It happened with the PS1.
It happened with the PS2.
It happened with the PS3.
Every console when new needs a break in period for the developers. It happens. It takes time to learn new hardware and be able to push the console to new heights.
That's a completely different thing. If you recall those early days of 128 bit gaming, developers loved the PS1, compared to the clunky dual-processor Saturn and cartridge hampered N64. It required some learning as it was very advanced, but it was a straightforward architecture and very powerful. early games wowed us, though they were of course much better three and four years down the road. That's just the nature of learning how to use new technology, whether that technology is comprehensible or arcane.
"Technical issues" usually mean unstable hardware or hard-to-develop-on hardware. While PS3 wasn't unstable, it was difficult to come to grips with, much as PS2 was, because of an unorthodox architecture, although in PS2's case it was mostly a very stingy 4 megs of VRam. However the PS3 has to be coded in much the same way in many aspects, with the game code and graphic assets built in easy to shuffle chunks which can be loaded into and dumped from the working memory of the Cell's cores.
SONY knew that such an unorthodox architecture would be a problem in coming to terms with early for many developers, and so encouraged the devs to share techniques and custom tools with each other to speed things up. And so, pre-release stuff with most games looked as good as 360 games that were out after a year. It was a pain to accomplish at first, but this pool of knowledge made PS3 games quite advanced with the number of objects in the playfield with attached actions, A.I. and physical properties.
If you recall those early days when GT HD was released, critics openly downplayed the potential of it, asking how many cars of that extreme quality could be running around tracks of that quality at once. Early shots of Prologue only had four or five cars, maybe six, causing us to fret that we might be having the same six car races in GT5 we always had, while Forza had eight of near the same quality, and with custom liveries. Then of course came that epic trailer at E3 with sixteen cars, and the world had a spasm of excitement, causing Prologue to be a platinum seller from pre-sales alone.
In contrast, first gen PS2 games were criticized for only looking as good as last gen PS1 games, and many people slammed the PS2 for an unnecessary switch to the then-expensive DVD format, wondering when games would need anywhere near that much space. That didn't take long to resolve.
SONY learned their lesson from the PS2. Make a complicated unorthodox system, give as many helping hands to your developers as possible, and this time it worked pretty well. There was no confusing Ridge Racer 7 on PS3 with RR6 on PS2. They also learned their lesson on making powerful but unorthodox architectures for their systems, which I'll get into below.
You think that a launch game,on PS4, will look as impressive as GT5 is after PD took 5 years to learn the hardware? Going by that the PS4 hardware would need to be finalized last year and in the hands of Developers.
Not really. First year Wii games were made on overclocked GameCube dev kits, even though the Wii was a different platform with different chipsets and a slightly different architecture. And apparently, SONY has finalized the PS4 architecture for the most part, as revealed by
this article in the Japanese press. And something has to have been revealed to developers, since the key first party devs have been asked to help design the PS4, the OS, and tools for it. And a strong rumor that at least one developer is now working on a PS4 release game, with the prime candidates being Santa Monica Studios, Naughty Dog and Polyphony Digital. And with GT5 pushing the PS3 hardware extremely hard and coming up a little short, demanding a lot of power for three key aspects which are processor intensive: artificial intelligence, physics and near photo-real graphics, you have to know that Kaz will be keen to not only put in his 200 yen on PS4, but get to work on it ASAP.
As vandalizer says, every first year PS3 game looks better than the latest PS2 games, though the situation is a little different now. This is the HD age, and so resolutions aren't going to make a huge jump. Sure, the resolution is probably going to be full 1080p, which compared to 720p with some AA isn't much different. But, there won't be framerate slowdown, or screen tearing, or yucky particle effects, or jaggies - and you guys who complain about seeing pixels at 1080 resolution are just strange.
Whatever PS4 ends up being, the architecture will be built to be way more developer friendly, as PS1 was. It will have a much more powerful GPU, most likely bolstered with SPEs of some kind for even more capability and flamboyant effects. And the main issue with the PS3, LOTS more ram with good bandwidth, so stuff won't have to be shuffled around nearly as much.
How much better a Gran Turismo will look on PS4, I'm not sure, but just take care of the issues in GT5, and the improvement will be darn good enough to make us all very happy.
