PlayStation 5 - Next gen is expensive

[Uncle Mike]

I can see why people would be sceptical - the only gameplay warps we saw were in-room shifts and what could well have been a loading corridor in this gen, but it seemed clear that the promise is whole worlds loading and shifting in pretty real time, as well as being able to transfer objects/vehicles/aliens from one world to another. But I'd concede that those expectations were set in something that looked much more like a cutscene than the later gameplay demo.

[teddymeow]

I think it will add a tactical element to the gameplay as well. You're running towards an armoured enemy when you spot a rift to the side / behind them. You move through the rift and you're behind said enemy ready to launch a huge barrage of missiles, to borrow a previous R&C game, up his arsenal.

[Broker]

1 hour 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

Ohh ambassador, with these three PS2 levels loaded at once you are really spoiling us. 

[LaveDisco]

Can't wait to play a Zelda using this tech. BotW but with LttP instant Light World/Dark World.

But that probably won't be till whatever comes after, whatever comes after the switch.

[sid]

the Titanfall 2 level is one of my favourite bits of game design of all time, it blew my mind at the time. Like playing Zelda light and dark world at 100mph and switching every few seconds.....amazing.

 

if these consoles bring more of that, we are in for a right treat.

 

I love the idea of game designers being unconstrained....

[rgraves]

6 minutes ago, sid said:

I love the idea of game designers being unconstrained....

They will ALWAYS be constrained - it's just potentially going to become even more about time/money than ram/GPU cycles...

[Vemsie]

I can totally see Insomniac doing some crazy stuff with that tech with a Mysterio boss fight in either Miles Morales or Spider-Man 2.

[robdood]

This hype around the warping is really weird.  It's not some magic new tech??  Why is everyone talking about WHOLE NEW WORLDS.  It's all still smoke and mirrors.  

[Broker]

I wonder how big the could make a GTA game with graphics like 3 now. Or with graphics like the first one.

[PaB]

10 minutes ago, robdood said:

  It's all still smoke and mirrors.  

The point is that it isn't.

[Broker]

5 minutes ago, PeteBrant said:

The point is that it isn't.

 

Surely though we've seen before that if you load it all in you can swap quickly between small environments? There's not a lot in the Ratchet Trailer that couldn't be done on a current console, no matter what it's supposed to represent. The example above where the Witcher has portals to other parts of an open world map if you could do that to anywhere in a big open world map, that sounds impressive. This is such a tame representation of that it's hard to get excited about it, as the example they've chosen doesn't look difficult to achieve with current hardware.

[Captain Kelsten]

Imagine if Deep Down gets (re)announced and released as a launch title! 

[PaB]

Just now, Broker said:

 

Surely though we've seen before that if you load it all in you can swap quickly between small environments? There's not a lot in the Ratchet Trailer that couldn't be done on a current console, no matter what it's supposed to represent. The example above where the Witcher has portals to other parts of an open world map if you could do that to anywhere in a big open world map, that sounds impressive. This is such a tame representation of that it's hard to get excited about it, as the example they've chosen doesn't look difficult to achieve with current hardware.

I think the point is that its not swapping between small environments. It's swapping from one entire level to another. . The titanfall2 example is basically the exact same environment and level just with different textures and lighting (as excellent as it is). This is swapping between, say, Mars and Earth in Destiny, insantly.

[metallicfrodo]

6 minutes ago, PeteBrant said:

I think the point is that its not swapping between small environments. It's swapping from one entire level to another. . The titanfall2 example is basically the exact same environment and level just with different textures and lighting (as excellent as it is). This is swapping between, say, Mars and Earth in Destiny, insantly.

 

But isn't it the textures that are the bottleneck? Surely the level geometry is insignificant compared to the textures? I'm willing to concede that I could be completely wrong and the geometry is also a significant amount of data.

[PaB]

Just now, metallicfrodo said:

 

But isn't it the textures that are the bottleneck? Surely the level geometry is insignificant compared to the textures?

Possibly, but the TF2 level was obviously contrained in size such that it didn't have to access the HDD to make the switch between time lines. I think the difference is you can do that on a much grander scale, and, in completely different environments.

