Uh-oh. PS3 'Orange Box' fails.

ic1male · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:14

1UP have got their hands on near-final code for the PS3 version of 'The Orange Box'. They don't seem very impressed.

After spending a significant amount of time with a near final version of the PS3 game, it's apparent that this version suffers from a number of technical flaws, which at best merely hinder game play and at worst make the experience downright unplayable. Framerate is a consistent issue throughout the Half-Life series of games included in The Orange Box. One moment you'll be cruising through the game at 30 frames per second and the next you'll be enjoying a slideshow of series protagonist Gordon Freeman cruising down the river. However, Portal suffers from no such technical hiccups and is on its way to being a pitch-perfect port of the spatial reasoning exercise.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3164539

Bit miffed at that to say the least. I was hoping Gabe Newell would be proved wrong. Unless he's told the EA team to do it on purpose.

NokkonWud · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:17

This was mentioned inside another thread, but I can't remember which one it is and my net is running so slow that the search is timing out

.

james.miller · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:17

come on he wouldn't sabotage his own games like that. however, giving to EA to do...he might as well have.

Inoshishi · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:22

EA are so shockingly bad, glad I've got this on the PC

Mr Men · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:25

Oh dear, but seems to be typical of PS3 games sadly

NokkonWud · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:27

It's easy to blame EA, but they have no problems with the other formats, so perhaps it would be Sony's dev kit that's the problem, after all, it's not just EA that are putting out poor games too.

By no means do I think EA are free from fault, but I think the problem is more on Sony's side than any others.

TheMightyTen · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:27

Gabe Newell always sides with who ever pays him the biggest bucket of chicken (sorry I mean money

), He did it in the ATI vs Nvidia battle and in time has been proved wrong (although he'll never get his head out of his pizza box long enough to admit it; sorry did it again

). He's slowly becoming a bit of a John Romero character for me. I'm not denying he's a great game engine coder but being a blinkered one ends up doing you no favours.

scorza · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:29

Gabe Newell is never wrong.

Inoshishi · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:31

NokkonWud said:
It's easy to blame EA, but they have no problems with the other formats, so perhaps it would be Sony's dev kit that's the problem, after all, it's not just EA that are putting out poor games too.

By no means do I think EA are free from fault, but I think the problem is more on Sony's side than any others.

So if Sony's Dev Kit's are to blame, how come other dev's (Incognito, Infinity Ward, Naughty Dog etc.) are saying what an absolute dream it is to work on? - And there games turn out flawless.

And it pretty much is only EA who are putting out the poor games now, I can't think of any others.

nero120 · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:32

NokkonWud said:
It's easy to blame EA, but they have no problems with the other formats, so perhaps it would be Sony's dev kit that's the problem, after all, it's not just EA that are putting out poor games too.

By no means do I think EA are free from fault, but I think the problem is more on Sony's side than any others.

If call of duty 4 looks and runs fantastic I see no reason why other devs can't achieve the same results. Obviously every system has it's own method of games development, but the simple truth seems to be laziness/incompetance on the part of the programmers. If they were so good at their jobs, how are they failing to achieve what others seem to be able to do? There is no excuse for games running poorly on the ps3.

Microsoft really did a wonderful monopoly move with the xbox line. Make the game engine exactly the same as for pc and you've got 2 games for the price of 1! With that option in mind, sadly, it seems many development teams are no longer willing to put a reasonable amount of time into development for rival platforms.

TheMightyTen · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:33

scorza said:
Gabe Newell is never wrong.

That's what his ego says to him in the mirror every morning

mmj_uk · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:33

That explains his PS3 bashing a while back then, he should stick to PC programming.

KNiVES · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:34

TheMightyTen said:
Gabe Newell always sides with who ever pays him the biggest bucket of chicken (sorry I mean money ), He did it in the ATI vs Nvidia battle and in time has been proved wrong (although he'll never get his head out of his pizza box long enough to admit it; sorry did it again ). He's slowly becoming a bit of a John Romero character for me. I'm not denying he's a great game engine coder but being a blinkered one ends up doing you no favours.

