Killzone 2 has an amazing engine

[WrikaWrek]

Its a great and very awesome engine, graphically unmatched by any console game.

However when I was playing it I always felt like a dwarf. I mean if you stand next to a friend of yours, your face is around the height of his shoulderrs! Wtf is that about

No kidding, and it's lower than the shoulders. More like, a bit higher than his waist, it's ridiculous.

[Van Cruncheon]

re5 looks so much more impressive than killzone 2, seriously

depth of field and motion blur were cool back when they were 3dfx demos

[MCD]

POOR PERFORMANCE INDEED!

[Bebpo]

re5 looks so much more impressive than killzone 2, seriously

depth of field and motion blur were cool back when they were 3dfx demos

@_@

The train level is very impressive looking.  It's more about correctly doing/faking the lighting than effects.  Although the particle effects like the dirt/dust/ashes are fantastic looking as well.

RE5 has its crappy looking parts too like the entire stage out on the powerboat stopping at little hut towns.

I think it's a tough toss up between which is the better looking game.  At their BEST moments, both games are better looking than other games on the market.  At their WORST moments, both look worse than many other current-gen games.  On average, both look quite good.

[Smooth Groove]

Real talk.  

This weekend, I showed KZ2 to two of my friends and neither of them was impressed by it.  They claimed that KZ2 looked too blurry and didn't even seem to be rendered in HD.  

Based on what I've read from other gamers on the internet, their judgments of KZ2 were quite surprising to me.  

I actually played the devil's advocate and tried to convince them that Killzone 2 was a great technical accomplishment but neither could look past KZ2's not so impressive textures and lack of crispness.  

Through no prompts from me, both claimed that Gears of War 2 looked better than KZ2.  They also thought that SF4 looked great.  

Maybe image quality is more important to the perception of good graphics than fancy, special effects?  

[Bebpo]

I thought KZ2 looked very meh at first and made those exact comments your friends did when I played the demo.  Hell, I made them in the demo thread here on EB bashing the graphics. The textures looked weak like most PS3 games and the IQ was blurry.

But when I played the full game it looked a lot more impressive.  I'm not sure if it's just because the first level is the worst looking area, or it just takes a little while to adjust to the visual style of the game.  But by the middle of the game when you are out in the sandy wasteland straight out of Dune it looked great.

[duckman2000]

KZ2 is really at its best when you're engaged in CQB in fairly dark areas and it gets to show off it's lighting and shadow savvy. Some things just plain look good, like the incredible weapon models, but those are the situations where it really shines. Add some sweet explosions to the mix, and it's just hot. But then I'm just as impressed by Banjo, so hey. Gears feels much too flat, although it's definitely not without its own strengths and very impressive moments.

For what it's worth, I don't think the initial level looked all that great.

Prole, have you actually played a significant amount of KZ2? I don't know how it measures up to RE5 beyond the demo of that game, but I have a very hard time believing that the game could compare to something like the train, Suljeva or the refinery on a "much more impressive" level. The multiplayer map set in the desert is fucking impressive, too. I'm not buying it, dude.

[demi]

Man, why can't we all just get along

As long as you don't take it seriously, we can get along just fine


Resident Evil 5 > Dead Space

[Brehvolution]

haha the hate couldn't be contained in one thread.

[Van Cruncheon]

KZ2 is really at its best when you're engaged in CQB in fairly dark areas and it gets to show off it's lighting and shadow savvy. Some things just plain look good, like the incredible weapon models, but those are the situations where it really shines. Add some sweet explosions to the mix, and it's just hot. But then I'm just as impressed by Banjo, so hey. Gears feels much too flat, although it's definitely not without its own strengths and very impressive moments.

For what it's worth, I don't think the initial level looked all that great.

Prole, have you actually played a significant amount of KZ2? I don't know how it measures up to RE5 beyond the demo of that game, but I have a very hard time believing that the game could compare to something like the train, Suljeva or the refinery on a "much more impressive" level. The multiplayer map set in the desert is fucking impressive, too. I'm not buying it, dude.

you mean the ugly, lo-rez pixelmass shadow savvy? admittedly, that would translate to "ugly stipple gradient shadow savvy" on the 360, but the fact remains: the ps3 hardware limitations poke out throughout the game. at least re5's devs were smart of enough to embrace the limitations of shitty consoles.

[Beezy]

POOR PERFORMANCE INDEED!

[Van Cruncheon]

I thought KZ2 looked very meh at first and made those exact comments your friends did when I played the demo.  Hell, I made them in the demo thread here on EB bashing the graphics. The textures looked weak like most PS3 games and the IQ was blurry.

