More Resistance in April, episodic content on the menu
by James Ransom-Wiley 
{ Feb 26th 2007 at 9:25PM }
Fast-forwarding through another Phil Harrison interview, we smack into some meaningful chatter. When pressed about future content for Resistance, Harrison busts out a tantalizing reply: "we have some really, really cool things that will be extending the story, extending the locations, some brand new content, starting in April. So if that works well and is well-received by the audience, then that will keep the engagement with game going between now and should there be a sequel at some point in the future." (For the record, Insomniac's Ted Price has already confirmed the obvious; Resistance is a franchise, with a sequel likely already in early development stages.)What Harrison seems to suggest though, is some degree of episodic content bridging the first game and apparent sequel. Adding multiplayer maps and modes is the tired standard, but actually building upon the single-player narrative with downloadable content would represent a significant step forward for PlayStation Network -- and keep Resistance holding down the console that's sure to let loose sooner or later.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
unlucky 360 user @ Feb 26th 2007 9:34PM
hmm. im so close to buying a PS3... i need just a little more.
Ironhide @ Feb 26th 2007 9:30PM
What? 25gs didn't hold enough levels to begin with? Oh BluRay... I am fraught with dispair over your shortcomings!
Patrick M. @ Feb 26th 2007 9:43PM
This is pretty slick. Its nice to see Insomniac go a different route and not just release the standard multiplayer pack and actually try to give new life to the single player experience.
luckyluc @ Feb 26th 2007 9:54PM
So, HL2? Not that I'm complaining...
gilbert @ Feb 26th 2007 9:57PM
@1
they actually didnt use the whole disc, just about 16 gigs worth from what was told.
Diman @ Feb 26th 2007 10:02PM
It will be great if they add vehicles into MP maps, these will complete the game for me.
REUYL @ Feb 26th 2007 10:07PM
Resistance (n) the act or power of resisting, opposing, or withstanding.
This word describes sales of the PS3.
smarterray @ Feb 26th 2007 10:14PM
um, how about some 1080i support instead...
Joe @ Feb 26th 2007 11:02PM
Exrta levels for the game sound good to me. That is a lot better then extra multi player levels.
cheese @ Feb 26th 2007 10:43PM
I just got a promotional packet for Resistance, w/ a poster and stuff, so I'm not surprised to hear this news.
Gansly @ Feb 26th 2007 11:19PM
Gotta laugh at #1. Good news for Sony left unspun? Never!
Gansly @ Feb 26th 2007 11:19PM
Gotta laugh at #1. Good news for Sony left unspun? Never!
Coughee @ Feb 26th 2007 11:24PM
Gotta laugh at #13 because he wouldn't know sarcasm if it bit him in the ass and he can't figure out how to POST A MESSAGE ONLY ONCE!!!.
ShinobiFist @ Feb 27th 2007 12:58AM
Apparently, #1 didn't play the game. Do you realize how huge this game is? This is no FPS you beat on one sitting. The game is pretty, if not; the longest FPS I played in recent memory(it might be the only one). And what's wrong with extra content? Good for them, now just bring out a Update for Virtua Fighter 5 SEGA, b/c that A.I. is freaking weak.
smik @ Feb 27th 2007 1:45AM
Why is the size of the game such a surprise. Gears had an extremely short 5-hour campaign and filled up 9GB, While Resistance with a 10-hour campaign used 18GB.
Ironhide @ Feb 27th 2007 2:00AM
@#13 - Well duh. It ain't bad news unless it's got Sony in the title.
@#18 - Truthfully I haven't played it. However, a game like that does not require 18g of space on a dsic. There are far better ways of creating game content than to bloat it with sloppy programming and ultra high res models.
I can create a polygonal model, in 5,000 polygons that looks like it should be made out of 50,000 polygons, and you the gamer will never notice it. I can compress textures or utilize non-reducing texture compression techniques to reduce the size of the individual textures. I can also compress sound effects and let the processor handle sound placement instead of recording said sound effects in true surround sound. Dialogue can likewise be compressed by stripping it of stereo recording.
Both 360 and ps3 are very capable of this. BluRay is simply not required unless you feel the need to bloat up discs.
As a noteworthy point, SNK was actually encouraging programmers to be sloppy, using as much space as possible to utilize a larger and larger sized cartridge. That's why the cart sizes kept rising. This is the same sort of thing that's being encouraged.
Parasyte Evil @ Feb 27th 2007 3:47AM
God damnit Sony! I need a price drop! There's something about Resistance that I can't put my finger on. The narrative could've been better, Hale should've talked more, and surface detail could've been better in the early levels (blurry texture are so 1999) but I loved every second of the game. I was surprised at Insomniac's ability to keep the energy level so high for such a long game (compared to other FPSes) and environments so interesting and unique. Until Sony comes out with a white PS3 (which they promised) and drops the price to $499CDN I'll continue to play on my friends PS3.
