PlayStation 5 - Next gen is expensive

[teddymeow]

In the R&C presentation there's a talking head but with a guy from Insomniac and after that there's a gameplay section.

 

It says in the bottom corner "Alpha Gameplay" so I'm assuming that's somebody playing it?

[jonamok]

Indeed, and there is zero rift jumping in that section (just local teleport). Unlike the trailer.

[Down by Law]

If Titanfall 2 could do it at a push of a button then surely Ratchet can on that hardware level 

[jonamok]

I'm sure it can do that purple rift jumping in real time gameplay, just thought it was odd they never showed that, as it's the big feature and all.

[metallicfrodo]

Just now, jonamok said:

I'm sure it can do that purple rift jumping in real time gameplay, just thought it was odd they never showed that, as it's the big feature and all.

 

There is one point in the Alpha gameplay trailer when he falls through a purple rift. 1 min into this video. Although I can't tell if he's going to a different environment or he just ends up closer to the bottom of the skyscraper (almost as if the simple portal section is actually hiding the loading in of the more detailed lower level assets)

 

 

[jonamok]

Good spot. Does indeed look like the same sort of world design. Not as vibrant a change as we see in the trailer.

[Ferine]

3 minutes ago, jonamok said:

Did it stream it in though? Did it say anywhere that the trailer was real time? The show only said captured on PS5. Could it have been pre-canned from a series of game assets - i.e. a movie? It's certainly not gameplay. The player is not in control of Ratchet during that rift scene. I'm probably just paranoid/misunderstanding, as it is indeed very impressive if all done real time from the PS5.

If it was a faked video they went to the effort of adding in some slight hitching and visual imperfections during the transitions to make it more realistic.

 

Given that the demonstration is congruent with the on-paper performance of the PS5's SSD I don't see any reason to doubt that it is genuine footage of an in-development video game.

[jonamok]

Fair enough. 

[footle]

5 minutes ago, metallicfrodo said:

 

There is one point in the Alpha gameplay trailer when he falls through a purple rift. 1 min into this video. Although I can't tell if he's going to a different environment or he just ends up closer to the bottom of the skyscraper (almost as if the simple portal section is actually hiding the loading in of the more detailed lower level assets)

 

I thought the portal sections felt like this generation's very short tunnels.

[rgraves]

It doesn't have to be 'faked video' - the point is more that it was 'on rails' - it's not really switching worlds if it's on-rails - the world is just built like that, it's not streaming in a new level on the whim of the player, it's playing the pre-determined level that has those sections already baked into it. The actual gameplay stuff was far more subtle - though I personally believe that's not because it's not possible on PS5, more that just because you can, doesn't mean you should - it would/could get pretty confusing from a player/orientation point of view - hence the gameplay stuff being a little more 'reserved' in that respect I think.

[Ran]

I would assume those purple portal transitions are indicative of how quick something like fast travel would be in a game like Skyrim. It is a massive QoL improvement and very welcome but personally I'd like to see something (probably down the line if at all) that truly wasn't possible on last gen. New forms of gameplay, more complicated systems and interesting NPCs.

 

[Eighthours]

Oh, I forgot! It was so great to see Housemarque back with such a lovely looking game - this must be the one they referred to a few months ago as the AAA title they've been working on for a while. And development on their horribly misguided  'chase-the-market' battle royale game Stormdivers was paused indefinitely a few months ago so everyone there can work on Returnal. I was worried that game was going to finish them off, after they pivoted away from arcade shooters.

[Broker]

3 hours ago, Vemsie said:

 

Nah. There'a no way it would look close to that on PS4. The density, the complexity of the environments, the lighting and ray-tracing, the instant dimension loading: it's all well beyond what a PS4 can do. It's especially apparent when you watch the 4K vids on your 4K telly. It's a pretty striking difference.

