SirAngry

@Mergatro1d I mostly just want to play games on a console, and occasionally chat with friends / maybe play together. Everything else is just noise to me... but I guess some people like this stuff.

@resigamer28 you say that... but...

@Mergatro1d but can it TikTok?

@kyleforrester87 depends if it is a remake, or a reimagining. I'd be interested to see what the project is first before I got excited. However, this is Konami, and quite frankly I just don't thinj they're interested in making games any more. They should've sold their gaming division years ago when it was worth something with limited rights to IP.l, i.e. you can only make videogames with these IPs but we retain all other rights.

@Ridwaano they didn't say that, they said at the very least it would hit a locked 30 FPS and they were targeting higher frames. I think given the team were working during a pandemic, with new hardware, and a new iteration of the AnvilNext Engine, that was a wise thing to say. I however had no doubts they'd hit 4K 60 FPS.

And just like I said it would. What a surprise. If there is a difference this time around it won't be HUGE.

@Rob_230 level-5 and Nintendo has been scuttlebutt in the industry since mid 2019. The big N has been sniffing around a few Japanese developers ever since the Switch took off. Whether anything comes of it I don't know, but the prospect might be enough to force Sony's hand.

@get2sammyb thanks, every now and then I make sense and raise good points combined. It's very rare, but it does happen. Do I expect Sony to make acquisitions? Yes. However, not in response to Microsoft yesterday, Sony have been eying up studios for a few years now, they have identified areas where they feel they're somewhat "weak" apparently. Online competitive games, racing, FPS games, RPGs and horror. When you look at the IPs they've let go dormant I'm not sure they need more IP, just maybe people to revive what they already have.

I've commented on the forums about this already, but I guess I'll put my considered thoughts down here on it as well. Buying Zenimax was a big a hugely expensive move. But it's one whose ramifications won't be felt for years. Talking to a former Ubisoft manager about it yesterday he made a point I thought was interesting, Take-Two, Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard won't be happy, none of them wish to see games become a devalued value proposition via something like Game Pass. For Ubisoft having to engage with Game Pass would spell the end for many of the games they produce, and Take-Two openly view Game Pass as competition for gamers money. So while it undoubtedly makes Game Pass way more attractive, it also probably makes many third parties even more wary of where MS are taking the industry.

I also don't see this as an Xbox move, this is more a Game Pass move, which yeah, is inextricably linked to Xbox right now, but is clearly diversifying away from it. This is a move to shore up Games Pass and MS in the gaming sector against large predatory tech firms like Google (Stadia) Facebook, Amazon and Apple who all seem to be eying the sector enviously. If anything this could be viewed more as an MS warning shot to them. It'll be interesting to see if Google respond more than Sony.

As to Sony, I'm not sure they will respond, although with Nintendo rumoured to be sniffing round studios like Level-5 and Platinum then their hands might get forced. My fear is that this triggers a series of "consolidation" moves within the industry, which is not consumer friendly, as this is the form of exclusitory capitalism that never serves the consumer and seeks to make other companies offerings look worse rather than making the prime companies offerings better. So please don't wish for your favourite corporation to make things worse for others.

So what could be Sony's moves? Well smaller studios most likely, who are financially precarious, or who they've had a relationship with. Buying Ubisoft or Capcom? No way, they don't have that sort of cash, and even if they did such a move would get out, start a bidding war and price Sony out of any such deal any way. So don't expect any big splash, but probably smaller single studio acquisitions and continuing to grow current studios. Sony actually provide a good cautionary tale about owning too many Studios, the list they've closed down is long, Studio Liverpool, Soho, Cambridge, Evolution, 989 Studios, 541, Zipper, Incognito and a few more. I do think Sony need to expand their first party offerings, I'm just not sure they'll do that via acquisitions.

@LeeHarveyOzgod sorry, but that is literally what they have done. They've just said all Bethesda / Zenimax games are going day and date to Game Pass. They clearly don't care about game sales. I'm not being a fanboy about it, just saying it as I see it. They've spent $7.5bn to make Game Pass attractive, and the best way for most to access Game Pass will be via an Xbox console. It's a baller move. Sony might respond, but they don't have the cash to get into toe to toe fights with Microsoft.

I think it's pretty much guaranteed they'll switch to Xbox and PC exclusively at some point. You don't spend $7.5bn to not gain some form of market advantage for your core business. Sony couldn't pull a move like this. No way.

@KathyQ I don't know, the price of games next-gen has taken over as biggest jump scare for me.