Aex @ Feb 27th 2007 3:59AM
@Ironhide
We get it, you don't feel Blu-ray is/maybe/willeverbe necessary. It is a moot point now. BD is in the ps3. That isn't going to change. People like you will always be skeptical at how the size of the BD is used and whether or not it "justifies" its usage, but will never accept any answers given to their questions. If you don't want it, don't buy it, just quit your god damned bitching over something that probably will never affect you in a negative way, seeing how I highly doubt you will or would have ever purchased a PS3.
We always hear, "Well I could have done it smaller" or "The executable is only 8gig" or "They didn't HAVE to prerender" or "There is no need to use such high quality objects/textures/sounds" or "If they hadn't included all this content". Usually to those one can give a returning statement such as "The Mona Lisa could have been painted on a smaller canvas" to provide evidence at how useless those statements turn out to be in the end. You will never be happy with any answer given, because what cannot be included due to size or difference between something that has never happened are not things you can measure accurately. Oh, let's not forget the “sloppy” programming part of it. Because it always makes sense that programmers who have worked their entire careers learning to code efficiently will just throw ALL that out the window because they were given a larger medium. Blu-ray, however non-justified you may feel it is, gives developers more space to either include more content, include higher resolution textures, include higher resolution sound, include fmvs, sloppify their programming or just NOT use, if they feel so inclined.
No matter what games come out for the PS3 and no matter how much of the BD is used up, people like you will never feel it is justified in it's use, until a larger space medium becomes the standard, and when that happens we will see you flipflop and start questioning the justification of the next larger medium the same way you probably questioned the justification of the change from Floppy -> CD -> DVD -> HD.
I don't own a PS3 and will probably not purchase one until the price is a little more reasonable for me and sure, I would be more inclined to buy one sooner had the blu-ray not been included and the price $100-200 cheaper, but that does not mean that the included blu-ray was or was not a mistake or that it needs to be justified.
Ironhide @ Feb 27th 2007 6:54AM
@Aex
You speak as though you know what I'm objecting to. You speak as though you think you know all there is about me to know. Sorry Charlie, but if the format is worth the expenditure then I'm all for it.
A format is justified if a consumer is not forced to adopt an expensive NEW format. About the time the PS1 came about CD-roms were becoming a standard format that most people could afford and were comfortable with. Unfortunately the ps3 is bringing a completely new and untried format, which speaking as a developer, is not required.
You don't seem to understand some basics about game development. The idea is efficiency. Get the most bang out of what you are using. What this bang does not entail is the requirement of a medium that's over 3 times the capacity of a dvd-9 disc. Larger medium tends to allow for things to be hidden or to be added to until it's right. What can be done in say 3 lines on a 360 may take 5-9 lines on a ps3 because of the horridly inefficient cell processors. A good programmer can get more out of the cell but it would certainly take more lines of code than the same thing on a 360 core. I'm not a programmer but I work with a few good ones so I hear a lot about the comparisons.
Sloppy programming can be hidden by the sheer power of a newer processor. Ie the Cell being a majorly inefficient design, but that being said, a very powerful set of processors. Sloppy programming might not even be considered sloppy programming if it gets the job done, but we are still dealing with code that could be done a lot better. Sloppy graphics can be hidden just by cramming models with poor build issues disguised as high res models.
Sadly again you follow everything up with an assumption that you know me and assume you understand me. I will be getting a ps3 just like I did all the consoles released so far. I cannot and will not justify the price for a format that as a developer just has no place just yet. If it drops by about 200-300$ I will get it. As it stands it will take more than two games to make me want to purchase one at the current price.
Ironhide @ Feb 27th 2007 6:56AM
*** Addition ***
This whole rant was refering to the fact that sloppy programming and ineffeicent programming can be hidden with a large format capacity like BluRay.
smik @ Feb 27th 2007 7:55AM
Ironhide, you are probably more technically oriented than me - wont argue with "sloppy programming and ineffeicent programming can be hidden". My argument is just this - Gears / RFOM are both very well written programs and representative of nextgen. And both occupy the same space - 9GB / 5 hours or 18GB / 10 hours. And most good FPS would be RFOM level, as gears was short (not to take potshots just a fact - am sure lots of pluses about Gears) So, assuming space needed rises 50% a year we will need 3 DVDs or 1 BR for a full-sized game by end-2007. And this will worsen every year. So, let us not get away from the fact that BR WILL be needed. Sony brought in this tech 2 years ahead of time (hence the cost) - but this also enhances its life whereas 360 will have to be replaced by a new console in 2-3 years.