So you think he deliberately undermines his products and therefore his own business just because he likes X more than Y? lol. The simple fact of the matter is, Gabe Newell would have loved a perfect PS3 port, and with EA as Valve's publisher he had to give the porting duty to them. It's a lot of work to do PC, 360 and PS3 simultaneously, and Valve wisely outsourced PS3 development. They just chose the wrong bunch that's all. EA has a track history of poor PS3 development. I am willing to bet the guys at Valve will be sorely disappointed with EA. There's no stupid childish grudges going on like some people here seem to think.

mmj_uk · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:36

Ah, I stand corrected... he DID stick to PC programming, PS3 version was fobbed off to the mighty EA.

In an interview earlier this year, Valve Software founder Gabe Newell referred to PlayStation 3 as "a waste of everybody's time." This attitude shows in the development structure of The Orange Box. While the PC and Xbox 360 versions were handled by Valve, the PS3 port was handed off to an internal team at EA.

wannabedamned · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:37

I'll wait to see it for myself, But it's a shame if its that bad. But as already said, Devs are managing fine games on the PS3. So it's not anything to do with the SDK.

NokkonWud · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:38

Because Naughty Dog are teamed with Sony, as are Incognito.
Infinity Ward have excellent programmers and it's clear a lot of care has gone into it, but at what cost, CoD4 lost a lot of its press early on in development because of other games so we don't know whether it was held up by PS3 development like Grand Theft Auto 4 has been for example.

It's not just EA, as has been said, there are only really DiRT and Sega Rally that run identically compared to the Xbox360.

KNiVES · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:41

mmj_uk said:
Ah, I stand corrected... he DID stick to PC programming, PS3 version was fobbed off to the mighty EA.

This thread pointed out several times that EA were the culprits, even the OP said so.

TheMightyTen · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:47

KNiVES said:
So you think he deliberately undermines his products and therefore his own business just because he likes X more than Y? lol. The simple fact of the matter is, Gabe Newell would have loved a perfect PS3 port, and with EA as Valve's publisher he had to give the porting duty to them. It's a lot of work to do PC, 360 and PS3 simultaneously, and Valve wisely outsourced PS3 development. They just chose the wrong bunch that's all. EA has a track history of poor PS3 development. I am willing to bet the guys at Valve will be sorely disappointed with EA. There's no stupid childish grudges going on like some people here seem to think.

There's more than enough evidence from the whole ATI-NVidia-Half Life 2 war to proove he can at times be nothing more than a whinging fanboy. Regardles of how talented he is, at times it seems he just chucks his dolly out the pram because he has the 'Do you know who I am' attitude. So in answer to you, Yes I honestly do believe he would undermine the development of one of his products because he prefers (or is in the pocket of) one platform over another.

nero120 · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:48

KNiVES said:
The simple fact of the matter is, Gabe Newell would have loved a perfect PS3 port, and with EA as Valve's publisher he had to give the porting duty to them. It's a lot of work to do PC, 360 and PS3 simultaneously, and Valve wisely outsourced PS3 development. They just chose the wrong bunch that's all. EA has a track history of poor PS3 development. I am willing to bet the guys at Valve will be sorely disappointed with EA. There's no stupid childish grudges going on like some people here seem to think.

I don't believe that at all. The 360 is basically a windows PC in a box, it's hardly like developing for 2 separate platforms. Valve took the easy way out by outsourcing and they knew what to expect of EA, Valve obviously had no intention of retaining any kind of quality of the orange box on ps3. They just wanted to get the title out in the cheapest way possible and watch those $$$ come rolling in...

nero120 · 23 Nov 2007 at 11:52

NokkonWud said:
Because Naughty Dog are teamed with Sony, as are Incognito.
Infinity Ward have excellent programmers and it's clear a lot of care has gone into it, but at what cost, CoD4 lost a lot of its press early on in development because of other games so we don't know whether it was held up by PS3 development like Grand Theft Auto 4 has been for example.

It's not just EA, as has been said, there are only really DiRT and Sega Rally that run identically compared to the Xbox360.

I love this."Held up by PS3 development". What a joke. It's like people expect that a games company should only have to build one version of a game and that version should work perfectly for every platform out there. :rolleyes:

It has always been the way that different platforms required different development strands and you couldnt build a "one version fits all". So why is it that people now expect to build a 360 version and that should work perfectly for PS3 also, otherwise PS3 is blamed for "holding up development"??!!

As I said before, Microsoft did good business by uniting console and pc games development under its umbrella, and unfortuantely the ignorant masses now don't want realistic development times for multi platform games, as such is with our "I want everything right now" culture. The great thing is the competition gets blamed for holding up games release times because a development team actually wants the game to run well on more than one platform!!

What a world.