EA has a team with a soul? Dead Space team deserves praise?

[George]

At least their workers do. Dead Space games are great, I have the first one. They put some work on that engine, but they also work for EA. So ya, EA isn't the best company with consumers....  but at least the people working at Visceral (DS devs) are...

Check this out:

My friends dog knocked over her XBOX 360 and it ended up breaking the disc, she got upset and ranted about it on twitter. The Art Director to Dead Space 2 then happened to see her tweet, messaged her asking for her address and sent her this. A hand drawn picture of Isaac scolding her dog and a signed copy of DS2 signed by most of everyone in the studio.

Pics

http://oi53.tinypic.com/313ksj8.jpg

http://oi51.tinypic.com/r94n5c.jpg

Just thought I'd show that the dev teams a bunch of rather riveting ol' chaps and give them some love.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... plains_on/

I have also noticed companies 'advertising' games as users, I doubt this is EA marketing..

[cube_b3]

I like EA Dice.

As soon as I get my PS3 (fingers crossed for March) I'll start Mirrors Edge.

[SOUP]

I like EA Dice.

As soon as I get my PS3 (fingers crossed for March) I'll start Mirrors Edge.

It's a good one :D.

[Sega Uranus]

EA is the best publisher this year so far, and with stuff like Mass Effect 3 coming at the end of the year, I expect it to stay that way. Even then their digital department might be the best of this gen honestly.

I am not a fan of either Dead Space games, but I think they are very high quality products. You usually do not see stuff like this in the industry (only Bungie has done it a lot in the past few years), so this kind of thing always puts a smile on my face. Much respect.

[spoiler:3nd7kis5]Mirror's Edge is one of the most overrated games this generation.[/spoiler:3nd7kis5]

[George]

I agree with Mirror's Edge being overrrated. I own it and it could have been a $15 dollar title for PSN/XBLA tbh..

Anyway... They do put up high quality products if you ignore the super copy called Dante's Inferno.

They are quite behind true AAA titles though, like Uncharted and a few other games. They are at least better than Bungie when it comes to engines. Bungie is better at that online.

[Sega Uranus]

Dante's Inferno is a pretty shameless ripoff, but it is very similar quality to God of War.

I disagree entirely on what you said about Bungie though. Halo 3 and especially Halo Reach both run phenomenally and make excellent work of the Xbox 360. Some of the facial models in 3 are kind of bad and some of the textures in both can look dull, but the games always run perfectly and remain smooth throughout. I know you do not play Xbox 360 much, but I think you would be impressed if you saw what they do with your Bungie.net profiles especially, with how they track basically every detail. The way they balance gameplay mechanics and how well their art works in their games is also extremely impressive I think.

Halo 2 had bad graphics I think, but it also ran well even with 16 people in the same room. Oni is their only other game I can think of that does not look as good as it could be, that could be forgiven with how hard the PlayStation 2 hardware was to use at the time.

[George]

Yeah they ran fine, but they also didn't push the 360 at all. Sub HD games, Reach was pitted against Resistance 2, which wasn't even that great looking of an exclusive and mostly ran better.

http://www.lensoftruth.com/?p=25645

I do credit Bungie for putting so much work and effort to their online play. That is where they really shine, not making engines, but making playing the game online fun.

[CrazyT]

Battlefield bad company 2 >call of duty

[Sega Uranus]

Yeah they ran fine, but they also didn't push the 360 at all.

Incorrect. Just because the games have some blocky models here and there sometimes does not mean much. There are more to games running than textures and polygon count.

Sub HD games

That is your reasoning for saying they do not push the hardware?

There is no "True" high definition. It has and will continue to change every few years. The original Genesis model claims it is high definition, some games even say that on their box. I have seen NES games do it too.

What about God of War III? It runs in 720p. It literally might be graphically the best game of all time but it runs in "Sub HD". Same with Little Big Planet, inFamous, Heavy Rain and many others deemed HD experiences. I can also point out titles like the Sly Collection actually only run in 420p, but they plaster the word high definition all over that.

Reach was pitted against Resistance 2, which wasn't even that great looking of an exclusive and mostly ran better.

