Comments 834

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Has Been in Development for a Year on PS5

SirAngry

@God_of_Nowt yeah... RT is da bomb, might come back and bite a few people hard. Have you seen the DmC5 RT implementation? I cracked up. It's overkill and actually makes the scenes look faker. This is the problem with most new graphical techniques, people want to see them, whereas truth be told if they're adding to the image quality of any given frame holistically and synergistically you probably shouldn't have it jump out and poke you in the eyeballs. But... it's same as it ever was. I have to say RT does have the capability to reduce asset bloat though in terms of "junk maps" and shadows and multiples of models in different lighting conditions... but yeah, it's not a cure all that'll make games intrinsically better.

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Has Been in Development for a Year on PS5

SirAngry

@torne I have a sneaky suspicion you might see another Insomniac game in-between Ratchet & Clank and Spider-Man 2. Probably in 2022. Insomniac are a very large studio, I know for certain they're at least 300 strong, but have been recruiting like crazy over the last 2 years since that figure was revealed to me, so @insertUsername probably isn't far off when they say they're probably 350 strong at least. However, more than 10 people will have worked on this. But what people don't grasp is that in modern studios now it's normally only a very small nucleus that works solely on any project, and the rest are just floating resources that flit between projects. There's also external support studios and freelancers who get roped in to do things. Insomniacs network of support will probably extend to other first party studios as well. However, none of that matters, in and of itself this remaster will have value not only to the studio in terms of income, but knowledge.

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Has Been in Development for a Year on PS5

SirAngry

@RedShirtRod I can answer that, it's not an either or situation. The work anyone does within their profession adds to their practical knowledge, praxis is vitally important in design work, and in particular games, iteration and incremental learning from this absolutely will have fed into both Spider-Man Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2. Any learning taken from this will absolutely speed up development of and improve Spider-Man 2... especially with the analysis tools Sony make available.

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Has Been in Development for a Year on PS5

SirAngry

@God_of_Nowt I do think our industry has a bit of a problem communicating openly with customers though. Would it really take all that much to be a little open about the crap we get up to? We hide away and let the PR teams employ special effects studios to produce CGI rendered films of games that will never exist, well, not in that form any way. E3 always used to make me shudder when I knew a game was going to be "shown" for the first time. Then came the crushing knowledge that you'd never achieve what that special effects studio put out in a million years and you'd get the "downgraded" comments when the game was finally shown. I've looked at this "remaster" of Spider-Man, as I'm sure you have, and the frame pacing looks damn solid, and the LoD into the distance is pretty insane actually, as are the higher quality assets being used pretty much throughout. However, I can say, that maybe sitting on your sofa 6' to 10' away... maybe it won't be as noticeable to your average gamers. So I get it.

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Has Been in Development for a Year on PS5

SirAngry

@Arugula man if I had a dollar for every old game I got up and running on new hardware as a studio learning exercise... I'd have $2's... lol. But it is quite a common thing to do. It's work that never used to see the light of day, just something studios did to figure out where the kinks were in new SDKs / hardware. Normally conducted by the tech team. Now it involves a lot more departments, and somebody shoves it out the door and slaps a price on it. I can understand why some consumers think it sucks as a practice, I really do, but from the other side of things I think if a studio can get money for old rope you've just cleaned up a bit why not? Helping the bottom line while learning from a studios perspective just makes a lot of sense.

Re: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Has Been in Development for a Year on PS5

SirAngry

@Arugula I'm not sure you should, or anyone should look at it as a waste of resources. Firstly for Sony, doing what they did, converting the game was proof of a few concepts, and for Insomniac themselves it will have been a learning exercise, and will have fed into the studios knowledge about the new hardware. It's quite common as an exercise in studios to try and get older games up and running on new hardware and see where you can push it, with the comfort of a finished product, and then analyse system usage. I bet it's what CDPR did with the Witcher 3, it's just that rather than leaving this stuff as internal and valuable learning exercises, it now gets pumped out as a remaster. So it's cash for learning, which makes sense from a profit stand point, but I can't help thinking Microsoft's approach to just putting the work out as free updates for games will earn them more good will... but is that bankable?