Jake @ Feb 27th 2007 9:44AM
People talk about blu-ray like having more space is a bad thing. That is the plus side. The negatives are an extra $150 or so in hardware cost and the fact that you had to wait an entire extra year to have next gen gaming unless you got a 360. How the hell can extra space be a bad thing? It doesn't force you to use "sloppy programming". Gears used up almost the whole DVD. Blue Dragon uses up 3 DVD's. A little extra space would have been nice, I'm sure.
With that said, I am glad the 360 didn't include HD-DVD or Blu-ray. I am glad that the system was cheaper and available sooner. There are plenty of good 360 games. And, I don't think the games will really suffer other than your FF types and linear RPG's with tons of prerendered HD stuff because they will need more discs.
But if you look at how high budget these 5-8 Gb games are you can't see them spending any more money on them. To make an 18 Gb game with the quality of an 8 Gb game would cost at least twice as much.
Look at Resistance for example. How that game is 18Gb is beyond me. I've played through it at a friend's house. It is pretty huge; fun game. But, the textures aren't as rich as Gears and they seem more repeating. Oblivion is larger than Resistance and used 4 Gb on 360. Resistance uses 18 Gb, but does have more textures maybe. I don't know. I'm not an expert but think that game could have been done in under 9 Gb. It does seem that looking at the memory count on a PS3 game doesn't tell you anything. The developers are putting it in there by choice, though, so it can't hurt the game.
My point is we have yet to see the advantage of Blu-ray in a game for the most part. Blue Dragon could have been one disc. That's it so far. Oblivion, Gears, and many others basically prove that you can make a good next gen game on DVD. It is up to the PS3 developers to show that you can make a better game with the extra space.
To summarize. Blu-ray adds hardware cost and added your wait time. If you are a PS3 only fanboy, you waited a year to pay more for old 360 games and a couple exclusives. The future may hold a better experience and perhaps the wait will pay off, but that is doubtful. However, the extra space in and of itself can only be a good thing. Anyone who tries to say it forces you to blah blah blah is talking out of their ass. The devs will take the space and use it to make the best game they can possibly make with the resources at hand. Space is good. Blu-ray is debateable.
JJC @ Feb 27th 2007 10:16AM
More content for resistence? thats pretty sweet. i wonder if it has anything to do with gears and how they are coming out with new content (once already, promised in the near future for more). it would be really cool if they tied r:fom to resistence 2 with downloadable content. i hope they will be able to get a sponsor or something so that the content will be free (like epic's release).
@smik
i dont think its as simple as you propose (9gb = 5 hours, 18gb = 10 hours). alot of the space in games is taken up by sound and textures and a lot of the sounds and textures are reused throughout the game. think of how many times in resistence that you see the same monster, same style building, pool tables, etc. they arent all seperate parts of code on the disc. i have written a lot of code (i am currently finishing up my computer engineering degree) and i imagine that these objects are created by calling a function that only exists once on the entire disc and is created and destroyed all during runtime. By saying this it doesnt mean that i actually know everything that is going on between how gears was programmed and how resistence was programmed, but i would believe ironhide in that it is probably not such a big deal to have 'sloppy' code on the ps3 with that much more space to deal with. another issue is possibly the reading of the disc. it has been stated that data has been replicated on the oblivion disc to decrease load times. it is generally considered to be bad programming to have data or code appear more than once, but if thats the way they get around having slow load times and they have the space then its a quick easy fix. ahh enough rambling...
sheppy @ Feb 27th 2007 10:36AM
BluRay, to me, represents another bar. We have not seen the necessity of raising that bar but if the industry was lead merely by necessity, we would barely be beyond SNES by this point (It's a common quite that Nintendo wanted NES to last at least 10 years but Genesis and the government stopping their strongarming tactics forced them to consider SNES much sooner than they would have hoped). Gaming has always been about the excessive.
We don't NEED normal mapping.
We don't NEED extra peripherals.
Hell, we don't even NEED downloadable content.
But we want it. The bar is raised and people will find ways to effectively use the extra space but don't expect it at launch. It should also be noted that Oblivion repeated textures and assets heavily.
What BluRay means to me, as a gaming medium can be summed up in two examples. One real, one entirely possible.
The Darkness. On the BluRay, there is well over 9 hours of video content. What does this mean and why is it not on 360? Well, let's say you turn on a TV in this game, suddenly you're watching an episode of Witchblade. Turn the channel, Nosferatu. Because I'm the type of gamer that loves to "play" with the environment, this is the kind of thing that I would waste time with. They don't need to do this and in the ultimate game, there is no purpose. But since the bar has been set by Doom 3 in regards to what monitors display in game, first Prey raised the bar and now The Darkness for this kind of extra crap.
