PS3 Hype Report

Upon picking up the excellent Guitar Hero 2 demo last weekend, I was subjected to the unfortunate byproduct known as Official Playstation Magazine. The “Official” in the title was my first clue, and I immediately cast it into the waiting pile of propaganda-by-mail. However, mere hours later I had the somewhat unusual incident of tripping on one of Elijah’s toys and accidentally reading a small portion of the Oblivion PS3 coverage.

Ironically, it turned out that this randomly selected portion of Playstation Magazine was a glaring error. Page 69 shows a screenshot of the PS3 version of Oblivion, helpfully inset with an Xbox 360 screenshot of the same locale. The vista is a beautiful one, looking out across the river outside of Imperial City at the distant ground texture. The caption helpfully explains that the muddy looking Xbox 360 distant landscape texture is outdone by leaps and bounds on the PS3.

So, how do I know this is a glaring error? Because I just fixed the exact same problem on my PC version of Oblivion and I know for a fact that it has nothing to do with the technical rendering prowess of the PS3 or the 360. The original version of Oblivion simply had muddy looking distant textures for one reason or another. Perhaps the final build of the game was rushed out and got stuck with “placeholders” in the distance texture spots. The 360 is no more responsible for how these textures look than it is for Oblivion’s occasional stutters and stalls.

Fortunately, on the PC side, when issues like these appear, modders often take matters into their own hands. It wasn’t long before a double resolution distant texture mod was available for PC Oblivion, and thanks to this mod, my experience with the game is on par with the “superior” PS3 version. My guess is that the PS3 Oblivion team knew about the very popular PC mod, and made their own version for the PS3. If this had been an issue with mip-maping or anisotropic filtering, I would have happily conceded the win to the PS3’s full year of additional development time. However, it looks more like Playstation Magazine’s Joe Rybibki should have played all three Oblivion versions before leaping to conclusions.

Personally, I’m happy to do whatever I can to slow down the hype machine, but as for the rest of the November issue of Playstation magazine, you’ll have to read it yourself.