But when I played the full game it looked a lot more impressive.  I'm not sure if it's just because the first level is the worst looking area, or it just takes a little while to adjust to the visual style of the game.  But by the middle of the game when you are out in the sandy wasteland straight out of Dune it looked great.

the train level looked great, for sure, but that was due to the slick wind physics bits -- i couldn't tell if they were canned or calculated on the fly (most likely some combination thereof), but it did look great. overall, though, the engine didn't wow me.

[duckman2000]

Well, I suppose they could have taken the safe (lame) route and just made everything static with limited exceptions, but I prefer the far more interesting route Guerrilla took, occasionally sketchy shadow quality or not. And about embracing limitations, KZ2 is pretty blatantly designed with the PS3 shortcomings and strengths in mind, as opposed to for example Resistance 2, which looks like an Xbox 360 game forced to be on a platform it doesn't belong on. I just plain don't buy that there is any sensible justification for the "so much more impressive" claim.

[Van Cruncheon]

there's not a lot of technical justification, other than that re5 doesn't show its limitations so glaringly and is much, much more interesting to look at, visually

i mean, if you wanna get down to actual hardware/software technical features, killzone 2 isn't doing much beyond what lost planet did two years ago, unless you're counting MAYBE better physics and vaseline dof/blur

[duckman2000]

Moving this...

I don't know about technical achievements. I'm not sure what impressive engine tech even means these days. It looks great, but I'm not sure it's because it's doing anything incredible on a technical level. Top notch designs and a keen sense for composition seems to have more to do with it, coupled with a good understanding of what the technical platform needs to be for the actual hardware it's supposed to be running. It's got quite a dramatic look.

[youtube=560,345]HGX-SSAU5kU[/youtube]
[youtube=560,345]KqLvkGZWSj4[/youtube]

[Bebpo]

I don't think you can argue that KZ2 is amazing from a tech perspective.  Like 99% of PS3 exclusives it is technically weak because the PS3 is technically a weak system compared to the X360 with a lot of limitations. Uncharted is about the only PS3 engine that looks damn impressive even when compared to X360 engines but then Naughty Dog always rocks at graphic tech.

But I'd still argue that KZ2 looks as good or better than RE5, but that's because I think the team did an amazing art job within the limitations of gimped PS3 hardware to fool you into thinking it looks good.  See, that's the thing about PS3 games, they have to do tricks to "fake" things to make you think they look good and are doing the real thing.  But at the end of the day if it's faked well enough that you can't tell, who cares?  It still looks amazing.  I'm sure the RE5 engine technically stomps the KZ2 one, but the KZ2 one tricks me into thinking it looks as good as RE5, and I'm fine with that.  If I met any of the engine guys at Guerilla I'd give them a pat on the back for great work on KZ2.

[duckman2000]

Generally I agree, in that I think it's much more of an achievement in product design than it is any technical, cell-fueled marvel, but the PS3 seems to tolerate a whole lot of stuff going on at once without choking, though. Maybe it's just a matter of having skilled, dedicated developers, but I rarely feel like the games are about to break apart from everything going on.

One thing here though... the real thing? Faking it? What part of computer-aided design isn't faked? We've generally come a long way from blob shadows and paint-on wall shadows, but I feel like there are some of those mythical standards rearing their heads again here.

[Van Cruncheon]

i'm not denying it looks great at all. there were certainly a few moments, especially in the more intense firefights, where i shat my pants at the visuals. in the end, though, like gow2, it all felt a bit rickety and contrived, like i was pedalling through a setpiece demonstration with the all-too-frequent peep at the cardboard, wires, and string barely holding it together. take that against far cry 2, which, while having less of an impact in any given instance, had an amazing global lighting and lod model in a large open streaming world that really struck me as a technical accomplishment on consoles.

i ain't sayin' killzone 2 has no chops, because it does. the physics are used precisely the way i want to see physics used -- not for global behaviors, but in very narrow contexts used to create a strong cinematic sense. a lot of stupid-hard dev work went into those indivdual behaviors in killzone 2, and maybe? they played to the ps3's strengths. but a technical masterpiece? nah. there's nothing that couldn't be done on  the 360 given the same manpower and manhours, although they'd have a different set of limitations to fudge (stipple gradients on shadows, again, for example).

[Van Cruncheon]

i think bebpo is talking about contextual models as opposed to global ones. john carmack is a genius in the former approach, where you smartly allocate resources to those limited areas in a scene that will generate the biggest impact, rather than rolling up a completely unified resource/lighting model. on the other hand, the latter is more impressive, from a hardware performance standpoint, especially given the optimization complexity necessary to make it/them work. it's too different approaches: one makes for better screenshots and tighter per-scene visuals, and the other makes for a stronger sense of holistic cohesion.

