You know what, screw this I'm not stooping down to your guys level, Gammy i'm sorry about being a jerk and telling you guys Gears of War sucks, I don't care. Make fun of me for liking Resistance but you know what I hope it makes you guys feel superior. Screw that I'm interested in the game so what, why can't you guys except that. I'm excepting that you like Gears of War over Resistance. Its stupid to compare games because they are diffrent and have so many diffrent variables that you need to look past it all.
I want to appologize to everyone who I hurt saying that Gears of War sucks, I hope its a game that can reach all of your highest expectations.
Here is a cool Ted Price blog, its a good read.
Update on Resistance: Fall of Man, Blu-Ray, and more
Hi everyone,
Ted Price here from Insomniac Games. We’re joining the party a little late with this blog, but as a result we’ve got lots to share when it comes to Resistance: Fall of Man. As I hope most people know by now, Resistance is a brand new first person shooter launching with the PS3 in a couple of very short months. While there’s lots of information making its way to the web, I and others from Insomniac are hoping to use this blog to tell you more about the game and its development as we finish it up.
Where we are with Resistance: Fall of Man
So where are we right now? We’re currently fixing bugs, testing the game and putting in lots of polish. Every day it seems like another totally sweet effect goes in or the lighting improves for a level or we tweak the details to make the game look and run even better. Everyone is working extremely hard to put in all of the “gravy” we’ve planned. As we near the end, we’re also testing the bejesus out of the game – for single player, co-op and multiplayer. We’re continuing to tune difficulty and add some cool unlockables.
For all of you on the forums:
Rather than give you a list of game features, I’d like to spend our first blog answering some questions and directly addressing topics that have been coming up on the IGN forums. Last week, two threads showed up analyzing the interview that a bunch of us did for IGN. Watching these threads grow has been pretty gratifying for us here at Insomniac. Obviously people are very interested in Resistance – some love it so far, some seem a bit skeptical. But we all knew we’d be under the microscope as one of the most visible games on the PS3 and it’s cool to see so many raging debates.
Within those threads from last week the two topics most heavily debated are the result of my somewhat ill thought-out answer to a pretty open-ended question during the IGN interview.
Could Resistance have been created on…uh, Gameboy?
The first topic is whether or not I was blowing smoke when I said “It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance on any other platform. What I should have said was, “It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance as designed on any other platform.” You make your design choices based on what you have available and the PS3 and Xbox360 are very different machines with different strengths. We designed Resistance with the PS3’s strengths in mind. In several other interviews and presentations I’ve elaborated on what we think those strengths are and why we think the machine is pretty damn amazing.
But as many of the IGN posters have correctly pointed out, with enough redesign and enough time almost any game could be made to run on any platform. This has been proved in the past and is being proved right now by other franchises purportedly being created for PS3, PC and Xbox360 simultaneously. (And I’ll bet there are PSP and DS versions in the works for plenty of those games as well.) Certainly there will be differences between all of those SKUs – differences that will be analyzed as thoroughly as they were for SKUs on previous generations of hardware.
Just for fun, I’ll elaborate a bit more on the initial choice we made. Even though we as a company haven’t released a game on a non-Sony platform, there are plenty of people at Insomniac who have. So when it came to making a choice between PS3 and Xbox360, we didn’t go in blind. Certainly our experience working with Sony on PS1 and PS2 helped, but being independent we had to do what we thought was best for our games. And we had to choose one system because our current philosophy is to create technology specialized for one platform - enabling us to get the most out of it. We chose the PS3 because we believe that it has the best long-term potential of any next gen platform. The amount of raw processing power that it offers and the fact that we can get “down to the metal” on the platform fits our programming style. We like the fact that right out of the box, using the SPUs allows you to do some incredible things. But what we like even better is that as we refine our technology – technology we’ve designed specifically for the types of games we make, we’ll be able to see bigger and bigger wins using the Cell.
The question at the heart of the debate is whether or not the PS3 is more “powerful” than the Xbox360 and there is no way I will get sucked into that one. Sure, I and others here at Insomniac have our own opinions (and are admittedly biased) but no matter what I say and no matter what people see at launch, the debate will continue long after the PS3 has been released. And since different games focus on different things it may be very hard to make true "apples to apples" comparisons. To all of us at Insomniac the most important question has always been, “is the game fun?”
The 20Gb debate
The second topic that has been surfacing a lot lately is our support of Blu-ray as a medium. Yes it is true - we are currently using more than 20 gigs. And yes, we do compress our level data. The fact that we store so much on disc is actually not that surprising when you look at the numbers. Consider that even with compression, each of our “levels” (or loaded areas) has more than 300 megs of unique data. And keep in mind that we’re also streaming data during level playthroughs. It doesn't take too much level data before you've gone past what can be stored on a dual-layer DVD. And between single player and multiplayer we have a lot of level data (over 40 different large loaded areas) – yes, more than will fit on a dual layer DVD.
We also include a lot of data in the form of game movies in both HD and PAL formats, high quality audio streams for all supported languages and some of those Insomniac “extras” that our fans have come to expect.
I realize that some people will still be skeptical unless we provide an actual layout of the disc. But for now I wanted to give you some better info.
More answers
And finally, two bonus answers to other questions that always seem to come up:
Question:
Aren’t you guys owned by Sony?
Answer:
We’re 100% independent though we’ve been working directly or indirectly with Sony for over 10 years now. A huge amount of trust exists between the two companies, which I believe is unique in this industry. Sure, we could work on the Xbox360. Sure we could work with EA or Microsoft. But even though we’ve had those opportunities, we’ve stuck with Sony (and they’ve stuck with us). Not trying to sound like a fanboy here but the folks we work with at Sony are all honest, extremely hardworking, fair, loyal and creative. And they really know games. It’s been a great partnership.
Question:
Didn’t Ratchet & Clank use Naughty Dog’s engine?
Answer:
When we were moving from the PS1 to the PS2, Jason Rubin from Naughty Dog called me up and said “Hey, do you want to take a look at what we’re doing?” It was a completely selfless gesture since they had already gotten a strong start on developing technology for Jak & Daxter. But we’ve been friends for a long time and our companies had always been very close since we used to work side by side on the lot at Universal Studios.
So Al Hastings (our CTO) and I went over to Naughty Dog and checked out their stuff. It was really impressive. We ended up bringing back code for a couple of their core background object renderers and incorporating it into our own engine (which was comprised of over 10 different renderers).
During development of our next game (Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando) we gave them code for our occlusion system. After Going Commando, I don’t remember sharing code between the companies for the PS2 though we certainly shared ideas and compared notes on future designs. And, of course, our respective engines diverged pretty significantly.
Wrapping up
Some final words: We at Insomniac pay close attention to what everyone is saying on forums (thanks for the great post, powerkevin9). And while it’s occasionally hard to listen to the haters, we appreciate a healthy argument as much as anyone else. We definitely love the feedback – positive or negative. At this point we’re pretty darn stoked about the game and we’re doing our best to make sure that when Resistance hits the shelves it rocks!
Next time, more about the game…
Ted