[Broker]

8 minutes ago, PeteBrant said:

I think the point is that its not swapping between small environments. It's swapping from one entire level to another. . The titanfall2 example is basically the exact same environment and level just with different textures and lighting (as excellent as it is). This is swapping between, say, Mars and Earth in Destiny, insantly.

 

Huh. Maybe if they'd shown that it would have had more impact on me, because that sounds great, though that may just be my Destiny loading screen PTSD. It just looked like normal Ratchet and Clank to me, I honestly feel like I've seen that exact trailer at every Playstation launch for the last fifteen years.

[rafaqat]

1 hour ago, metallicfrodo said:

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.

 

I think the difference in opinions here is on the one side we have people claiming that the PS5 is doing things that are impossible to do on other consoles technically, which I can believe. And then there are people that are saying with a bit of smoke and mirrors you can achieve similar effect.   Depending on whether you take the Dev's viewpoint or the Gamers viewpoint it's either revolutionary or a bit better than previous attempts at similar techniques.

 

 

[Uzi]

 

Quote

Sony's PS5 SSD is the kind of storage The Flash would be proud of. It rockets data at 5.5GB/sec speeds, and can hit 9GB/sec compressed data rates and up to 20GB/sec with deeply compressed assets. This kind of speed can shoot data, assets, and content through the system to be processed and rendered on-screen. The practical use-case enables instantaneous, interruption-free gaming. And the new Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart game showcases what the SSD can do.

 

"Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart is a full-length inter-dimensional adventure built from the ground up for PlayStation 5," said Insomniac Games creative director Marcus Smith.

"We're doing things we've never been able to do before, like use dimensional rifts to be able to leap from planet to planet nearly instantly, or put ray-traced reflections on Clank. All of our alien worlds are filled with density and life previously unseen."

"Players will seamlessly travel through different dimensions in mid-gameplay, thanks to PS5's ultra-high speed SSD."

 

Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/73195/playstation-5-ssd-destroys-loading-screens-in-new-ratchet-clank-game/index.html

 

Basically confirms the game is built around this and it is a gameplay function. It could be dev bullshit (although I don't think Insomniac are known for it like Todd Howards lulz) but it definitely seems to be using the SSD tech for a very specific gameplay core focus of the game.

[Vemsie]

We'll see in the end, but John Carmack called the PS5's SSD solution "a big deal" on Twitter and he knows his onions. It seems pretty exciting tech.

Also, I've picked-up Horizon again and damn, the loading times on that are pretty brutal.

[Uzi]

1 minute ago, rafaqat said:

 

I think the difference in opinions here is on the one side we have people claiming that the PS5 is doing things that are impossible to do on other consoles technically, which I can believe. And then there are people that are saying with a bit of smoke and mirrors you can achieve similar effect.   Depending on whether you take the Dev's viewpoint or the Gamers viewpoint it's either revolutionary or a bit better than previous attempts at similar techniques.

 

 

The smoke and mirrors will always be limited by what has been loaded in advance not in real time - that is the point of difference.

[Uzi]

7 minutes ago, Vemsie said:

We'll see in the end, but John Carmack called the PS5's SSD solution "a big deal" on Twitter and he knows his onions. It seems pretty exciting tech.

 

It is a huge deal. Forum favourite Skyrim - go try and jump onto a town building directly from an external hill or mountain? You can't - even though in Morrowind you could because loading has been limited to certain degrees. It's incredibly exciting tech and surprised to see the first use case of it demonstrated so wonderfully to be met with such cynicism but hey!

[PaB]

6 minutes ago, Broker said:

 

Huh. Maybe if they'd shown that it would have had more impact on me, because that sounds great, though that may just be my Destiny loading screen PTSD. It just looked like normal Ratchet and Clank to me, I honestly feel like I've seen that exact trailer at every Playstation launch for the last fifteen years.

I don't think they made a great show of demonstrating it in the gameplay, some of  it looked like "well we can do this now". But combined with the trailer I think we are looking at something far more ambitious and of wider scope , and we will be jumping between entire levels almost instantly.