Now, apply this same ideal to something like FFVIII (in fact, looking at footage of FFXIII, it's obvious I'm not the only one thinking this). Remember the sequences where CG was playing in the background? Now imagine your playing a game like Jedi Unleashed, on Corrisant (sp? I'm not a huge SW fan). The city in the background is alive with flying cars, elaborate sequences, and all of it is possible because they created a movie on the BluRay and assigned it to a skybox. Nonintrusive, excessive, and very, very impressive should someone do this.
Necessity has rarely had anything to do with gaming and BluRay is there, not a necessity, but look at what they could do with it. Arguing necessity in gaming is similar to arguing why books need so many words.
Crono @ Feb 27th 2007 11:41AM
Sheppy, those video features you're talking about have been done in games since FF7. You don't need to sit there and pre-render a movie to play in the background because there's enough horsepower to render it on the fly. Rendering on the fly not only saves disc space, but developer time because they can script a scene, instead of actually modeling it.
Scott @ Feb 27th 2007 11:54AM
I always thought resistance looked too much like half life 2 for me to be interested in it. Just look at the way the gun is held, the cross hair and even the enemies.
http://www.playphoria.com/games/halflife2/images/half-life_2-3.jpg
http://www.gamesarefun.com/games/ps3/resistance/e3/1.jpg
http://www.webjunkies.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/fall-of-man.jpg
and whats with not being able to aim-down-the-sights???
I find this episodic extension of the story adds another similarity between it and half-life 2.
By the way, I've never played RFOM, I'm only stating my opinion of what I've seen of it. (I don't know anyone who owns a PS3 to try it out)
I think its good idea for developers to add content to the single player game to bridge the gap between the first and the sequel in the series.
sheppy @ Feb 27th 2007 11:53AM
Actually, if we want to get technical, they've been around since Megarace (maybe sooner). And yes, it could all be handled by realtime but not on the levels of CG.
Crono @ Feb 27th 2007 11:56AM
But are you going to notice the difference in detail if you're talking about something playing on a TV inside a game? Or in the background shot in a starwars game? And will it add to the immersion or take away from it because you have this huge gap in the quality of the action in the foreground and the animation in the background? Finally, is it worth all the time and money and effort for that experience?
Digi Smalls @ Feb 27th 2007 12:16PM
i see alot of posters bring up the promise of "higher resolution textures" that blu-ray will afford, but one thing that blu-ray can't do is change the PS3's video memory.
not to be too simple, but those "higher-res" textures have to go somewhere before they go to your tv. the PS3's video memory is set to 256mg and no matter how big the blu-ray is that won't change. the 360 has a flexible memory structure that can go over (and often does) 256. for Gears of War, its been repeated often that they were pushing it close to the full 512 available and would be impossible on PS3.
so its a trade off, amount of content on disc, to amount of content on screen. Resistance was very long, Gears was very rich.
yes, Gears was short but it didn't have to be. it's not like every building texture was using a different texture from the level before. they could've have easily made more levels from the assets already on there if they really wanted to. or use a trick from Resistance where it changed the color of the light cast to give every level it's own "feel".
regardless, blu-ray does bring a lot more storage and if sheer amount of content space was an issue - only FMV worth anything to me is of the Square Enix variety - then $200 isn't worth me getting up and changing a disc.
.
JJC @ Feb 27th 2007 12:22PM
i think crono has a point. if i were playing through a game and saw something that looked a whole let better than everything else (such as CG) while i was still moving around in the regular graphics it would be distracting and annoying. i dont mind cut scenes (as long as the story is good) and im all for CG in the game, but mixing the two without any noticeable cutting away from game to show movie like pause would be odd. imagine playing FFX and having a pre rendered CG video playing somewhere on a tv while your playing in game, with graphics that are hugely inferior to what is being shown on the screen (the cutscenes in that game for the time were AMAZING).
Crono- the only thing that i experienced that would be on the downside of rendering on the fly (besides the drop in quality) is that (depending on the game) the console drops frames. not terribly in my experience but noticeable. it was only really noticeable during gears of war, which also happened to have the best on the fly rendered cut scenes i have ever seen.
Aaron @ Feb 27th 2007 12:46PM
1080i SUPPORT PLEASE!!!!
Digi Smalls @ Feb 27th 2007 1:06PM
the entire Metal Gear series has been exceptional with in-game cut-scenes (even back to PS1). and even the FMV in FFXII seems like it could have been done realtime to some degree on PS3.
FMV is too intrusive, and breaks the continuity of the gameworld. it's time has past. using "more FMV" as a reason for blu-ray is the worst idea yet. use that space for more (or higher quality) dialog but not video.
.