Re: PS5 Game Returnal Looks Amazing in New Screenshot, Plus More Details

SirAngry

As others have said, I really, really trust Housemarque, since the days of Superstar Dust HD I've been a fan of them and their twin stick / bullet hell arcade games. Nex Machina was a masterpiece. I've always wondered what they'd be able to do with a bigger budget and a grander scope. Vanquish always felt like a game Housemarque could've made to me if it had been given the financial support, so Returnal is definitely on my personal radar, and given they've never personally let me down this is likely to be a day 1 purchase for me.

Re: Rumour: Your PS4 Saves May Not Work on All Upgraded PS5 Games

SirAngry

@Oz_Momotaro if that was your point, then making it to me was redundant as I'd already made the point. I was responding to a question @JapaneseSonic asked as to why this might be the case. For the record a game using the "same engine" does not mean that the code, or even how it is structured is the same across platforms. Not even remotely. I don't want to get into a discussion about it because we're on the same page in general, and I was only answering a question for Japanese sonic.

Re: Rumour: Your PS4 Saves May Not Work on All Upgraded PS5 Games

SirAngry

@Oz_Momotaro also read my comments again, I clearly say if teams planned for it it's simple. If they didn't well, sorry, but I've seen teams on different versions of the same game diverge massively in terms of how a game us put together... and it's a nightmare. It's becoming less and less common, but it does still happen from time to time. There are however other reasons as to why save files might not transfer over, and that could be by design.

Re: Rumour: Your PS4 Saves May Not Work on All Upgraded PS5 Games

SirAngry

@Oz_Momotaro it does if you've ever developed a game. A well managed team, with good project managers that lay out ground rules and standardized naming and tagging conventions for code absolutely should have no problems, and probably will have save files that will carry across generations. Not all teams work likd that with well managed agile work environments. Save files relate to tags in code, it's as simple as that, and quite often between platforms / generations that code can look significantly different. So taking a file which relies on one set of tags and trying to get it recognised by a similar but different set of code, which doesn't use the same tags would require some kind of conversion process. If you plan for it, it's simple, really simple. If you don't you can end up with problems like these.

Re: Rumour: Your PS4 Saves May Not Work on Upgraded PS5 Games

SirAngry

@JapaneseSonic I could go into more detail about what save files are, but I'd probably bore the pants off people. The simple thing is this, games are just a series of instructions, "if this then this" sort of stuff, and how games are structured to run on one system, might not always be the same on another, it might be less optimal on one system to log progress with certain tags. So getting the game to read the file might not be possible without some sort of conversion of the original save file values to a format the upgraded game version uses. Clever developers will have built work arounds into their work flows and project management... others might have not done so for various reasons. I'll leave others to judge what those reasons are.

Re: Rumour: Your PS4 Saves May Not Work on Upgraded PS5 Games

SirAngry

@JapaneseSonic well yes, it could be an easy fix, depending on the game. We are however essentially talking about completely different games when you move from PS4 to PS5 in many cases, and save files might differ because of it. There are games within generations that suffer this problem because of the way the save file data is formatted. For instance my disc copy of Horizon Zero Dawn got a scratch on it somehow, no idea how, not important, so I bought the complete edition, my save didn't carry over. However, writing a conversion program to upload saves to shouldn't be too onerous. I think Gearbox did it if I'm not much mistaken with Borderlands 2 with PS3 to PS4 saves. I'm sure I read a paper on it. Wouldn't be too much work I'd have thought in most cases. The difference is Microsoft planned for this, Sony did not, it wasn't part of there strategy. They were fine if that's what developers wanted to do, but they didn't mandate it like Microsoft did. So it's extra work the platform holder isn't required, which sucks, because if they don't "have to" quite often they won't bother. I'm pretty certain it'll be a mixed bag. I expect Cyberpunk and maybe Ubisoft to support transfer saves, but some others? I'm not so sure, and there's not likely to be a uniform way of doing it either.