@SnakeDoctor I think micro-deletion should be possible with a little bit of effort from developers. It's probably a pain in the A'hole task, but if you incorporate it into your NBT Tags at the begining of development and in you development protocols it's possible. The only issue I could see is the rolling impact it'd have on the QA process as games change during development. For some titles it could be way more hassle than it is worth as well, but essentially we already know what data comprises sections of the game, because we know when to load it into RAM. Moving similar protocols over to managing the data in storage devices isn't too big of a technical leap from there, it's more of a man power issue, or having highly organised project managers who are on at their teams to maintain tidy code.

@get2sammyb It'll be on PS5 I'm almost certain of it. I also do not believe any of the rumours around this game from social media at all. The RE engine isn't exactly taxing, and unless they are implementing an exceedingly greedy form of ray tracing I can't see it really pushing the hardware. For reference DMC5 Special Edition is using the exact same engine, and has really overdone the RT and that seems to be running fine. I can imagine them having a frame pacing issue, but that's their software, rather than hardware it's running on. RE7 had frame pacing issues as well.

@SnakeDoctor you did, a few comments above, #223 to be precise. lol. I've had discussions with project leads on linear level based games about possible "rolling deletion" as you complete a level giving players the ability to delete that part of the game. Or install a part of a game from a trophy guide that shows you a specific place to get a specific achievement. All of that is technically possible if developers and platform holders choose to support it. It might be way more difficult in an open world game though, unless there was a way you could incorporate the hard edge to the map thematically, like say with Assassin's Creed games with the Animus, which could give you a thematic "out" as it were. I guess with something like Spider-Man you could delete the components that relate the the main story, or DLC after playing them though. I still think rather than allowing very fine micro management of game installs we're more likely to see players being able to install or delete specific game modes like multiplayer or single player, but in some cases that could provide significant space saving. I also expect compression to get better as we go along, but having seen the assets some art directors now want to include in games, I'm genuinely surprised the installs for these two games are so reasonable.

This generation will see far more split games. Where you can delete a proportion of the game once you're done with it. So say you're playing the single player, don't install the multiplayer part. Or vice versa. Even had discussions with some about whether you could essentially delete highly specific portions of a game, like a level. Or indeed install just s fraction of a game that relates to an achievement / trophy. It's actually possible with an SSD as it opens these possibilities up. It's just whether MS or Sony support these possibilities. But online / single player only installs will be a thing.

The FP32 difference between the Switch and the PS4 is roughly the 84% uplift in favour of the PS4. The Switch actually has very different GPU architecture as well, and CPU for that matter, much of which means it's able to handle geometry far better than you'd think the paper specs would suggest. Even so it is dwarfed by the PS4 in performance. But it is still far more comparable to the PS4, than the PS4 is to the PS5, and CDPR had to completely rewrite how much of their game, and engine worked to fit it onto the Switch. In many respects the Switch version of the Witcher 3 is an "imposter" using different "techniques" to simulate and emulate it's bigger brother.

I too think there's some cheating going on. It is far from my area of expertise, but I'm assuming they are selectively tracing certain things at lower resolutions, and possibly interpolating to reconstruct a higher quality image. I'll have to read their papers / go to their talks when Covid finally gets sorted, because I thought both R&C and SS:MM seemingly achieved a hell of a lot, with what looks on the surface a very small hit, and possibly a small computational footprint. They could also be faking some of the stuff further away from the focal point on screen and then blending in the RT as the object moves closer to the screen foreground. Almost like RT LoD, but I'm just guessing. It has a nice quality to it though, and I think their subtle approach leads to a more natural image than some of the in your face stuff I've seen which just doesn't look "real" to me. I think we're going to go through a stage where if the RT isn't in your face and turned up to 11 gamers will think it looks pants, but we'll evolve to use it more subtly and selectively to create more natural looking scenes. It'll be a journey that's for sure!

@God_of_Nowt firstly I currently don't work anywhere officially. I just answer emails on things I may or may not have messed up. lol.

As to SS:MM I'm glad it's not just me that is impressed with what they've done. They're already able to optimise what little deployment of RT they have to get as big an impact on image quality. I noticed certain things we're omitted. It could've be mistakes though, but in the walking section some of the crowd were clearly included in the reflections while others weren't, obviously the nicely fluid simulated smoke was omitted too... but the snow wasn't and that had deformation applied. Wizardry I tell you, wizardry. I was surprised by the amount actually included, although I'm wondering whether they ramp it up and down depending on whether you are taking a nice leisurely stroll at street level, or whether you are swinging like a loon through the city. I'm sure they are scaling it, but either way, they're able to achieve a quality of frame image that's above what I expected for a launch game... and don't get me started on Demon's Souls... Sploosh.

