Insomniac explains why Gears looks better than Resistance
And calls Wii a "fad".
Insomniac Games has responded to complaints that its PlayStation 3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man doesn't look as good as Gears of War, the Xbox 360's current poster-child.
"Sometimes people ask us, 'If Resistance takes 14 gigabytes, why doesn't it look better than Gears?'" Brian Hastings, Insomniac's chief creative officer, wrote on the developer's official website (sign-up required). "Well, for one, Resistance didn't support texture streaming, so we had to make choices about where we spent our high-res textures."
"Resistance also had 30 single-player chapters, six multiplayer maps, uncompressed audio streaming, and high-definition mpegs. That all added up to a lot of space on the disc.
"Starting with Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction we are supporting texture streaming, which will make the worlds look even better, and will also consume even more space on disc."
Hastings made the comments as part of a piece called "10 Reasons Why PS3 Will Win This Console Generation", and had been arguing that the Blu-ray disc's 50GB capacity would give it the edge over consoles still reliant on DVD9.
"Gears of War is a beautiful game and shows off the highest resolution textures of anything yet released, partly because of the Unreal Engine's ability to stream textures," he wrote.
"This means that you can have much higher resolution textures than you could normally fit in your 512 MB of RAM. It also means that you’re going to chew up more disc space for each level.
"With streamed textures, streamed geometry and streamed audio, even with compression, you can quickly approach 1GB of data per level. That inherently limits you to a maximum of about 7 levels, and that’s without multiplayer levels or mpeg cut-scenes."
Other points in his top ten included Home and LittleBigPlanet, which he believes are going to be huge, Sony's free online service and free use of dedicated servers, the early perceived strength of Blu-ray films, HDMI from day one (as you'll have read this morning, Microsoft plans to fight back on that front), a hard disk as standard, an advantages in CPU and depth of games. Hastings also points out that the PS2 will continue to sell strongly, and argues that the Wii is a "fad" that will die out in a year or so.