Why Uncharted 2 couldn't work on Xbox 360

by Justin McElroy on Aug 27th 2009 10:32AM

With developer Naughty Dog owned by Sony and all, you likely didn't hold out much hope of seeing Nathan Drake on your Xbox 360 (except in Shadow Complex, of course), but Naughty Dog president Christophe Balestra took a few moments to explain to Ars Technica that technical hurdles would be equally insurmountable. "First of all, we fill the Blu-ray 100 percent," Balestra said. "We have no room left on this one." How many of those gigglebytes were used to capture the proper sonic resonance of Nolan North's chiseled good looks? We'll likely never know.

Admitting that Naughty Dog only used around 30 percent of the PS3's SPUs (or in more technical terms, "magic") in Drake's Fortune, Balestra said his team is using 100 percent of the system's power for the sequel. Perhaps more importantly, the team is also passing on its knowledge and techniques to third-party developers.

So, you heard it here first: All future PS3 games will look this good. Confirmed.

Source

Tags: Microsoft, naughty-dog, not-flamebait-but-probably-will-be, sony, uncharted-2, Uncharted-2-Among-Thieves, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (222)

No one can deny the game looks amazing. I think first part games can take advantage of this, but third party multiplats have to areal to the least common denominator.

that and they have to care...

one of the reasons i got a ps3

Can't wait to get this game... Gotta get the 120gig PS3 Slim, wewt.

What happeend? All the suddenly PS3 has EVERY awesome exclusive coming for it:
Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2
Gran Turismo 5
MAG
God of War 3
ModNation Racers
The Last Guardian
Final Fantasy XIII Versus
Agent

PS3 is a monster now.

Somebody on my friends list is in the MAG beta and he says it's fuckin' sick! Sounds a bit too tactical to me, but if that floats your boat, be prepared to have your mind blown.

List of games are SO 2008.

PS3 Fanboys and their lists.

I'm sure in 2007 his list included Lair & Heavenly Sword too.

@Caveman: My list includes Heavenly Sword right now. Great underrated and unappreciated game.

Short though.

@Caveman: What's wrong with heavenly sword?

Phin: Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is a port of a really shitty Xbox 360 game, dude.

@caveman
of course u pick 07 since that was not the best year neither was 06 but i mean 360 wasnt really that epic in 05 or 06 how bout 08 or 09 maybe 10 all ps3 wins uncharted 2 god of war 3 resistance 2 mgs4 infamous killzone 2 heavy rain etc etc

Tales of Vesperia is going to PS3, with a ton of new content. I just hope it comes state-side.

Yup. Heavenly Sword is awesome!

100 percent of the system's power, ALREADY?????? is that good or bad?

Look at it this way...the Xbox 360 was designed with the original Gears of War in mind (its hardware was even changed to accommodate the game). Gears of War taxed the 360 in ways that games normally don't tax a console until later in the console cycle

Having said that, no hardware is ever truly maxed for a couple of reasons. First of all, better code can always be written. Secondly, there are ways of doing things more efficiently (see: Rage for PS3/360/PC) which can allow for more to be done with the same amount of power.

The guy is just hyping his game, I doubt he really believes that his game really uses 100% of the PS3's power.

I love how Heavenly Sword went from Over-Hyped to Underrated. Nostalgia is a funny thing.

Man.. I don't know what the hell Naughty dog did but when I was playing the beta I was in shock the first couple of minutes. I thought Gears 2 looked good but this game is on a whole other level.

Was drake in shadow complex? I'm confused. Probably cause I haven't played either of those games yet.

Nolan North, the voice actor for Drake, also voices Jason in SC.

He wasn't, but Nolan North voices both characters.

He also voices the prince from Prince of Persia, a soldier dude from Halo Wars, a guy in Halo 3: ODST, and every single other male character in every single other videogame from this point onwards.

Because that's how awesome he is.

Nice some track record.

So he's right up there with Mark Hamil & Natahn Fillion huh?

He was also in Assassin's Creed, IIRC.

Also Jason sports a half-tuck.

He's voicing Mario in the next game, too.

*gruff voice* yeah, it's me. Mario.

jason had a ham and cheese on rye for lunch today and he prefers boxer briefs over both boxers and briefs because it holds his junks securely in place.

I got to play SC the other day and while it was very good, all I kept thinking was it was a 'poor man's Uncharted'.

The dude IS Nathan Drake with a few slight adjustments.

title made me LOL

Me, too. Reminds me of when the PS3 launched, and Insomniac announced that Resistance: Fall of Man could never be developed on the XBox 360 because they "fill the Blu-Ray." Second-part developers are always going to pimp their platform, and they should.

This would be like Gabe Newell announcing that Left 4 Dead 2 could NEVER be implemented on PS3 because the platform can't support cross-game voice chat.

http://forums.n4g.com/Cross-game-chat-and-why-it39s-currently-MIA-m700070.aspx

If you want to see a game that actually can't be done on XBox 360 currently, I would look to DC Universe Online.

what about DC Universe makes you say it cant be done on 360??

