PlayStation 5 - Next gen is expensive

[Girth Certificate]

Quote

Or games that transition scenes instantly like a movie, without the need for fmv to mask the loading in the background, like how TLOU2 does it. 

 

Yeah, no more holding beams and bits of rubble while your mate squeezes through. It's HUGE

[Broker]

7 minutes ago, Mystacon said:

Christ, you’re hard to please aren’t you?

 

Don’t get me wrong, Ratchet & Clank has never done anything for me, but I can’t deny that Rift Apart looks technically impressive at the very least. I imagine someone that has always enjoyed the series will be really excited for it.

 

I just don't think it's impressive to put as much stuff on the screen as possible with no meaning. It's hundreds of particles and effects in service of a game where you stand still and repeatedly shoot other things that are standing still. 

[Kevvy Metal]

Ghost of Tsushima has recently demonstrated how amazing actually fast, fast-travel is. 

The loading in that game is freakishly fast, but still take 5-10 seconds to transition, and it's totally cheating because it's switching from a relatively empty grassy open environment to yet another relatively empty grassy open environment... so most assets won't actually need to be culled and loaded from memory. 

 

This is a dense environment switching to another dense environment in a second. 

[Mystacon]

32 minutes ago, Broker said:

 

I just don't think it's impressive to put as much stuff on the screen as possible with no meaning. It's hundreds of particles and effects in service of a game where you stand still and repeatedly shoot other things that are standing still. 

Do you mean the environment? Personally I thought it made the play areas feel a lot more alive.

[Vemsie]

 

1 hour ago, Broker said:

 

I just don't think it's impressive to put as much stuff on the screen as possible with no meaning. It's hundreds of particles and effects in service of a game where you stand still and repeatedly shoot other things that are standing still. 

You definitely have to move a lot on R&C, especially on hard. The game actually has pretty snappy strafing.

Sure, it's more R&C with added bells and whistles and cool new SSD and DualSense tech, but that's not a bad thing. A cartoony game fits nicely into a launch window that also has much darker titles for a core audience like Demon's Souls, Resident Evil Village, Hitman 3 and Deathloop. R&C is colourful videogame fun and there is nothing wrong with that. And it's definitely impressive from a technical point of view, not just the dimension hopping and particles, but also the character rendering, the animation, the reflections. Insomniac putting in work. It's pretty impressive to deliver two next-gen launch window games, especially in challenging times like these.

[footle]

Deathloop is now summer: does that still count as launch window?

[Jg15]

I wonder with the Miles Morales game if that was originally a PS4 specific spiderman spinoff (in the same way Infamous First Light and Uncharted Lost Legacy are spin offs from their respective series) that got bumped up to a PS5 exclusive when Sony realised that R&C was not going to make day 1 launch?

[HarryBizzle]

I always thought that R&C was basically dumbed down to make it easier for kids. The platforming is very basic and there's usually around one or two puzzles in the whole game. I loved it when I was 14 and rubbish at games. It's an ok but pretty shallow game that's generally carried by the fact that they look great and are quite funny. Moaning about it not being deep is missing the point, I think.

[Alex W.]

9 minutes ago, Jg15 said:

I wonder with the Miles Morales game if that was originally a PS4 specific spiderman spinoff (in the same way Infamous First Light and Uncharted Lost Legacy are spin offs from their respective series) that got bumped up to a PS5 exclusive when Sony realised that R&C was not going to make day 1 launch?

It’s hard to judge until there’s some actual footage floating around but the one screenshot they’ve released looks a bit too next-gen for it to just be a last gen title boosted to PS5. The performance/quality graphics toggle also isn’t something I’d expect to see unless it was developed with a demanding next generation graphics target.
 

I figure it was something that was always planned for PS5, probably to help acclimatise they team to the new tech for future projects without having to come up with a whole new game concept. The original game was used extensively for early PS5 tech demos so the team probably had access to the console quite early.

[Vemsie]

14 minutes ago, footle said:

Deathloop is now summer: does that still count as launch window?

Well, even if you take that out (launch window is basically up until April) there are still many darker core games on the way.

 

[Eighthours]

8 minutes ago, Alex W. said:

I figure it was something that was always planned for PS5, probably to help acclimatise they team to the new tech for future projects without having to come up with a whole new game concept. The original game was used extensively for early PS5 tech demos so the team probably had access to the console quite early.

 

I think this is it entirely. The game allows Insomniac to develop and get acclimatised to new tech for a full-fat Spider-Man PS5, while being able to release a stop-gap product quickly that will likely be a big seller. Win-win.

[instasis]

R&C feels like a fancy tech demo for something that looks not entirely dissimilar to the best Titanfall 2 level.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see what the the PS5 can achieve with this new tech but I suspect that in most third party games we're looking at slightly faster loading times than XBox SX. Not sure how I feel about that right now.

[Jg15]

10 minutes ago, Pelekophoros said:

R&C feels like a fancy tech demo for something that looks not entirely dissimilar to the best Titanfall 2 level.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see what the the PS5 can achieve with this new tech but I suspect that in most third party games we're looking at slightly faster loading times than XBox SX. Not sure how I feel about that right now.

But that was always going to be the case, its the job of the exclusives to maximise the potential of specific hardware.

[Broker]

1 hour ago, Mystacon said:

Do you mean the environment? Personally I thought it made the play areas feel a lot more alive.

I don’t really see the benefit of having tonnes of animated background stuff. I’m not looking for a game that looks like it’s in a populated, exciting place if there’s no benefit to the gameplay. It looks like someone running along a single corridor, with a lot of animated shite around it, and probably the least interesting gameplay I can imagine. I don’t really think there being mountains of moving things around the corridor makes any difference, it’s just set dressing for a game that was boring on the PS2. 