I think it might help if they’d chosen a series of games where every one isn’t completely identical? Like it’s a better looking Ratchet and Clank game, but it functionally looks like an incredibly standard ratchet and clank game. Regardless of how pretty it is, choosing such a safe series that changes and innovates so rarely seems like a bad call if you’re showing off your brand new console. 

[footle]

1 minute ago, Broker said:

I think it might help if they’d chosen a series of games where every one isn’t completely identical? Like it’s a better looking Ratchet and Clank game, but it functionally looks like an incredibly standard ratchet and clank game. Regardless of how pretty it is, choosing such a safe series that changes and innovates so rarely seems like a bad call if you’re showing off your brand new console. 

 

If you directly compare them on a decent feed, it actually shows the graphical changes quite nicely. Of course, on a shite 720p feed or your phone (so the resolution doesn't get a chance to be apparent) it just looks identical.

 

[Girth Certificate]

Indeed. GT7 also looked pretty cool (I liked the animation of the driver's hands using the gear flaps) but the dude was driving on a track I remember from the very first game. 23 years ago! The topography of my arse has changed more than the world of Gran Turismo in that time.

[Broker]

I mean more that maybe how ever many pixels you make it out of, a game that’s barely changed since the PS2 isn’t going to look very impressive. It’s got tiny areas, boring piles of enemies. It looks 15 years old, no matter how pretty they make the models look. 

[Vemsie]

31 minutes ago, Broker said:

I think it might help if they’d chosen a series of games where every one isn’t completely identical? Like it’s a better looking Ratchet and Clank game, but it functionally looks like an incredibly standard ratchet and clank game. Regardless of how pretty it is, choosing such a safe series that changes and innovates so rarely seems like a bad call if you’re showing off your brand new console. 

 

I thought the dimension switching was a nice showcase. My guess is that they picked R&C because like Astro Bot, it's good, colourful fun for a larger audience, which diversifies the line-up, which also had much darker games like Demon's Souls and Resident Evil 8.

[Stanley]

2 hours ago, Broker said:

I mean more that maybe how ever many pixels you make it out of, a game that’s barely changed since the PS2 isn’t going to look very impressive. It’s got tiny areas, boring piles of enemies. It looks 15 years old, no matter how pretty they make the models look. 

It looks like a real-time Pixar/Dreamworks movie, I’m not a fan anyway but graphically it’s pretty astonishing looking. 

[Broker]

23 minutes ago, Stanley said:

It looks like a real-time Pixar/Dreamworks movie, I’m not a fan anyway but graphically it’s pretty astonishing looking. 

Yeah I agree that it’s pretty technically. I just think maybe the reason some people aren’t as blown away as others is that it looks like an incredibly pretty PS2 remaster. I think maybe so matter how high the resolution on it is some people just aren’t going to be impressed by a game that looks that old in every way except the rendering.

[Uzi]

6 hours ago, Dirty Harry Potter said:

I dont know about that. Not sure what you are seeing, but to me that looks like a much less impressive jump, now I have seen them side by side.

 

Were you at Barnard Castle when you watched it?

[Uzi]

2 hours ago, Broker said:

I mean more that maybe how ever many pixels you make it out of, a game that’s barely changed since the PS2 isn’t going to look very impressive. It’s got tiny areas, boring piles of enemies. It looks 15 years old, no matter how pretty they make the models look. 

 

It literally is based around a mechanic the current consoles cannot do which is insta warping from one full environment to another

[Ry]

8 minutes ago, Uzi said:

 

It literally is based around a mechanic the current consoles cannot do which is insta warping from one full environment to another

Original Prey did this btw. 

[metallicfrodo]

It's a mechanic that was used in Titanfall 2 on current consoles with the time skipping and had ramifications to how you traversed the level. I mean I appreciate it wasn't quite on the scale that the non gamplay section at the beginning of the trailer showed, but until we see it being implemented as a serious gameplay mechanic it's still just fancy streaming of assets.

[Uzi]

6 minutes ago, Ry said:

Original Prey did this btw. 

