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Silent Hill HD Collection patched on PS3, Xbox update cancelled

 

Konami has finally issued a long-awaited patch for the PlayStation 3 version of Silent Hill HD Collection. It's intended to resolve frame rate and audio synchronization issues, among other things. The Xbox 360 compilation, meanwhile, won't be patched due to "technical issues and resources."

 

To recap for those of you following at home: Xbox 360 technical issues cannot be corrected due to technical issues.

 

Will Konami offer refunds for Xbox 360 owners, or discontinue the sale of the HD Collection for that platform? The publisher has yet to respond to our enquiries, and Amazon shows one copy of the game remains in stock.

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Again what exactly were the problems ?

 

last time i was playing Silent Hill 2 it seemed fine to me.

 

The Xbox 360 version didn't suffer from the technical issues as much as the PS3 version did, though there were a ton of small bugs and technical glitches. Though the game might seem to run OK, if you've played the original PS2 or Xbox versions of SH2, you would have noticed a pretty big difference.

 

The 360 version suffered from: framerate issues/stutter, random freezes and loading issues, audio sync problems (audio looping and dropping in sample rate, especially noticable when using the sub machine gun). These are all of the technical problems as far as bugs go.

 

I believe the main problem people had with the HD Collection, was the lack of the fog effect, missing textures, and the horrendous water effects. The fog effect is practically completely missing, and as a result, you can se the edge of the game's draw distance (which doesn't look very good). The fog effect was originally intended to hide the PS1's technical limitations, and ended up being used as one of the series' trademark effects in the rest of the games. By limiting the view distance, the developers could amplify the graphics and textures to even greater detail in SH2 & 3.

 

On a related topic, Tomm Hulett recently went public with this statement:

 

"We got all the source code that Konami had on file -- which it turns out wasn't the final release version of the games! D'oh! So during debug we didn't just have to deal with the expected 'porting' bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we'd never seen before. A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point Heather was blue. Ten years ago, a lot of game companies assumed the games were 'done' once development finished, and that they wouldn't need to use that data ever again. Now it's clear that having all that data in an easy-to-manage format is important. Many consumers don't realize you can't just buy a copy of SH2 and then open up its code in a usable state."

 

This of course, sounds like a lame attempt to excuse the poor and lazy port they did of the games. What he says is not true at all, Bluepoint Games (the studio behind GoW HD, Team Ico HD, MGS HD etc) said that they reverse engineer their games, i.e: they use the retail copies of games to acquire all the necessary files in order to hand convert it to HD.

 

Andy O'Neil, president of Bluepoint Games said:

 

"We don't use archive data. We take retail discs of the game and reverse engineer them. That way we can be 100% sure we have all the final retail data and that it matches up. That takes a lot time. Then to get it working, we basically have to go in and change every single piece of data. We get the code and we use that to build a PC version of the game. It's not something meant to ship, so a lot things don't work. It doesn't have sound for example. The engine though is the same, the data layout is the same, so we get that working first. If you have a lot of stuff coming through the VU assembler, you need to do lot of super detailed work to convert it all. We don't emulate any of this stuff, we hand convert it."

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In the Silent Hill HD Collection team's defense, they probably had much less time and money to do this port than BlueHill did with the God of War Collections, etc. No developer wants to put out a buggy game - that's usually a result of pressure from the publisher, either due to a hard release date and insufficient time, or simply refusing to authorize more funding than initially agreed upon.

 

All that said, I'm very disappointed we won't get an update. I had been waiting to play the collection until one came along... Sigh.

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The Xbox 360 version didn't suffer from the technical issues as much as the PS3 version did, though there were a ton of small bugs and technical glitches. Though the game might seem to run OK, if you've played the original PS2 or Xbox versions of SH2, you would have noticed a pretty big difference.

 

Yeah well.... i haven't played the original's so all is good there for me

 

The 360 version suffered from: framerate issues/stutter, random freezes and loading issues, audio sync problems (audio looping and dropping in sample rate, especially noticable when using the sub machine gun). These are all of the technical problems as far as bugs go.

 

Sounds like alot to do with Silent Hill 3.

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Yeah well.... i haven't played the original's so all is good there for me

 

The fog plays a big part in creating Silent Hills unique and eerie atmosphere. A feeling of isolation and loneliness that went missing when the fog effect was removed. If you are not a SH purist, it might not matter to you at all, but for me, it kinda ruined the tension to some degree.