[Majora]

1 hour ago, HarryBizzle said:

I always thought that R&C was basically dumbed down to make it easier for kids. The platforming is very basic and there's usually around one or two puzzles in the whole game. I loved it when I was 14 and rubbish at games. It's an ok but pretty shallow game that's generally carried by the fact that they look great and are quite funny. Moaning about it not being deep is missing the point, I think.

 

A Crack In Time had quite a lot of puzzles and I may even have gotten stuck on them once or twice. I'd be very surprised and quite disappointed if this new one didn't have puzzles that made use of the dimension swapping.

[Mystacon]

49 minutes ago, Broker said:

I don’t really see the benefit of having tonnes of animated background stuff. I’m not looking for a game that looks like it’s in a populated, exciting place if there’s no benefit to the gameplay. It looks like someone running along a single corridor, with a lot of animated shite around it, and probably the least interesting gameplay I can imagine. I don’t really think there being mountains of moving things around the corridor makes any difference, it’s just set dressing for a game that was boring on the PS2. 

Just out of interest, is your favourite game Pong?

[Broker]

31 minutes ago, Mystacon said:

Just out of interest, is your favourite game Pong?

Tetris

[Mystacon]

54 minutes ago, Broker said:

Tetris

Fair enough

[Broker]

I do understand that there’s a rich history of interesting corridors in games. I just don’t think this is a great game to be promoting their new console as “it’s the same game but with more background detail” is the most boring way I can imagine using new technology.

[Stanley]

To be fair it utilises the SSD in ways not possible on PS4, it’s 4K, looks incredibly detailed, has ray tracing etc. so it’s doing quite a bit to demonstrate some of the consoles new features. 

[Dirty Harry Potter]

7 minutes ago, Stanley said:

...it’s doing quite a bit to demonstrate some of the consoles new corridors. 

Corrected for you!

[Ghosty]

I never wanted to play a Ratchet and Clank until now. Very impressed with what I've seen.

[Broker]

43 minutes ago, Stanley said:

To be fair it utilises the SSD in ways not possible on PS4, it’s 4K, looks incredibly detailed, has ray tracing etc. so it’s doing quite a bit to demonstrate some of the consoles new features. 

Again, I strongly disagree. Extraneous detail added to basic games that we have already seen a million times fundamentally does the opposite for me. It says loud and clear that there’s nothing new to see here, just the same old games rendered at 4K with better lighting, which is the opposite of what makes me want to buy new consoles. The loading thing I still don’t get, because whilst the idea of being able to load different areas instantly is interesting, loading tiny playable areas is already easily possible without this SSD. Much like ray tracing, I don’t see the point of replacing a smoke and mirrors solution with a more genuine one if they’re both being used in service of gameplay that was outdated when Obama got elected. I don’t care how pretty the backgrounds of PS2 games get, or how many of them you can load into memory at once. 

[Stanley]

Yeah well it’s probably not aimed much at you - but it does generate, at a hardware level at least, what it can do that last gen can’t. 

[Qazimod]

1 hour ago, Broker said:

I do understand that there’s a rich history of interesting corridors in games. I just don’t think this is a great game to be promoting their new console as “it’s the same game but with more background detail” is the most boring way I can imagine using new technology.

 

I kind of had similar feelings of "how next-gen is this" when it was first revealed, but my train of thought was slightly different - I was wondering about the crappiest old-gen way you could theoretically have something like this, and my imagined game was a series of locations built in Hammer or UnrealEd with markedly different texture packs and assets loaded into each one and a featureless corridor connecting each location to the next.  Yes, that's hugely reductive, but thinking about this game as a series of connected rooms kind of makes things less exciting.

 

On the other hand, interesting corridors absolutely have a place in gaming if they're things like Rez, After Burner Climax or Space Harrier. So I guess I'd just hope for a satisfying gameplay loop behind all of the effects.  

[Broker]

43 minutes ago, Stanley said:

Yeah well it’s probably not aimed much at you - but it does generate, at a hardware level at least, what it can do that last gen can’t. 

Oh absolutely, I don’t think this generation has been very interesting and the continued chasing of higher fidelity versions of the exact same games isn’t something I’m ever going to be interested in. It’s just confirmation for me that not only can the new consoles probably not facilitate any interesting new gameplay, but that the people in charge aren’t even interested in trying to do that anymore. I’ll stick with PC and occasional Nintendo games and hold off on the new consoles until something I like enough to want to replay it with better graphics comes out. 

[Alex W.]

Funny thing about R&C’s shiny floors and ray tracing is that I’m sure most of it isn’t ray traced or even screen space reflections. He goes inside at one point and the floor’s reflecting buildings on the other side of an opaque wall so they’re probably mostly cube maps.

[cubik]

If it were genuine ray tracing then surely they'd have made a much bigger deal about it, rather than constantly going on about the SSD.

The biggest talking point of the next gen so far is data transfer speeds FFS. Mind you, it's still a more interesting subject than Godfall.

 

Every time I see one of these preview videos or events that are supposed to hype things up I feel less inclined to preorder. I really hope Sony have something major up their sleeve but I'm fairly certain they don't.

[Alex W.]

It’s the same ray tracing that all of the modern ray tracing graphics cards have, and they have made as big a deal out of it as is really justified. Even that hardware accelerated ray tracing is an expensive effect that has to be used relatively sparingly.
 

Like, all those RTX demos of chrome plated everything were hilariously misleading about what even those cutting edge RTX cards could do. The only games that’re running using nothing but ray tracing on those cards are Minecraft and Quake II.

[Vemsie]

I believe only Clank is ray-traced. It's probably too much of a system hog. I'd say the SSD and DualSense probably have a bigger impact on the experience, though I do love ray-tracing on my PC but you really need DLSS to make something like Control run smoothly.