 

Some form has happened before (obviously see portal games) just not to the same degree I saw in this trailer where it was instantaneous full environment to another back to back. I'm not saying the mechanic is unique but the sheer implementation of it looks to be to my eyes anyway 

 

 

[PaB]

2 minutes ago, Uzi said:

 

Some form has happened before (obviously see portal games) just not to the same degree I saw in this trailer where it was instantaneous full environment to another back to back. I'm not saying the mechanic is unique but the sheer implementation of it looks to be to my eyes anyway 

 

 

It looked to me like warped from one fully realised level to another, instantly. I mean, I thought it was pretty clear what the technological leap was.

[Thor]

Witcher 3 also does ... to hilariously bad effect on consoles.

 

Witcher 3 ending spoilers

Spoiler

The final boss fight in the main story has you both going through teleports to different places ... the loading on PS4 for this fucks those scenes up royally. 

 

[Uzi]

5 minutes ago, PeteBrant said:

It looked to me like warped from one fully realised level to another, instantly. I mean, I thought it was pretty clear what the technological leap was.

 

I agree - previous implementation was more smoke and mirrors so in the prey eg or others such as portal those assets/levels would already be loaded in along - it wasn't instant warping form one whole level to another - it was all one loaded in section. So in Prey you would have already loaded in the main environment and the warp ones and this would create obvious limitations. In portal you would just be warping around the same environment already loaded in.

 

Here unless it is loading in all of these sequences in one entire go - it appears to be doing what you are saying.

[Vemsie]

19 minutes ago, metallicfrodo said:

It's a mechanic that was used in Titanfall 2 on current consoles with the time skipping and had ramifications to how you traversed the level. I mean I appreciate it wasn't quite on the scale that the non gamplay section at the beginning of the trailer showed, but until we see it being implemented as a serious gameplay mechanic it's still just fancy streaming of assets.

It wasn't non-gameplay though, right? Seems he's fully controlable in those scenes where he was riding the creature in a fantasy world, then in an instant he was rail grinding in a futuristic city and not much later he was flying a dragon through futuristic traffic. It can seemingly load entire worlds with different gamplay in an instant, not really comparable to going from one room to another via a portal.

 

It's a bit like saying VR could be done on the Virtual Boy. Technically true, but not quite the same as playing Astro Bot or Alyx.

[metallicfrodo]

10 minutes ago, Vemsie said:

It wasn't non-gameplay though, right? Seems he's fully controlable in those scenes where he was riding the creature in a fantasy world, then in an instant he was rail grinding in a futuristic city and not much later he was flying a dragon through futuristic traffic. It can seemingly load entire worlds with different gamplay in an instant, not really comparable to going from one room to another via a portal.

 

My take is that it's representative of gameplay, otherwise they would have said it was gameplay. It's noticable that when Ratchet is in battle in the actual gameplay section that the hud is displayed, but that isn't the case at the end of the trailer. I have no doubt that is what they are aiming for and it's obvious the game isn't ready to ship so it's unfair to expect alpha gameplay to have the level of polish that the final game will. It's noticable however that the only purple portal section that we see in the gameplay doesn't appear to warp them to a section with hugely different assets than they have already shown (although the sequence is cut up), and that there is 5 seconds from the point that the player loses control (when the explosion happens) to the point that the new view is displayed. Which if it's loading in an entirely new set of assets is still very impressive. But then again the PS5 has twice the memory of the PS4 so it should be able to hold more in memory anyway, so an on rails sequence, which the trailer shows might well be able to have all those changes stored in memory.

 

I mean don't get me wrong I know the SSD will have a huge effect on the speed of loading etc, I'm just not sure what was shown couldn't be done with clever loading and scripting on a current gen machine (obviously with a graphical downgrade). It might just be that it's a hell of a lot easier to do it now.

[Vemsie]

I guess we'll have to wait and see when more footage becomes available, but the impression I got is that it can instant load entirely new worlds. I believe Housemarque's Returnal does something similar, only on death.