I do not see why they were put against one another. Besides shooting things in the first person, the two are very different overall, it is like comparing Shinobi's gameplay to Mario. Both are platformers where you can shoot things, but that is pretty much where it ends.

The sections they put against one another are also fairly stupid. The first few scenes of Reach are designed to be small, the characters are unaware with what is about to happen. With Resistance 2, it is obvious the world is ending right as it starts, or whatever is going on in that story.

I do credit Bungie for putting so much work and effort to their online play. That is where they really shine, not making engines, but making playing the game online fun.

Besides ODST, they have made a new engine for every game they have made since like... Myth II... Maybe even before that...

They make a new game every two or so years. Not many developers are capable enough of making their own engine anymore, let alone with the amount of staff members they used to have (during Halo 3, they were much smaller than you would expect). The fact they can get these kind of games out and running so well, so fast is pretty damn impressive I would say. Halo Reach, for example has never had a patch and continues to run at 100% after months and billions of hours between all of the players. If there were any real issues with their games' engines I assume those people would be aware of it before you are.

[George]

So basically "Not pushing hardware doesn't mean they didn't push the hardware"

Are you saying that 360 is being pushed by blocky humans? Makes no sense.

[Sega Uranus]

So basically "Not pushing hardware doesn't mean they didn't push the hardware"

Are you saying that 360 is being pushed by blocky humans? Makes no sense.

The only part of them that is blocky are their faces, at least in Halo 3, Reach's faces are fine. Great for a feature not even used that much.

You are basically making mountains out of molehills. I know I could point you out to some bad textures in something like Forge World, but the fact that even just half that area works so well so easily is one of the most impressive things I have seen this gen. The campaign has tons of areas far away from where you are even supposed to visit that have extremely impressive amounts of detail that is comparable to Shenmue in some cases.

But I guess less than 10% of the characters faces that do not even appear in the game that much are a really big deal and means the engine sucks.

[George]

Not really. I disagree with everything you said. Graphically Reach and 3 are inferior to something like Gears, which really defined the 360 as a graphical powerhouse.

[Sega Uranus]

On the topic of Gears, it looks good in screenshots and usually plays fine, but many of the mechanics are all over the place, Halo 3 and Reach are solid throughout, in everything from frames per second to controls. With Gears it is questionable, to say the least.

You are confusing lame character models to game engines, on how they actually run and work (this includes online that you mentioned). There is nothing to agree or disagree on.

Back to EA. Look at the models of the side characters in the Fight Night games. Some look terrible honestly, but the games overall are very impressive. I think the newest one is the first game to ever have "Eye jiggle" physics even, pretty cool.

[George]

I was talking about game engines. You are confusing controls with game engines I think. LOL The lighting, textures are superior in Gears. Halo games offered nothing impressive sadly, that is why they have high framerate. Can't even display in 720p.

[Sega Uranus]

Oh, of course! Game engines! What was I thinking? Game engines only effect the look of their games, not how they run or play, stupid me!

Look at it this way. Look at the word ENGINE. What does that mean? Do you know what an engine in a car is for? The overall performance of the vehicle, not what it looks like on the outside!

Either you worded it wrong or did not know what you meant. In the cases of Halo 3 and Reach's graphics, those are the models they made for the games, which is literally not the same thing as if they made a graphical engine that upkeeps the look of the game. Who knows if they doubled the polygons for each model if it would still work good? Certainly not you.

I was talking about the game engines, not the graphical engines. Even in that case I would say the Halo games "Run better" than stuff like Gears.

IMHO Halo Reach is one of the most technical FPSs on consoles so far. The textures, the amount of polygons on the weapons and character models, the lighting, amount of colors, and advanced AI, the number of AI on screen are extremely impressive. Something like Killzone 2 looks great I think, but it uses many in-game filters and similar color schemes throughout to hide any jagged edges you could find.

Halo 3 was native 1152 X 640, with two framebuffers, but Reach is in 1152 X 720. Halo 3 had bad aliasing, but that is still kind of impressive for a somewhat smaller developer than most big IPs are known for. Halo Reach runs in 720p fine. The amount of pixels you are complaining about is incredibly strange. So what if it does not have that somewhat cool looking cave scene from Gears 2? The game is one of the best from last year, in every regard.