[Ferine]

Portals – such as in Portal or the original Prey – aren't taking you to another environment, they're repositioning the player within the currently loaded one. The explorable space has to be resident in memory.

 

It's a similar situation for Titanfall 2's Effect and Cause, or Dishonored 2's A Crack in the Slab, with the player switching between their relative position within different versions of the same environment which are loaded concurrently, stacked atop one another. One of the obvious downsides is that you are now effectively keeping two levels' worth of assets in the same memory budget you have for one, so you either have to dial back on the complexity/variety or sink a lot of time and effort into the "smoke and mirrors" of loading airlocks, elevators, corridors, etc.

 

I've posted this before – it's timestamped – but I think it's a great example of how masking loads can be both possible in certain situations and yet totally impractical:

 

 

[Broker]

27 minutes ago, Uzi said:

 

It is a huge deal. Forum favourite Skyrim - go try and jump onto a town building directly from an external hill or mountain? You can't - even though in Morrowind you could because loading has been limited to certain degrees. It's incredibly exciting tech and surprised to see the first use case of it demonstrated so wonderfully to be met with such cynicism but hey!

Again, this sounds like a much more exciting. Maybe I’ve got it backwards and R&C wasn’t familiar enough. Maybe a demonstration in a game that’s more ubiquitous like GTAV or Skyrim might have had more impact. The example show just quickly loads a few small bits of areas that could be loaded anyway.

[Petrousgyre]

@Ferine That's interesting stuff, thanks. One other thing mentioned there was the suggestion that duplication was taking up 10x the space of unduplicated assets on Spiderman. I'm not sure how representative that is of other games but it hopefully means that despite texture sizes inevitably increasing its will take much more than 3-4 games to fill next gen SSD's. 

[Uzi]

11 minutes ago, Broker said:

Again, this sounds like a much more exciting. Maybe I’ve got it backwards and R&C wasn’t familiar enough. Maybe a demonstration in a game that’s more ubiquitous like GTAV or Skyrim might have had more impact. The example show just quickly loads a few small bits of areas that could be loaded anyway.

Yep elder scrolls vi in theory should have no loading screens or gated off locations due to this

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Uzi said:

Yep elder scrolls vi in theory should have no loading screens or gated off locations due to this

I doubt we'll be seeing that before 2026. I wonder if Starfield has been built with the incoming tech in mind, given it's sci-fi themed with spaceships and such the implications of near instant loading related to travel is very exciting. Then again Bethesda seem to increasingly surprise in disappointing ways.

[Uzi]

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

I doubt we'll be seeing that before 2026. I wonder if Starfield has been built with the incoming tech in mind, given it's sci-fi themed with spaceships and such the implications of near instant loading related to travel is very exciting. Then again Bethesda seem to increasingly surprise in disappointing ways.

Todd Howard E3 2025

 

 "16 times the loading screens" 

[Flanders]

59 minutes ago, Ferine said:

It's a similar situation for Titanfall 2's Effect and Cause, or Dishonored 2's A Crack in the Slab, with the player switching between their relative position within different versions of the same environment which are loaded concurrently, stacked atop one another. One of the obvious downsides is that you are now effectively keeping two levels' worth of assets in the same memory budget you have for one, so you either have to dial back on the complexity/variety or sink a lot of time and effort into the "smoke and mirrors" of loading airlocks, elevators, corridors, etc.

This is a very good point. Both the levels you mentioned are widely rightly regarded as two of the most inventive pieces of design in recent years, but both are also small scale relative to the games they’re in.

 

Crack in the Slab is noticeably smaller and less architecturally complex than the rest of Dishonored 2’s levels and Effect and Cause has very little Titan gameplay. 
 

The SSD tech presents the opportunity to take these concepts and massively expand them. You could definitely build a whole game around that kind of time shift mechanism if you could dial up the complexity of the zones you’re moving between. 

[Ry]

Anybody think that Amazon leak of price is a good outliner?

 

I know it could be total bullshit and it's just a placeholder but I imagine Amazon would be the first company after Sony to know the price.