[duckman2000]

i ain't sayin' killzone 2 has no chops, because it does. the physics are used precisely the way i want to see physics used -- not for global behaviors, but in very narrow contexts used to create a strong cinematic sense. a lot of stupid-hard dev work went into those indivdual behaviors in killzone 2, and maybe? they played to the ps3's strengths. but a technical masterpiece? nah. there's nothing that couldn't be done on  the 360 given the same manpower and manhours, although they'd have a different set of limitations to fudge (stipple gradients on shadows, again, for example).

Which sort of brings up another issue, the one of actually seeing those results. It makes me increasingly annoyed with Microsoft's (admittedly understandable) apparent disinterest in feeding money and power pills to internal studios. I don't think we'll be seeing much of this from Sony i the future either, and I don't think it's a bleeding necessity, but it's nice to occasionally get to see what these systems can do.

By the way, since you brought up Far Cry 2, that game made for the perfect companion game to Killzone. KZ2 had a numbing effect after a while, and an hour of playing Jeep-having safari sniper in ridiculously open ended Far Cry 2 was the perfect cure. And then going back to KZ2 made me appreciate the quality of the close quarter combat of KZ2.

[Van Cruncheon]

killzone 2 will be an interesting artifact of the time, for sure: a huge amount of money and resources poured into what is ultimately a flawed and unmemorable by-the-numbers fps title that will only be remembered by the system warriors (remember outriggers on the dreamcast? OMG ITS 60 FPS FROM SEGA~ PS2 D0MED) -- it's an extravagance that is a neat blip on a history of game development, but will probably never be an approach used in the future. i just wish they'd spent all that money and brainpower and time on a more ambitious game!

[duckman2000]

I would have enjoyed something less ordinary, but come on. Flawed? The game has some of the best A.I. in the business, enemies actually react to getting shot (as opposed to falling over like a cod on dry land irrespective of how they got killed) and the gunplay is fuck awesome. Yes, even with laggy controls. I don't think it's going to be remembered for much beyond being the high (low?) watermark for warzone atmosphere, though, because it is just another shooter that does little more than being a shooter, and one without many memorable key moments. But it does what it does very well.

To be honest, I think Guerrilla was pretty heavily burdened with proving itself after their previous failures, which would maybe account for why it's as, er, focused as it is. I hope these guys aren't going to be forever shackled to the shooter genre.

[Van Cruncheon]

i think that's what YOU prioritize

[duckman2000]

True, but it doesn't actually fail at much. Admittedly, it also doesn't do much that it could fail at. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who wasn't dead set on having a good shooter, and nothing but a shooter.

[Van Cruncheon]

i've actually recommended it to folks looking for just that. it still doesn't make it anything other than a by-the-numbers affair, even despite its workmanlike presentation. to me, it was just cod4 in a new coat of paint, even if the flavor had nuances i didn't necessarily appreciate.

[Bebpo]

Any huge letdown or remembrance will be because of the crazy Sony fans making millions of .gifs and comments leading up to release.

The guys at Guerilla just wanted to make a cool fps with mechs and cool art and stuff that wasn't completely bogged down by the hardware like KZ1.  They got to do it and did it.  These aren't AAAAAA devs.   I don't think they wanted to make the best game ever.  They just wanted to make their own fps and now they'll get a chance to make another one with other cool stuff they enjoy and want to put in.

I don't really see KZ2 being more than a blip on the PS3 or current-gen timeline, but I don't really care about that.  shrug.

[TEEEPO]

uh

[Smooth Groove]

It's pretty sad that even Sony fans have given up on defending the technical superiority of the PS3. 

I almost miss the SH3 old man.   

[dark1x]

depth of field and motion blur were cool back when they were 3dfx demos

The type of motion blur and depth of field used in modern games is a completely different beast from what 3DFX was doing with the T-buffer.  Motion blur and depth of field have always impressed me as far back as the PS2.  It wasn't until the PS2 that we started seeing a lot of cool work with blur and depth of field.  Back in 2001, even the PC could not handle such effects in a game environment (it took another two years or so before depth of field or motion blur became used in PC titles).

