Mohonky
Member
Cant recall how I got to thinking about this, think it was in a thread about action hack and slash titles. Anyway it got me onto Ninja Gaiden and watching some videos of Ninja Gaiden on Xbox and then Xbox 360. What got me about Ninja Gaiden 2 was how despite being a reasonable looking game, compared to other games around it it wasnt visually amazing. It was a good looking game, but it never really jumped out at you as being something massively out of the ordinary. By contrast, when you went back and considered the Xbox original, the original was just head and shoulders above virtually every other game around it.
It was kind of like Team Ninja knew something about the hardware or were able to use it in such a way that when Ninja Gaiden launched there really wasnt anything out in that category you could compare it too it just looked and ran so much better. Then when next gen rolled around and the Xbox360 Ninja Gaiden 2 was announced you kind of expected it to be something extraordinary visually and yet for whatever reason it kind of wasnt. It still looked good, but its like whatever technical proficiency Team Ninja had over the competition had disappeared.
It wasnt just Team Ninja either. Another game that really made you do a double take was Riddick - Escape From Butcher Bay. In the same year iD were preparing to launch Doom 3, a PC game that had PC gamers scrambling to upgrade their rigs, somehow Starbreeze not only beat them to the punch with a lot of the visual effects Doom 3 was touting, they managed to somehow find a way to launch it on the Xbox. Yes, obviously the PC version was better and Doom 3 on a PC was its measure, the fact the game even ran on the Xbox was amazing. Visually it took a giant steaming piss on anything else on the system.
Yet like Ninja Gaiden, the follow up to Riddick, Dark Athena didnt have that same effect. Yeh, it was in HD and it still looked great, but it wasnt something you would right home about as being in the top tier of its generation. For a team that absolutely blew the doors off what you thought an Xbox could do, they never again really hit anything in the next generation of that calibre. They still made great looking games; The Darkness, Dark Athena etc but they were just good looking games of about what you expected at the time.
Lastly was Splinter Cell Theory. None of the Splinter Cell games have ever been a slouch, every new game looks pretty damned good but Chaos Theory was up there on Xbox with the very very best.
So not sure what happen, but if you went into expectations of what the developers were able to achieve with the originals, their next gen counter parts kind of disappointed; not because they were bad looking, they werent, but as far what the originals were able to muster compared to their peers, the next gen versions just sort of fell to the same level.
Have epthere ever been any other games of dimishing returns like this?
It was kind of like Team Ninja knew something about the hardware or were able to use it in such a way that when Ninja Gaiden launched there really wasnt anything out in that category you could compare it too it just looked and ran so much better. Then when next gen rolled around and the Xbox360 Ninja Gaiden 2 was announced you kind of expected it to be something extraordinary visually and yet for whatever reason it kind of wasnt. It still looked good, but its like whatever technical proficiency Team Ninja had over the competition had disappeared.
It wasnt just Team Ninja either. Another game that really made you do a double take was Riddick - Escape From Butcher Bay. In the same year iD were preparing to launch Doom 3, a PC game that had PC gamers scrambling to upgrade their rigs, somehow Starbreeze not only beat them to the punch with a lot of the visual effects Doom 3 was touting, they managed to somehow find a way to launch it on the Xbox. Yes, obviously the PC version was better and Doom 3 on a PC was its measure, the fact the game even ran on the Xbox was amazing. Visually it took a giant steaming piss on anything else on the system.
Yet like Ninja Gaiden, the follow up to Riddick, Dark Athena didnt have that same effect. Yeh, it was in HD and it still looked great, but it wasnt something you would right home about as being in the top tier of its generation. For a team that absolutely blew the doors off what you thought an Xbox could do, they never again really hit anything in the next generation of that calibre. They still made great looking games; The Darkness, Dark Athena etc but they were just good looking games of about what you expected at the time.
Lastly was Splinter Cell Theory. None of the Splinter Cell games have ever been a slouch, every new game looks pretty damned good but Chaos Theory was up there on Xbox with the very very best.
So not sure what happen, but if you went into expectations of what the developers were able to achieve with the originals, their next gen counter parts kind of disappointed; not because they were bad looking, they werent, but as far what the originals were able to muster compared to their peers, the next gen versions just sort of fell to the same level.
Have epthere ever been any other games of dimishing returns like this?