Re: Soapbox: The Week After PS5's Showcase, Sony Told Us Nothing About Its Next-Gen Console

SirAngry

@rpg2000 I agree on the Oodle news, it's pretty big news. The one thing that didn't compress well on the PS5 were textures. That's gone now, the PS5 I/O has the ability to shift between 15 to 17GB/s depending on your game and file types. It's thoroughly mental. The decision to make the I/O upgradable via firmware update is possibly the most important decision either console manufacturer made.

Re: Soapbox: The Week After PS5's Showcase, Sony Told Us Nothing About Its Next-Gen Console

SirAngry

@God_of_Nowt it's thoroughly bizarre isn't it? They've been so far ahead of Microsoft in terms of talking to developers and providing SDKs and regular updates and feedback from what their first parties are doing / have discovered. It really stands in stark contrast to how they are communicating with their customers.

@Sprybry I think you were the one talking about Oodle. It won't reduce game file sizes by 50%. It's just a compression system that is exceedingly good at compressing texture maps, and other map types, where patterns are normally far more difficult to determine. Oodle is actually part of Kraken, or at least an extension of it, for only one aspect of art resources in the game. Textures do make up a large proportion of a games file size, but so do meshes and other assets (@God_of_Nowt could tell you more about the struggle to create art assets that compress well). Kraken is actually exceedingly good at compressing most things, code included. The one major oversight in the PS5's throughput was large textures, the SSDs raw speed would probably have been utterly fine, but now? Well, it's nice. Very nice. Don't know if the SDK is updated already, but I'll be super interested to see how it performs, if it performs half as well as advertised we could be looking at filling the system RAM in roughly a second. There has been a dream in computer game development, the "as you need it" dream. Essentially the idea is that if you could move something from storage into RAM or straight to the GPU/CPU the moment you needed it, you could have all your computational resources going towards that specific frame. The PS5 isn't quite there yet, but it is damn close, really damn close.

Re: Soapbox: The Week After PS5's Showcase, Sony Told Us Nothing About Its Next-Gen Console

SirAngry

The communication to the outside world from Sony has been utterly appalling. Under Jim Ryan they've been a bit of a joke, he's not exactly inspiring confidence, and many of the blunders can be laid at the feet of him and his executive team. Whoever is in charge of marketing and communications needs to go. They've been awful. When they put together a show they're slick, but their dissemination of information has been at a glacial pace, and there's far too much consumers still don't know about the PS5. Far too much. Where's the teardown Mark Cerny? It's utterly baffling at this point, and simply isn't good enough.

Re: Did SEGA Just Tease a New Virtua Fighter Game?

SirAngry

@pip_muzz indeed, the DNA of DoA is pretty much Virtua Fighter... except the ridiculous breast physics... and subtlety in move set. Virtua Fighter was my go to after SFII. I liked Tekken, but it never felt as tight or engaging as the VF games. Also had soft spots for Fighting Vipers and even Last Bronx. Shame Sega abdicated from the fighting scene, I'd love to see Virtua Fighter make a come back.

Re: Resident Evil Village May Also Come to PS4, Capcom 'Looking Into It'

SirAngry

@Stocksy you can't spend $200m to $300m on developing a game for next-gen consoles only, there aren't the numbers there. That's normally what first party games are there for, to advertise and exploit fully the hardware, which is what makes Sony's cross-gen support so disappointing. A platform holder normally forces adoption by developing exclusives. Maybe this time will be different, but to start developing for next-gen only developers / publishers need a wedge of cash, or a large install base. Give us 25m + consoles in a launch year and you'll see teams start switching off current-gen development.

Re: Resident Evil Village May Also Come to PS4, Capcom 'Looking Into It'

SirAngry

@nessisonett I actually think the switch between generations for the first time in a long time is causing some headaches. There are just things you can do on next-gen that you can't on current-gen and even high end PCs. So if you go too far down that next-gen rabbit hole and lean of massive amounts of asset streaming teams quickly find themselves not being able to shoehorn a game onto the PS4, which at this stage for most third parties would be a disaster. The install base for next-gen just can't support next-gen only development for sometime I'd imagine.

