IGN: The Wii bowed out of the graphical race, whereas the Xbox 360 and PS3 have roughly comparable power. Are the difference in platform capabilities forcing your team to lean towards strictly next-gen style games?
Morgan Jaffit: If we were to do a Wii title, we would want to take absolute advantage of the Wii's abilities. Likewise, if we were to do an Xbox 360 title then we would want to make it as strong graphically as a 360 title can be. But we'd also want to make it something that could easily be ported to the PS3, and vice versa. In our perspective those are very similarly linked SKUs. Particularly when you're looking at a game with a 15 million dollar budget, we would want to be able to make it work on both.
If you look at the on-paper specs, the PS3 doesn't have this mythical, untapped reservoir of power. There's been a lot of talk about that, but it doesn't seem to be there. I have yet to see the evidence of this. It's always hard, a generation out - I'm not suggesting it won't happen, though.
I think it's interesting, in this age of high definition, that a TV's standard definition is 640 x 480 - and it looks real. So what are we doing wrong? The answer is very complex and goes into a bunch of things; but there's no theoretical reason why we shouldn't be making realistic games in 640 x 480.
IGN: Has improved graphics technology and HD resolutions aided the quality of the gameplay in current games?
John Passfield: If we can go back to 'what can we do with AI?', and having richer characters and ways of interacting, then I think the Wii offers new ways of moving forward. I think it's jarring going back to Gears of War from Zelda: Twilight Princess, but once you're into it, you forget. People play mobile phone games - and the graphics on those aren't particularly good. But they accept it because they know the limitations of the medium. And that's the thing with the Wii - people might learn to accept it despite the graphics and because of the gameplay. That's when the Wii will find greatest success.
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/756/756202p1.htmlIGN: In terms of game development, what is the difference between artistry and good graphics? Is there one?
Morgan Jaffit: Simple things work well. Strong art direction is absolutely key. Gears does look fantastic, but it also has really strong art direction - if it didn't have that strong art direction, it wouldn't be garnering the attention that it has. Look at a title like Resistance: Fall of Man on PS3 - it doesn't have particularly strong art direction, and hasn't really made the same impact. From a technical perspective, it's very comparable to Gears of War. So why isn't it garnering the same attention? It comes down to the art direction. It looks like everything else.
From a design perspective, I like a smooth framerate. The link between player and the game is the most important thing. So disrupting that by chopping the framerate is something that I try to avoid. There isn't an answer that's right for every game. It's really important to select the priority for the game. For a game like Shadow of the Colossus, it had amazing, amazing art direction, but sometimes the framerate would stutter. That was their call. It wasn't doing particularly incredible things with the hardware, but the art direction was there.
