The quality of a game is based 100% on the ability of the programmers. There's a secret area in Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando where it shows off the original water effects that they were going to use for the game, and they are quite literally the best water effects ever seen in a game. Ever. (If you ever have the chance, I recommend you check it out). The reason they didn't use it is because it taxed the system too much and they didn't have time to perfect the coding so it'd run at a decent frame rate. But if they could have, then the system could have run it no problem. It's quite true that no game has ever used 100% of the PS2's power (and no game has probably even used 40% of the Xbox's power either).
The problem is that it's harder to develop games on PS2 for several reasons, including the requirement of idealized code to get things running smoothly. In the beginning of this console generation, this caused several developers to either make shitty games for the PS2 because they were lazy, or just abandon Sony all together (which was the case with OWI). But all of the big name developers like EA, Square, etc knew that abandoning Sony would be just like taking a big bag of money and burning it. So after a while of creating shitty games, Sony stepped up and told such developers that if they didn't start using the PS2 to it's true potential, they'd discontinue their support.
So now people are taking true advantage of the PS2's power, and we're ending up with gorgeous games like Ratchet and Clank, Jak 2, Silent Hill 3, FFXI, etc.
So @Fuzzle Guy - Graphics had nothing to do with OWI's decision to switch from PS2 to Xbox. They just wanted an easier route. Munch's Oddysee could have easily have been on the PS2. And because of their decision to make it an Xbox exclusive, they lost a shitload of sales.
|