@God_of_Nowt I was thinking more about how their bounding volume hierarchy was used within their ray tracing model.

"it is about a first impression and wow factor. i did not get that feeling with miles morales — perhaps it more had to do with the content being predictable."

@Porco I can't argue with your subjective first impression. I won't argue that what you saw with SS:MM wasn't based on a kernel that is very much based in current-gen paradigms that's totally true, with various next-gen technologies and techniques liberally sprinkled in there. That's exactly what it was, but I found it very impressive. I thought what they achieved was impressive.

@Porco have you seen the videos at 4K. Because I can assure you it looked gorgeous, and the physics based deformation was top notch. As to the walking section, couldn't disagree more, and many of the artists I've worked with were gushing about the specular maps deployed in some areas and the differing physical qualities of objects and how they interacted with light. If you think that compares to PS4 models I don't know what to tell you, but I assure you from what I saw I wouldn't be surprised if the Miles model contained almost as many polygons as the PS4 can display.

@God_of_Nowt quick question, I'm no graphics expert, but clearly SS:MM was using a form of BVH, with various things excluded or occluded within the hierarchy, but what sort of BVH do you think they deployed?

@Porco while I agree with the gist of what you are saying, if you think the lighting, particle effects... which also acted as real-time light sources, and character models, PBR, physics and fluid simulation were subpar in Miles Morales, that's where we disagree.

@AdamNovice actually not necessarily. You take a game like GTA V and you can see it is technically possible with aggressive LoD management and careful use of billboards (2D assets deployed in lieu of 3D meshes to give the illusion of draw distance). I actually have zero doubt that the technical team at Guerilla could do that within the Decima Engine on PS4 and their artists are some of the best there are, and could definitely hide those transitions. The issues are around developing / generating those billboards. This is actually a perfect example of how ironically next-gen development might be easier. Rather than having to generate all those extra assets, on next-gen it'll just scale meshes in real-time from full assets... or that's the plan.

@theheadofabroom ah optimising code... those were the days. Now it's mostly about hiding the hatchet job you've done and praying to the machine God that when it gets to Q&A it doesn't all fall apart in a great big steaming mess of your own inadequacies... not that I'm neurotic or anything.

@God_of_Nowt they're actually a great company / publisher to work for. Wouldn't want people thinking they pay badly, or that their HR teams don't support staff, they do. But the pressure put on people at the top is forced slowly down through the organisation, and at no level do I see managers or leads trying to shoulder that burden, they just magnify and transfer it. It's not a great culture to be honest. Maybe I just didn't fit. I jumped ship from a team in Malmö that maybe I should've stuck with, I'm back down south now, and happier for it. Still, learned a lot and I guess I'll take that with me. Any way nice talking, their are actually three other Devs on here who don't make it so clear that's what they are. You'll probably spot them by their acerbic wit and nihilism.

@God_of_Nowt yeah, I thought mention of Sweden and nightmare project managers might give the game away somewhat. I'll just say the horror stories don't do the place justice, and everything you read on Glass Door you can multiply tenfold. It's a shame, because there are great people there, and all in all it's not a bad place to work. Maybe it's just not for me, or anyone else who expects to be treated with respect and dignity. lol.

@God_of_Nowt well... I'm currently on a sort of sabbatical. I've done freelance work with a few studios here in Sweden for the past two years after having a nervous breakdown of sorts. Been doing this for just over 20 years and I just got burnt out on a project where I just couldn't face a project manager who... didn't understand what they were asking wasn't possible with the tools at our disposal. I had one too many hair dryer moments and decided I needed a break. Luckily plenty of people had already left to other teams for similar reasons and they've kept me busy. However in November I'm going to be part of a team again, after I found somewhere that wanted me and where I wanted to be. I can totally understand where your friend is coming from, it can slowly erode you this industry if you aren't careful.

@God_of_Nowt thing is we don't like sending those messages. As I said, we're problem solvers, and every time we send those messages we're essentially admitting defeat and saying "you've given us a problem to solve that we can't" and no one likes to admit they're not good enough. lol. Story of my life really. This generation still has limits, I kind of laugh at Cerny and Ronald talking about systems that finally free designers and artists from limitations... I know what you swines are like, give you an inch and you'll take a bloody mile. However, with how both systems stream data / assets and how they both deal with geometry we are getting to a stage where we can more easily say "yeah, we can do that" rather than smashing our faces into our keyboards until qwerty is imprinted on our foreheads.

