Analysis: Sony's high-stakes, high-definition gamble on PlayStation 3
Los Angeles (CA) - It had all the makings of a slick Hollywood production. First of all, it was set at Stage 15 of Sony Pictures Studios - the old MGM Studios, at the site of the first motion picture studio in America. It had some of its native industry's hottest acts, including Sony Computer Entertainment President Kaz Hirai, and Electronic Arts CEO Larry Probst. And, like quite a few Hollywood productions these days, it had an unproven star that left some in the audience wondering, is the performance we just saw truly worth the price of admission? Sony's PlayStation 3, with its 1920 x 1080 high resolution, its Dolby surround sound, its ace-in-the-hole 4D controller...and its $499 entry-level price tag - the complete package - finally made its long-awaited sneak preview. For the first time, many in the general technology media were able to actually play the thing.
The front entrance of Sony Pictures Studios, the site of Monday afternoon's PlayStation 3 press gala.
It is, for all intents and purposes, the first consumer-ready, high-definition gaming console. On 17 November in the US, $499 will buy you an STI Core processor-based system with a 20 Gb hard disk drive and Blu-ray disc player; $599 gets you the version with a 60 Gb drive. The HDD is primarily for the storage of downloadable content that Hirai confirmed today will be provided by Sony's gaming network (thus far unnamed) for zero cost to the gamer.
The high quality mandate for high-definition
The first sample of content which Sony chose to spotlight - the company's "test pattern" for standards of quality - was a playable demo of Polyphony Digital's upcoming Gran Turismo HD, which lead developer Kazunori Yamauchi confirmed to TG Daily was composed from assets originally composed for Gran Turismo 4 for the PS2, in about three weeks' time.
At first glance, the quality of what you see of Gran Turismo HD will catch you off-guard if you're not expecting it. The crisply rendered vehicles make such subtle shuttering motions in the midst of the terrain, bending the light that bounces off the polished enamel and the windshields ever so slightly, letting you know that if it's not ray tracing that's going on here, it's something equally convincing. Clean, polished, rendered landscapes rush toward you at sixty frames per second: brick buildings, iridescent trees, wire-mesh fences, and in the rally races, rendered fans that stand beside the road and cheer you on. The aerial view of the Grand Canyon rally race course is so powerfully crafted, so full of color and life, that your attention wanders from the racetrack, and for a minute there you're not driving but flying.
A street race course from the demonstration version of Gran Turismo HD from Polyphony Digital. The crispness of the motion alone is enough to give onlookers a rush.
For those among the media seeing Gran Turismo HD for the first time, the sale was made within the first 20 seconds. The thought of actually owning something capable of rendering something that complex, that quickly, is enormously enticing, especially to those of us who have also served as programmers.
It is after the first four minutes of this breath-stealing spectacle that reality, confound it all, rears its crisply-rendered head, and the enormity of the task before the craftspeople at Polyphony presents itself dauntingly. As of yet, the cars don't dent or smudge or crack when they whack each other, or when they collide with a inertia-defiant whack against the impervious wire mesh fences or tire stacks or plastic nets. Objects in the far distance are just as crisply rendered from afar as they are close-up, perhaps partly to avoid masking the high-definition, and partly to avoid obscuring what may yet become this art form's principal subsidy: in-game advertising, in this case splashed against the roadside barriers.
An aerial scene from the Gran Turismo HD demo, showing the awful truth about race fans these days.
Some of the rally course spectators are animated, 3D-rendered objects, waving their fists gloriously. Others, at a further distance, are convenient 2D cutouts, the true identity of which is revealed in the aerial shots, like the ruse townspeople from Blazing Saddles. Furthermore, there is as of yet no dust, no smoke, no exhaust, no grit, no smudges against the Turtle Waxed paintjobs. Yamauchi's translator told me I was the first to notice; I doubt that. I imagine I was the only one lacking the good manners to refrain from mentioning it.
When I wrote about the release of Bruce Artwick's Flight Simulator II for the Atari 800 over two decades ago, I pointed out that the Statue of Liberty, for the sake of convenience, was a two-dimensional white apparition, that you could easily fly your plane clean through. That fact in and of itself, I argued, should not detract from the game as a work of art. If this were just as fair a society today, I would make the same argument about Gran Turismo HD. But playing this game, for the PS3's customers, will be the payoff for having made a colossal investment in electronic entertainment. In this day and age, they will expect smoke and dust and whirlwinds and dust-devils, and probably the occasional tumbleweed - and that's just for the Detroit Grand Prix course.
When Sony and others made the choice to move to high-definition gaming, they chose to fine-tune the granularity of the interactive experience. Pixels can't fudge for facts any more; HDTV obliterates the distinction between realistic and real.
Appealing to the sports fan's critical eye
The challenge for the EA Sports designers can only be more daunting, as 1080 lines of resolution expose every little unseen vertex in an athlete's elbow or cheekbone. We are emerging from the era in which "sprites," as Amiga designer Jay Miner referred to them, can represent the player on the battlefield or the basketball court. It isn't that players' tastes have necessarily changed or evolved, because in the PlayStation Portable realm, where the screen is smaller and the resolution lower, the evolution of gaming rests comfortably at about the level of the PS one. It is that, in high definition, blocky, clunky athletes look bad, and gamers might end up preferring the PS2 to the PS3 for that reason alone.
An astounding live rendering of the face and body posture of Tiger Woods, adapting to inputs from an onstage EA Sports developer - in lieu of inputs from the actual game, PGA Golf 2007, which is still in development.
To that end, the test pattern for Tiger Woods' PGA Golf 2007, demonstrated by EA's Larry Probst, shows how enormously far designers have come. Their objective was not just to capture Tiger's body movements, muscle tone, and wardrobe, but also his character and personality. To accomplish this, EA literally digitized Tiger's real face, going through the motions of watching a ball sink into an eagle hole and a sand trap.
It is, to date, perhaps the most convincing game console digitization of a living, real human being that I've ever witnessed, albeit not yet in a playable game. Tiger's eyes follow the ball in the air, he winces at the sunlight, grimaces a bit, urges on the ball with his mind, and then cheers as it follows his whim. For perhaps the first time ever, his teeth...are teeth - rendered objects, rather than a bitmapped pattern laid over an unseen denture set. If there is any room for improvement, it's in his eyes - and that's the tricky part. No one yet has managed to make a perfect rendition of human eyes - not even for the Final Fantasy theatrical film. There's something magnificent about eyes that motion artists don't yet know how to capture, but this test demonstrates how hard they're trying.
Perhaps you've already hit upon an underlying problem in all of this: EA can make basketball and golf athletes look more and more like people, but have they actually improved the underlying game?