 

Sounds like alot to do with Silent Hill 3.

 

I encountered numerous bugs with audio syncing and framerate issues when playing both SH2 & 3. SH2 had serious problems keeping the framerate where the achievements unlocked, and even AFTER they had been unlocked on my later playthroughs, the framerate still dropped to 2-3 FPS for a few seconds whenever an achievement would have unlocked! Not to mention the result screen. Every damn time, it would sometimes take up to 5 minutes for the results to load! SH3 was more plagued more by the audio bugging out though.

 

My point was that they gave the job to a team who obviously had no idea what they were doing! This might not have been apparent to Konami at first, but when they used as much time porting the games as Team Silent did developing them, the executives at Konami should have given the task to someone more suited for the job, or maybe even pulled the plug completely! The fact that the game was even quality approved, is just an insult to all gamers, as the game was an absolute mess around launch. They sold us an unfinished game, told us they were going to patch it, then tells us they scrapped the patch, but ironically the PS3 version, which was completely unplayable when it came out, now has a patch that makes it run even better than the 360 version...

 

I still enjoyed playing the HD Collection, and it brought back a lot of good memories, along with a lot of new frustrations. It's not terrible by any means, it just isn't anywhere near as good as many of the other HD collections out there. I was hoping for a definitive version of these games, but instead got a half assed port.

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I encountered numerous bugs with audio syncing and framerate issues when playing both SH2 & 3. SH2 had serious problems keeping the framerate where the achievements unlocked, and even AFTER they had been unlocked on my later playthroughs, the framerate still dropped to 2-3 FPS for a few seconds whenever an achievement would have unlocked! Not to mention the result screen. Every damn time, it would sometimes take up to 5 minutes for the results to load! SH3 was more plagued more by the audio bugging out though.

 

Yeah i got the frame rate problems when achievements unlocked but its not like it ruined the game and as for the rest things you've mentioned haven't encountered them, Might be only with the NTSC version this stuff happens with..who knows... my copy is pretty good

 

 

also how was the Metal Gear Solid HD collection?

 

and yeah that's just bullshit if that ones okay and they messed this one up.

Edited by Kazenji
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Yeah i got the frame rate problems when achievements unlocked but its not like it ruined the game and as for the rest things you've mentioned haven't encountered them, Might be only with the NTSC version this stuff happens with..who knows... my copy is pretty good

 

I live in Europe, so I have the PAL version of the game. It seems to vary from person to person, and I know some people who claim to have played through the entire collection with close to no bugs at all, while others traded it in after a few days, as a result of not being able to cope with it.

 

 

also how was the Metal Gear Solid HD collection?

 

The MGS HD collection was flawless compared to SH! All games run at 60fps in full 1080p resolution, including all the content from MGS2 Substance, MGS3 Subsistence and Peace Walker. For Peace Walker, they even added the function to control the camera with the right analog stick, so it resembles modern controls. Out of all the HD collections I've played, this is the best of the bunch. The only one that comes close, is the Team Ico HD Collection.

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My point was that they gave the job to a team who obviously had no idea what they were doing! This might not have been apparent to Konami at first, but when they used as much time porting the games as Team Silent did developing them, the executives at Konami should have given the task to someone more suited for the job, or maybe even pulled the plug completely! The fact that the game was even quality approved, is just an insult to all gamers, as the game was an absolute mess around launch. They sold us an unfinished game, told us they were going to patch it, then tells us they scrapped the patch, but ironically the PS3 version, which was completely unplayable when it came out, now has a patch that makes it run even better than the 360 version...

 

As I said already... Problems like this almost never result from the team just not being good enough. It's a time, money, and resources issue. They were given less than the resources they agreed upon (full source code), and then it's extremely likely they had to stick with the originally agreed upon date. As a result, they didn't have enough time to iron out the kinks they'd have liked. I feel that Konami is to blame in this case for sticking to a hard date instead of delaying the games until they could be polished.

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The MGS HD collection was flawless compared to SH! All games run at 60fps in full 1080p resolution, including all the content from MGS2 Substance, MGS3 Subsistence and Peace Walker. For Peace Walker, they even added the function to control the camera with the right analog stick, so it resembles modern controls. Out of all the HD collections I've played, this is the best of the bunch. The only one that comes close, is the Team Ico HD Collection.