The type of blur used today, however, is insanely demanding in comparison.  Trackmania Sunrise was actually one of the first games to attempt it and it destroyed performance.  I could run the game at a perfect 60 fps on my 6800GT back in the day, but enabling motion blur more than halved the framerate.  The quality of these effects have improved as well.  The type of blur used in Killzone 2 is nothing to scoff at.  It's true per-object, velocity based motion blur.  I think it's an amazing effect in all of the games that make use of it.  It's the best visual effect to come out of this generation, in my opinion.  It brings animation that much closer to emulating the look of pre-rendered CG.

take that against far cry 2, which, while having less of an impact in any given instance, had an amazing global lighting and lod model in a large open streaming world that really struck me as a technical accomplishment on consoles.

It should be noted that, unlike Gears of War 2, the shadows and lighting in Killzone 2 are actually completely dynamic.  If the scene lighting were adjusted, the shadows would change accordingly.

Honestly, I think GTAIV is a much more impressive looking open world game on consoles.  The level of detail is so much higher than Far Cry 2.  I've only ever played the PC version of Far Cry 2 as well (which I've heard looks better than the console versions).

I suppose the problem with Killzone 2 is simply that it goes for a more cohesive and subtle look to the point where the average person won't appreciate what they are doing with the visuals.  I think that's part of its success.  The technology was used to enhance its art direction rather than define it.  I also think the textures get a lot more shit than they deserve.  They look really good, for the most part.  If you analyze any of the surface textures in Gears 2, for instance, you'd find that they really are not any more detailed.  It's simply that using a 3rd person POV keeps the camera away from such surfaces.  Killzone 2 aims for texture variety rather than small, repeating patterns.  FEAR 2, for instance, displays sharper detail when textures are viewed up close, but they mostly rely on highly concentrated patterns (such as tiles or bricks) which makes this a piece of cake.

[WrikaWrek]

I don't know.

Sony 1st Party has 10x the tech that MS 1st Party has in comparison. And FFXIII will end up looking like dog shit on the 360 i bet.

Oh and GTAIV is still the most impressive game of the generation.

[dark1x]

And FFXIII will end up looking like dog shit on the 360 i bet.

so we all agree it'll be a perfect 100% port of the Ps3 version then? 

I'm surprised that anyone would think that it looks like dog shit.  Although they've obviously had some pretty serious issues getting to where they are, the realtime media has looked really nice.

Of course, I'm not going to hold my breath.  Star Ocean 4 looked great in the initial media as well, but the final product is pretty damn ugly (terrible shader aliasing, low resolution battles, ugly tiled textures, framerate issues, etc).  This gen has been full of uneven looking RPGs.

If FFXIII manages to look as nice as the realtime footage in the trailer suggests, it's pretty much the nicest looking RPG to come out of Japan this generation (as it should be, considering the budget and time invested).  It's obviously not a hardware thing, however.

[Bebpo]

Playing SO4, the main reason why it's ugly besides the art style and textures that accompany that (and besides the awful resolution in battle), is the ultra-low geometry used for the environment.  It's like SUB-Oblivion and towns/dungeons look closer to Morrowind than anything out of this generation which is pathetic.  I haven't played a lot of IU, but what I did play had far nicer and more current-gen looking environments even if the framerate didn't hold up.  SO4 is definitely the worst looking of the big name rpgs this gen so far.

the realtime media has looked really nice.

wowzers, the LAST person on earth i'd have thought that would think the realtime media looks nice, i would have put my money on, would have been you.

More dropped frames than an art gallery in Italy.

Of course, it's an RPG so it doesn't really matter, but the realtime media has looked insanely janky to date.

FFXIII looks fantastic outside the framerate (which isn't even horrible, just a little more choppy than wanted).  If they smooth out the framerate then it'll be one of the best looking games on the market.  Even better than RE5/Killzone2 or whatever.  If they don't, it'll still be the best looking jrpg.

[dark1x]

the realtime media has looked really nice.

wowzers, the LAST person on earth i'd have thought that would think the realtime media looks nice, i would have put my money on, would have been you.

More dropped frames than an art gallery in Italy.

Of course, it's an RPG so it doesn't really matter, but the realtime media has looked insanely janky to date.

Err, DC, Blue Dragon was one of the best looking RPGs this gen (one of the only good looking ones, if you ask me) and its framerate was MUCH worse than the FFXIII footage.  I agree that the framerate isn't great at this point, but I still think it LOOKS really nice.  I thought the realtime cutscenes were particularly nice looking.

If the framerate is that slow in the demo, however, I will be more disappointed.

