1.0 to 2.0 - CutscenesFollow

They were great if you had a machine capable of rendering them like that.

Few people did.

The graphics quality, especially the lighting, was softer for sure. But it was very poorly optimized. Perhaps PS4 could have handled it like that, but there was no way PS3 could.

The scenes from the 1.0 beginning were pretty amazing, definitely designed to hook you in. The problem is, they were so well made that there were only a few of them. Once you made it to level 20, the quality drops off a cliff, and any remaining cutscenes were even worse than what's in 2.0. That was either because there wasn't any more time to make good scenes or they didn't have the budget for anything else. Probably both.



I believe the PS3 could have handled it. One only need to review the amazing scenes from God of War 3 to see that the ability of the cell processors to calculate floating point calculations in the manner of a super-computer could really make the system sing. A core processor cannot divide the work of calculating of floating point numbers among its cores. A cell processors can among its cells, which is entirely the point of the architecture, which was originally used in super-computers to calculate difficult math problems. And graphics are all about rapid floating point calculations, so this had the potential to offer unique experiences you couldn't get on an ordinary PC.

The problem is, programming a cell processor to render graphics is a non-trivial approach to programming, so many developers would rather just code in a PC style with most of the burden on the GPU rather than the CPU. That's why a lot of PS3 ports were terribly lackluster because most developers weren't interested in a drastic re-write of their code just to take full advantage of the PS3's capabilities and settled on relying on its GPU which was terribly weak (because the idea was to make use of the cell processor for most of the heavy lifting).

So, Sony learned its lesson for the PS4 and made it just another PC with a few tweaks to its memory architecture, instead. That way PC ports are not a problem for developers and quality won't suffer. But, sadly, all we have now is a console generation of hobbled PCs with little that distinguishes them from a middle-of-the-road gamer PC. At least the cell processors could offer a difference experience from time-to-time, but the system just wasn't popular enough to warrant the effort among developers.