 

Next HD collection from Konami is Zone Of The Enders, Lets see how that one turns out.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yet another example of why Konami doesn't give a shizzle about one of their best-selling series. Re-porting a game to next-gen consoles without access to the complete code/sources and therefore with otherwise-fixable issues, announcing a life-saving patch and then canceling it while still expecting people to buy the collection. Not paying a penny to the original actors. Clear as day that their main goal is money.

 

Nonetheless this is a big disappointment, because I'm getting tired of the audio-looping issues present in BOTH Silent Hill 2 and 3. Now I'll have to live with it until I can afford to buy another PS2 with the original game. My boyfriend, who also got the HD collection for the 360 said he often experiences frame-rate issues with the cutscenes. Sometimes when a notification pops up on his screen the cutscene will literally slow down to frame-by-frame.

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tbh, When I first played this collection, I thought it was great, then they said they were gonna patch it, so I started to look at the differences from the original game, I stopped playing right there, thinking might as well wait for the patch to come out.

 

but what is so frustrating now is that i've waited for a few months to play it again and now they just cancel it... They should never have promised a patch!

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What really bugs me about developers lately full stop is the amount of games that come out incomplete and require a patch, some of them on release day.

 

The XBOX360 updates are not too bad, compared to the 1gb+ patches you get for the PS3 that have 10mb patches on 360, but still it is a maximum of 2 platforms these days.

 

PC gaming has always been a challenge of versitility for developers, getting the games to work on an infinate combination of hardware/software combinations.

 

Now most developers ignore the PC and concentrate on XBOX360 or PS3, that's 2 possible combinations (OK there are slight variances but Sony and Microsoft lay it all on the line and try and keep it simple).

 

If you cannot manage it on 2 variations, you shouldn't be making games.

 

Bring back the days of the offline consoles such as the PS2, hell even the megadrive. Sure there were bad games out there but they were few and far between and usually by bad developers that did not live out the year.

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  • 3 months later...
As I said already... Problems like this almost never result from the team just not being good enough. It's a time, money, and resources issue. They were given less than the resources they agreed upon (full source code), and then it's extremely likely they had to stick with the originally agreed upon date. As a result, they didn't have enough time to iron out the kinks they'd have liked. I feel that Konami is to blame in this case for sticking to a hard date instead of delaying the games until they could be polished.

 

I disagree fully. Hijinks studios had released a Frogger game, a mediocre XBLA game called Vandal Hearts and a DS game called Touchmaster 3...that's it. Konami decided to hand over one of their most beloved series to a completely unqualified company and they did as well as one could imagine, the fact the game was even released in this state is an insult. I refuse to accept that this had anything to do with a lack of development time or resources. As stated earlier in the thread, Blue Point studios released a flawless HD collection for Metal Gear due to the fact of them reverse engineering the retail copies of the game. Hijinx studios could of followed suit, they were not bound to the source code they got from Konami and if they were even half competent they would of done the same thing and it's as simple as that. Instead, they released an unfinished buggy game and people paid money for it, it's an insult.

 

I can not see how you could even argue the fact that these people were qualified to take on this project, they were not, in any way. It was nobodies fault but theirs that this game turned out the way it did, the fact that they even credited the QA testers is just flat out embarrassing...it's just not even a valid argument.

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I can not see how you could even argue the fact that these people were qualified to take on this project, they were not, in any way. It was nobodies fault but theirs that this game turned out the way it did, the fact that they even credited the QA testers is just flat out embarrassing...it's just not even a valid argument.

 

You really don't seem to understand how game development works. When little development studios like this take on a project for a publisher, they are very much at that publisher's mercy. If they don't meet milestones and complete the project by the originally agreed upon date, they don't get paid and often go bankrupt as a result. Should the publisher have unrealistic demands (as they often do), the dev has no choice but to comply and do the best they can to finish the project.

 

Sometimes when a game ends up 'bad,' it's because the development studio itself was mismanaged, and that's certainly a possibility here. But it's absolutely always the publisher's decision when to ship the product; they could always choose to give the devs more time to polish. The developer won't say no because they want to get paid more.

 

What another developer accomplished with Metal Gear Solid or a different game isn't relevant because we're not privy to the details of that development agreement, nor the time and budget allotted to that project. Given that Silent Hill: Downpour was also released in a less-than-polished state, it's clear that Konami considers Silent Hill a lower priority franchise than Metal Gear.

Edited by eastx
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  • 3 weeks later...

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