As an example, I often feel really sad we can't get what artists do on screen, or put level designers visions on screen. Often software engineers are wracked with guilt that we can't actually get creatives visions on screen. Honestly? It's artists and designers that push us to develop better tools and hardware to realise what you guys want. I think without that tension and drive to iterate we just wouldn't be where we are.

@theheadofabroom they're a typical artist, only thinking about their meshes and maps and not the real heroes who get their pretty assets on screen... I'm joking @God_of_Nowt, but our competing perspectives are indeed the tension at the heart of development. You guys get to dream big, but often your creations are downscaled away from what the artist intended. Whereas on my side of things we're problem solvers attempting to hide technical limitations and use what resources are at our disposal as best we can. Dreaming isn't something we get to do much of to be honest. lol. We tend to be the miserable gits telling designers and artists they can't do this or that... and then giving up and trying to find ways of bodging things together. But the next-gen consoles are capable of things you just couldn't figure work arounds for on current systems, like rendering two worlds at once and flipping between them, or vistas and draw distance / physics / AI / all sorts of things we just can't billboard away. We could reduce numbers of onscreen AI, but if in one version of a game you're fighting 12 enemies and in another version you're fighting 6, you are having a fundamentally different experience... is it even the same game?

@God_of_Nowt as a coder / software developer I have a very different perspective to the artists in the teams I work with. You guys develop high poly meshes and downscale / develop different LoDs based on different specification / settings. Whereas for me, developing physics or AI I have to ensure what I do runs on the lowest common denominator, it might be that we target a performance level above base specs, but fundamentally what we hack out mustn't fundamentally alter the experience of what the game is. I've said on here many times that not everything in a game scales in a linear way, pixels obviously do, as to frames to an extent, but physics doesn't, and often you can find yourself in a situation where a game on consoles emulates the physics you actually wanted to deploy because they can't do it the way God intended . But the framework quite often of a game is built around the limitations of specific hardware, asset streaming being a key example this time. I can't design a level to take full advantage of SSD draw times and then shoehorn that onto the PS4 or X1, I'd have loading screens every few seconds. So I put a wall here, a cliff face there, a corridor here an elevator journey there, whereas were I taking full advantage of the next-gen consoles that wouldn"t be necessary.

@God_of_Nowt the initial PS5 Dev kits used RDNA 1 and multiple M2. SSD's to simulate the bandwidth they hoped they could achieve, but of course it didn't have the priority levels or the encoding / decoding capabilities of the I/O. I really don't think we'll see teams start to fully exploit that until maybe late 2022. Sure much of it will be "blind" so to speak, but as teams learn what compiles well, or how to make things that compile well and just learn to trust the I/O and lean on it more we won't see the best of the PS5. It's the same with the XSX|S as well. The point at which we leave last gen behind depends on how rapidly the sales cross over occurs. The moment they sell more on "next-gen" is the moment publishers start to see diminishing returns on current-gen development as an unnecessary sunk cost. If analysts in Japan are right that could take 18 months.

And there speaketh a man who has never developed a game in his life. Unless they are two totally separate development tracks that use the same design document / brief to develop separate interpretations of the same document I call utter BS. You develop for the lowest common denominator and then upscale. Sure their might be more foliage etc. on the PS5 version of a game, but fundamentally the framework underneath it all will be a PS4 game with extra bits bolted on. Games are a synergy between hardware and software, and sure, maybe the most important factor is skill of developers to produce the tools, compilers etc. etc. but that is always in service of extracting the maximum computational limit out of any said hardware, but in this instance with the PS5 much of that computational extraction will be in service of things that don't serve the core underlying framework, because to do so would mean the game couldn't run on the PS4. I can see things like particle effects, or fluid dynamics being far more advanced on the PS5, maybe not even being present on the PS4, but is that how the team would have deployed those computational resources had they not had to worry about getting the game running on PS4? I can't say for certain, I just can't, but the contrary argument is even harder for me to make.

10/10. I was obviously paying attention, although I very nearly picked the wrong FFXVI summon.

@strawhatcrew I could see a multi-player mode being potentially fun. A couple of character classes, Tracker, Trapper, Hunter, Healer and set players off Monster Hunter style into the world to track down legendary beasties. Wouldn't need to be part of the main game, but as an add-on to the product and another way to engage with the world / assets I could see them generating something worthwhile and fun for those who wanted to try it. Even release it as an update later on like Ghost of Tsushima is doing.