Re: Resident Evil Village May Also Come to PS4, Capcom 'Looking Into It'

SirAngry

Well it started development on current-gen consoles and migrated because they were having problems with it on X1 and PS4. They shifted focus to next-gen. Maybe after shipping on next-gen they can get round to hacking it up to shoehorn into the older systems, but those CPUs are really starting to cause serious issues.

Re: New Sony Patent Shows Potential Next-Gen PSVR Controllers Once Again

SirAngry

@thefourfoldroot I haven't seen the prototypes or anything, but Sony have been supposedly working hard on new controllers for PSVR, and fixing issues with the headset. I think they're locked into releasing a new PSVR2, just don't think it'll be in the first year of PS5. Their focus will surely be on getting that sold.

Re: New Sony Patent Shows Potential Next-Gen PSVR Controllers Once Again

SirAngry

@thefourfoldroot PSVR2 is already quite a long way along it's development path though. They've been trying out new controller types, and much of the tech in the PS5 is there, in my opinion, specifically to support a hi-def and fidelity wireless headset. So part of me thinks there's a far larger synergy this time between the headset and console. It'll come, but I think in 2022.

Re: New Sony Patent Shows Potential Next-Gen PSVR Controllers Once Again

SirAngry

@thefourfoldroot there's already rumblings about the money they spend and focus on VR. It's not cheap. However, it's been a profitable endeavour for them so far, and I think coupled with the PS5 then VR could really take off if they get it right. I wouldn't want them throwing the towel in just yet. However, as I intimated a few days ago, Amazon has moved into the gaming space, we're expecting Apple to make a play at some point next year, and Facebook too... so Sony might need to focus all their resources on their core gaming business.

Re: This Could Be the First PS5 Compatible SSD

SirAngry

@Medic_Alert as others have said I think Sony are scared if proprietary storage ever since the the PS Vita, which is a shame, because in the case of the PS5 it really, really makes sense. If either next-gen system really deserved bespoke storage it's the PS5.

@nessisonett as I've said above, the PS5 really needed to bespoke storage, and ironically the XSS|X could've done with the off the shelf route, because those systems could go with beefier options and much of their architecture isn't specifically built around a set SSD paradigm.

Re: Mini Review: Crysis Remastered - A Poor Remaster of a Pretty Important Game

SirAngry

If ever there was a studio that needed an arm around it, and guidance, it was Crytek. Outstanding technical team, some truly amazing artists... just lackluster or confusing design... like the bow and arrow in Crysis 3 essentially being a howitzer and all the modern military firearms essentially being pea shooters in comparison. All three Crysis games were on the verge of being very good, with 2 probably being the best from a gameplay / narrative perspective.

Re: This Could Be the First PS5 Compatible SSD

SirAngry

@Medic_Alert I've said the same. Ironically given Microsoft's more "limited" SSD them going the open market route would've been better for them. Meanwhile Sony's drive is so bloody unique that they really should have gone proprietary.

Re: This Could Be the First PS5 Compatible SSD

SirAngry

@MoorePs4 expandable. The PS5's internal SSD can't be removed.

As to the price / compatibility of these drives, Sony won't release drives, and until we get that tear down and info from Cerny / Sony we just don't know if it's compatible, but proprietary drives is Microsoft's plan and letting the market decide is Sony's. Both have merits and pitfalls.

Re: Poll: Has Xbox's Bethesda Buyout Made You Reconsider a PS5 Purchase?

SirAngry

For me it's a solid no. I get PlayStation's, like Nintendo consoles, primarily for first party exclusive games, those will still be on PS5 / Switch. Also most of my friends / former colleagues game on PSN, have done since the days of PS3, it's how we keep in touch mostly nowadays as we"re flung to the four corners of the earth. I don"t need an Xbox to access Game Pass or MS games because I have a gaming PC... soon to have a much better and smaller gaming PC, so I have no real need for an Xbox. But I understand for others that's different.

Re: Rumour: Bloodborne Remaster Is Real, Coming to PS5 and PC

SirAngry

I have absolutely no idea why Red Gaming Tech is suddenly considered a reliable source on game leaks. PC hardware and AMD related tech news, sure, maybe, he has an OK track record there, but certainly not spotless... but games? No. Sorry, methinks he's trying to drive viewing figures and subscribers.