Sat, May 31, 2008 | 22:03 BST
Alone in the Dark delayed on PS3 because “it’s not performing as well”
Phil Harrison refused to talk about the PS3 version of Alone in the Dark in London last week, but that didn’t stop producer Nour Polloni explaining why the SKU was arriving well after the 360 game. In a nutshell, the frame-rate’s borked.
“There’s no firm date yet but what we can say is that it’s coming out this year,” Polloni told Videogamer.com. “In terms of why it’s coming out later, we have the full game running on PS3 and all the features, no problem. The thing is it’s not performing as well on PS3 as we hope it is in terms of frame-rate and all that. We didn’t want it to come out and have less of an experience for the PS3 gamer. We wanted to tweak that up and make sure they get the best experience on PS3 as much as possible.”
Polloni also said that both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Alone in the Dark will contain the same content, but added that PS3 owners won’t be disappointed when they finally get the horror game.
“It will be really worth it,” she said. “It’s something that we didn’t want to deceive the players. That’s why we preferred waiting. And I know it’s tough but we want them to wait to be able to get that same experience.”
There’s a full interview with Polloni here.
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Posted in: Action, Atari, Horror, PS3
Tags: Alone in the Dark, Nour Polloni
18 comments
#1
Blerk
30/05/08, 2:56 pm
Heh – I linked this earlier on! Did you miss it?
#2
Psychotext
30/05/08, 2:56 pm
It would have utterly sucked for Harrison to have had to give that info out.
#3
McLovin85
30/05/08, 2:57 pm
All i have to say to that is…ffs
#4
morriss
30/05/08, 3:00 pm
surprise surprise
Incidentally, I just bought BGaE for the PS2. I had it on PC but 15″ screen vs. 37″ upscaled plasma = no contest really.
#5
Blerk
30/05/08, 3:00 pm
He didn’t have to say exactly that though, did he? He could’ve just said “it’s not quite as ready” or something like that. But instead he just blanked the question. I’m sure there was more to that than meets the eye.
#6
Robo_1
30/05/08, 3:10 pm
Delays are never fun, but fair play to the developer for holding out until they can deliver a top quality PS3 game. Other firms wouldn’t bother, and just bring out a crippled PS3 version.
#7
patlike
30/05/08, 3:10 pm
I did miss it, Blerk. I’ve lost my edge. Like Cougar in Top Gun.
#8
Blerk
30/05/08, 3:20 pm
lol! I was going to mail it to you but I’ve been getting worried you might think I was stalking you.
Here’s a nice quip from Kaz Hirai about exclusives, while we’re talking about Phil. Sort of.
http://tinyurl.com/3lnynt
#9
soong
30/05/08, 3:25 pm
@morriss:
“Incidentally, I just bought BGaE for the PS2. I had it on PC but 15″ screen vs. 37″ upscaled plasma = no contest really.”
Uhm that doesn’t make sense. Surely simply connecting your PC to your plasma and using xpadder is far far better than upscaling a technically vastly inferior PS2 game?
#10
morriss
30/05/08, 3:28 pm
Yeah, but my PC and TV and in separate areas of the house.
#11
ecu
30/05/08, 3:29 pm
I hope Sony learn from this. The PS2 was supposedly really hard to develop for, but I don’t remember there being that many problems. PS3 is clearly just too much for most developers in a time when the industry should be doing all it can to make things easier (and therefore cheaper) for game developers.
#12
Psychotext
30/05/08, 3:33 pm
You didn’t really hear much about the PS2 being hard to develop for because the developers were too busy counting their money. =)
#13
ecu
30/05/08, 3:37 pm
Nah, that wasn’t it. I read a lot of stuff about people saying it was a bitch to develop for, but as far as I can remember, there weren’t many games with performance issues. Maybe things just weren’t scrutinised as much back then. Sony really got their priorities massively wrong with the PS3.
#14
Blerk
30/05/08, 3:45 pm
There weren’t any performance issues because people were developing FOR the PS2. They weren’t developing for something else with a radically different architecture first and then trying to shoe-horn it into Sony’s version like they are now.
#15
Truk
30/05/08, 4:03 pm
That’s starting to change though. It’s easier to target the PS3 and convert to the 360.
Like most of Sony’s machines, the PS2 had a somewhat strange architecture that took a while to get used to, but it really shone when people stopped trying to program it like they wanted to and got on with programming it like it needed to be. Same will happen for PS3. Unfortunately, the combination of the PS3 being a wholely different way of coding means that most people are still struggling.
#16
Psychotext
30/05/08, 4:25 pm
Truk: That was Sony PR mostly though. They came out and said that Burnout Paradise was the first in a long line of titles to be developed on the PS3 first… then there were no other titles.
The order still seems to be PC first then port to the 360 and PS3.
#17
Truk
30/05/08, 4:40 pm
I’m talking about what I get told by developers working on such things. I’m purely Wii and DS myself, but I know enough people working cross-platform to have a good idea what’s going on.
It really makes more sense to do it that way.
#18
mortiferus
30/05/08, 9:45 pm
Psychotext you are absolutely right. 360 is the lead platform and that wont change unless something dramatic happens.
MS did their homework with the 360 API’s and overall platform spec. Sony well…. while I love the fact that PS3 uses linux and OpenGL ES, there just quite too many a number of hurdles to deal with. Granted most of these can be reduced or be dealt with with sufficient development time.
Im glad Atari is doing the right thing in delaying AITD instead of releasing a sub part game.