@AJDarkstar think it can be turned off. Think they plan on having a very customisable UI this time around.

@Suren1998 for people of a certain age, let's call it old, who might have little sacks of snot they are responsible for, I can assure you Sackboy's Big Adventure is quite an enticing game. Sit on the couch and play a game with your kids? Even as miserable and devoid of joy as I am, I can see the paternal joy in that. It's something Nintendo have realised since the days of the Wii, the kids who grew up with Nintendo in the 80's and 90's now have genetic offspring of their own. Sony too are in that position now. I'm not sure parent and kid games are a genre, but it's definitely a growing market segmentation, and if Sumo Digital have played it right Sackboy could be a sleeper hit.

@get2sammyb thing is whose fault is it we've not seen more. We're going off of what Sony showed at the PS5 reveal event. So it's on them. As a free to play game with cosmetics micro-transactions and an in-game economy I thought I might give it a go. But the PS5 is out in 2 months, and at this stage they've not really shown me why it's worth €80's. Have they got time? Probably not because most people have already pre-ordered Demon's Souls and Miles Morales.

Have to be honest, I'm really, really surprised this isn't a f2p game, everything I saw screamed online f2p game. If it had been that I'd have probably given it a go when Sony finally remembers Sweden exists and sends it some consoles, probably around 2025. But I've not seen anything of it, and asking people to drop €80 or £70 on four screen shots and some dodgy promo video? Sony and Lucid are having a giraff. Not convinced SIE understand this online game malarky at all, and that's what this screamed at me. If it's a single player game they've done an awful job conveying that.

No * bleep * I actually don't think there's many consoles Day 1. Well not in some European countries that's for certain. I'm not sure there's any chance to get one in Sweden this side of Christmas. The allocation here is piffling.

@Matroska I can confirm that @Quintumply is 100% correct, and you really don't want to know what we have to do to beanbags... Shudders and starts rocking in a darkened corner

Does anyone else think the white banner at the top of the PS5 games is deliberately hideous so as to force people who like cohesive graphic design to buy games digitally?

PS. If it isn't already clear I am joking.

@theheadofabroom there isn't an excuse. I think there'll be less outsourcing too. Because what happens a lot of times is a studio will produce a high quality model and then you send it to a graphics farm for people to make lower quality models at multiple detail levels. There's not as much need for LoD this generation, specifically on PS5 with how it deals with geometry. I think it'll be quicker.

@pip_muzz disagree vehemently, the engine will literally port across, they'll use the high-res assets they down scaled from for the PS4 title as game assets, and won't need shadow maps etc. because they'll be real-time and ray traced. The project turn around this time has been really, really quick. Most first party studios will have been scaling their engines for years, actually we know from glass door job postings it started as early as 2015/16 for ICE. I'm pretty confident in my predictions, much like I was Demon's Souls been a launch game.

@pip_muzz I keep telling people turn around on development is much, much quicker this generation. Ratchet & Clank has been in full development since 2016 and GoW Ragnarok could easily have been dual tracked too. They have most of the assets already, like the Kratos model enemies etc. I think Sony's aim was to make studios more productive this generation, which makes the hike in game prices even more suspect in my opinion.

There's no option for:

Sony forgot Scandinavia exists so who knows?

If they send more than car boot full maybe I'll get one. If not I doubt I'll be able to get my hands on one until the middle of next year. Could very well be the first couple of consoles I've not owned day 1. Wasn't going to get an XSX this time any way, but it's looking like it'll be impossible to get one where I live any way.

@RedShirtRod of course there is, and of course they do. It makes tax avoidance easier for starters. Plus investors like having breakdowns, and indeed need breakdown to question the board of directors on the running of the company. Game Pass loses money because that what the CEO says. They're constantly having to defend the loses made by the Xbox Division to investors as well. That I think is unfair, because without the Xbox Program Direct X / 3D wouldn't be where it is, and that's vitally important to the health of Microsoft, but I do think at some point Phil Spencer and co will need to turn a profit.

@theheadofabroom told you there's a faster turn around this gen. Two studios I've recently done work with think they may have cut development times from 4 to 2 years. I doubt it, because there"s always ways to screw up development, but I actually do see it being quicker, even on the asset side of things, because you don't need shadow maps etc. if they're generated real-time. Getting things working is actually easier than ever.

Hmmm... sounds to me like Insomniac and Sony just pulled a 505 Games and Remedy, like they've done with Control. We can see what you've done, and it's no better and I hope they get the same stick from gamers I really, really do.