Outside of the framerate, though, I don't see where you could level complaints (especially in comparison to the rest of the JRPGs out there).  I suppose the most consistent looking RPG would be Tales of Vesperia, but it has its own problems (poor animation during all narrative sequences, for instance).  The rest of the games in the genre as of late have been really uneven.  Blue Dragon was beautiful, but had a terrible framerate.  Lost Odyssey looked great sometimes, yet ugly as sin at other times while also having a poor framerate and loading issues.  Trusty Bell was fairly simplistic, but decent looking.  Star Ocean 4 was ugly as was Infinite Undiscovery (a huge disappointment considering what they did on PS2).  Last Remnant had loads of severe technical problems on 360 in addition to very simplistic visuals (low poly as hell).  It's been a sad generation for JRPG visuals, really.

[Bebpo]

Mistwalker has done a pretty good job bringing jrpgs to this generation graphically though.  I think it might have to do with their 25 million a game budget, but outside of tech problems (BD = framerate; LO = framerate/animation) their rpgs brought out a lot of what I wanted from current gen jrpg visuals.

I'm extremely disappointed the games did so poorly that the studio basically was forced to become another DS house and cancel Cry On and probably Blue Dragon 2/LO2.  If things had gone well I'm guessing we would've seen Cry On release last winter and Blue Dragon 2 would be coming this year.  ;_;  Instead we get a Blue Dragon MMO on DS

[duckman2000]

I haven't played it myself, but from what I've seen of it, Tales of Vesperia looked sort of pretty.

[Smooth Groove]

It wasn't until the PS2 that we started seeing a lot of cool work with blur and depth of field.  Back in 2001, even the PC could not handle such effects in a game environment (it took another two years or so before depth of field or motion blur became used in PC titles).

Not really.  The PC could already handle such effects in 2001 since the Geforce 3 was already released.  The Geforce 3 was at least equal to the Xbox's GPU which easily handled DOF and MB effects. 

The PS2 was never more powerful than top of the line PCs for two years.  It was just pure marketing hype that the PS2 would be more advanced than PCs for years. 

One reason why there weren't too many visually groundbreaking titles on the PC was because even some PC devs bought into the PS2 hype.  A couple of the big names, like Carmack, really did think for awhile that it was going to take PC hardware many years to catch up to the PS2. 

I suppose the problem with Killzone 2 is simply that it goes for a more cohesive and subtle look to the point where the average person won't appreciate what they are doing with the visuals.  I think that's part of its success.  The technology was used to enhance its art direction rather than define it.  I also think the textures get a lot more shit than they deserve.  They look really good, for the most part.  If you analyze any of the surface textures in Gears 2, for instance, you'd find that they really are not any more detailed.  It's simply that using a 3rd person POV keeps the camera away from such surfaces.  Killzone 2 aims for texture variety rather than small, repeating patterns.  FEAR 2, for instance, displays sharper detail when textures are viewed up close, but they mostly rely on highly concentrated patterns (such as tiles or bricks) which makes this a piece of cake.

Actually Drinky made a very strong argument that the average person is more likely to be impressed by Killzone 2 than someone knowledgeble in tech. 

[dark1x]

I haven't played it myself, but from what I've seen of it, Tales of Vesperia looked sort of pretty.

As I said, it's probably the most consistent looking JRPG this generation.  It's main issue lies in the fact that it animates poorly outside of battle.  They use the same type of animation you saw back in Tales of Symphonia and Abyss.  It feels out of place when the characters themselves look so incredible.  The image quality was perfect and it really had the look of an animated title, but the animation was very much last generation.

Not really.  The PC could already handle such effects in 2001 since the Geforce 3 was already released.  The Geforce 3 was at least equal to the Xbox's GPU which easily handled DOF and MB effects. 

That may be so, but no games used it (perhaps for the reason stated above).

[maxy]

I am surprised that this thread hasn't evolved into screnshoot war...rawr

[Bebpo]

It's not that Vesperia has bad animation outside of battle.  It's that it has no animation outside of battle, lol.  The characters just stand still while you advance the dialogue and occasionally move from one pose to another.  I don't think it's fair to fault the graphics for this though, as it's just an old-school design choice.

Vesperia looks nice and is very, very polished and consistent.  The only graphical downpoint is that it's just not particularly detailed and not a huge step up from what they were doing last-gen.  The art style is very, very simple but pleasing.

[dark1x]

Yeah, it pretty much refines last generation "Tales of" presentation.

That's why I appreciated what Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey attempted to do.

[cool breeze]

Infinite Undiscovery looked alright too outside of the frame rate.

[tiesto]

Infinite Undiscovery looked alright too outside of the frame rate.

Some of the later areas in IU, especially the final palace, looked fantastic. But that was more on the art rather than the tech side of things.