So I was reading this interesting article on wired.com tonight that had occured to me before but I never really gave it much extra thought. This guy is talking about how in Ninja Gaiden II the bodies of the people you kill don't disappear. Quoted below are the first few lines of the two page article, link to the article follows. What do you guys think?

 

Something quite interesting happens in the first few minutes of Ninja Gaiden II: The dead people don't vanish.

 

About five minutes into the game, I finished my first battle, and it was a grisly spectacle of carnage. I'd killed about seven guys, and their corpses lay scattered about. Then I went around the corner to save my progress at the "sacred statue."

 

When I turned around ... the bodies were still there.

 

All seven of them. Everything was intact: the fractal flowers of blood on the walls, the body pieces I'd severed from their hosts -- a couple of legs, a stray arm -- scattered like doll parts.

 

Why was this so weird? Because the bodies weren't gone.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/06/gamesfrontiers_0603

:thumbsup: -Not quite as deep as he thinks...Graphics cards now have the memory to keep casualties around.

:thumbsup: -Not quite as deep as he thinks...Graphics cards now have the memory to keep casualties around.

Exactly.

 

It's not that game developers thought it would be too graphic to wade through the bodies in World of Warcraft's Azeroth, to use his example, or whatever else... it's that your console/PC would fall to its knees and beg for mercy because there would be so much to render.