^ Microsoft's policy towards MMO's on their console...

Because Microsoft will not provide economically viable models to people who want to run MMOs on the XBox Live platform.

(Except for that one time when they really, really had to kiss Square Enix's ass so that they could get future Final Fantasy titles on the system.)

yea MMO's on the 360 are like triple dipping....

FF11 is the only one I can think of so far....and most likely FF14 will be on there sometime in 2011 or 2012 as well

I would guess warhawk and Mag couldnt be done on 360 either.

not to sure about mag, but warhawk has server lists populated by dedicated ranked regional servers and player hosted servers, as well as player dedicated servers.

Don't forget a UT3 how its suppose to be... that can't be done on xbox360.

why do you think xbox cant do multiplayer games up to a certain number of players? the 360 has identical core processors (IBM 3.2ghz powerpc cores), the spe are for cpu assisted rendering.

you just need a dedicated server basically for games to support a large number of players, only reason maybe 360 doesnt do this that often is because their online service is extremely popular therefore its more costly to maintain dedicated servers and rather they prefer people host their own games (no cost in bandwidth, dedicated server hardware, and games can stay online longer)
*MAG will probably go offline 1-2 years after it releases.

L4D servers have to track hundreds of entities and it does this with little to no lag online. the number of players has little to do with how powerful the console is and more about the online infrastructure they choose there are trade offs.

"gigglebytes" made me LOL

ugh... why do i get devoted for this. i'm not bashing either console i just wanted to point out a flaw in logic.

You were pointing out a flawed logic. Ps3 has the main core and 6 other secondary cores.
If a developer takes advantage of these and somehow finds out how to get around the whole parallelism is horrid in games. You've got a ton of power linked in a chain with a ton of bandwidth.

Kuddos to Naughty Dog for giving out their expertise to 3rd parties so that all future development can benefit.

Oh I'm sure the word "giving out" is not really what goes on here. I'm sure they charge pretty well for their "expertise".

Nothing wrong with it mind you.

No, they're not charging for it. Naughty Dog is an arm of Sony. Sony has an interest in getting more good games on PS3, a platform that is considered difficult to program for. So Naughty Dog is doing what their owners say to do, which is help other developers program for the platform.

Naughty Dog also receives a lot of development help from Sony corporate, and other devs get access to the same code libraries.

yea that was the part of his comments that made me really impressed with naughty dog. I really hope they're sharing knowledge - it just leads to better games for us

i hate when the execs talk about hardware like they know what they're talking about, they're just spouting non-sense to hype/sell their game

the game uses the entire disc? k how effectively does it use it? there are games on a single DVD such as fallout and oblivion with i guarantee much more content than uncharted 2. as for the 100% utilization thats just a stupid thing to say. there is no game out there that can utilize 100% of the hardware because thats not how games work they render depending on the situation its not like folding proteins where youre given a limitless stream of data which you can immediately queue. anyways by saying this, they're in a way saying this is the max potential of the hardware...

@DeepFriedSushi: I hate it when people shoot their mouth off about stuff they don't have a clue about...

If you knew anything about Naughty Dog you'd know that Christophe Balestra is not just co-president and an exec, he's also a senior programmer; so I think you'll find he knows a tad more about the how the PS3 hardware runs than you.

I read in an interview, with Amy Hennig I believe, that when talking about using the PS3's power at 30% in Uncharted and 100% in Uncharted 2, they are talking about idle time - the Cell Processor was utilized fully 30% of the time in Uncharted 1 and they apparently got it near dead on 100% with Uncharted 2... but even saying that, they are talking about using 100% of the PS3's power within the limitations of their game code - they can always make it more efficient which is where you get improved graphics as more processing power is freed up, they can be used elsewhere to perform other tasks.

So many people like to instantly judge anyone who makes a comment like this as a hype merchant, but seriously, the proof is in the pudding. Play the game, you'll see that there's been nothing like it thus far in the console world.

From what I know every 360 near a copy of U2 will explode because it just can't handle the awesomeness of that 100% spu power

LOL! That is hilarious!

This isn't really shocking. The two consoles have different strengths and weaknesses. I'm sure there are some 360 exclusives that wouldn't work on the PS3 too.

In terms of power, I doubt it. The PS3 is a lot harder to develop for, however, and if you're not making an exclusive on it, it's rarely worth the effort to extract all of that juicy power from the complex system. What the 360 does have going for it is that it's extremely easy to program for, and online capabilities are very robust.

"I'm sure there are some 360 exclusives that wouldn't work on the PS3 too"
list the games then

The 360 also has unified RAM - 512MB shared between CPU and GPU, whereas the PS3 has 256MB dedicated to the CPU and 256MB dedicated to the GPU.

If you made a game on the 360 that required, say, the CPU to use 600MB of the RAM and the GPU to use 400MB, then the game "couldn't work on" PS3.

Different consoles, different architecture, different strengths and weaknesses.

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Why Uncharted 2 couldn't work on Xbox 360

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