing considering what they are giving us for now, lmao.

They should be able to, people are emulating ps3 games on hardware that is just about as powerful as the ps5,

 

[93xfan]

Still not selling my PS3 no matter what he thinks about it.

 

[Umbasaborne]

The cell. Which is exactly why almost all 3rd party games looked and performed better on 360.

Yes, but 3rd party games that were designed around the cell trounced the 360 version pretty bad. I mean…look at ff13.

 

[vpance]

RSX was a pile of shit. And they fucked up the design too with hardware bugs.