Final Fantasy 16 crossgen although I don't think an article is needed as the game is visibly cross-gen.
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Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]
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the real reason : "During development, we realized that, like all others studios, we should use the power of next gen to not care for optimization and rely on up-scaling too"
/jk
I'd say the tech feels cross-gen or even more or less last-gengen, but the asset quality is definitely next-gen
I don't see many last gen games with raytraced shadows. Asset quality and geometry density are far above last gen. The game is not perfect with a performance mode with very unstable framerate out of combat, a bad upscaling algorithm with FSR 1, no option to reduce or cut motion blur and some screen space reflexion problem sometimes but the quality mode is good, asset quality and PBS are very good, shadows are great. The indirect lighting is baked but good and ambient occlusion is good. Motion blur and bokeh depth of field are good too.
VFX are top notch too.
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Material work is surely some of the best I've seen and entire visual design there almost gives out a filmic CGI look at its best.
I'm not too sure if the game uses rt shadows. I remember seeing flickering and aliasing of shadows on armor sets back in the demo. It might be per-object shadowmap +/or screen space cone tracing soft shadows during cutscenes (of course I'm only guessing and I could be wrong though). I somehow recall TLOU2 offers the same quality of cutscene shadows with the help from SSCS.
Geometry density is really top dog, especially in the forest scene. I originally suspected some sort of visibility buffer pipeline going on under the hood, but with a resolution this low (down to 720p in performance mode?), the dense geometry might just be brute force rasterization. Also personally speaking, the indirect lighting doesn't look impressive. I mean it's not bad, but it's average and nothing next-gen. You don't really see any detailed indirect shades (so not just from first bounce AO, but more subtle shadowing from multi-bounces), nor richful color bleeding. The general indirect lighting is plain with details added by some form of GTAO. I can also spot lighting leaking, so again prolly just some average probe based gi system.
Never ceases to amaze me how off base you guys are from what's cheap / what's expensive. Nothing on the screen is scalable or smart for a cross gen game -- the only shadow are expensive ones, the lighting is completely dependant on the shadows, in the opening there's nearly constant pre-baked in-environment destruction with no practical way to scale it down, all of the geometry is dense enough to murder a last gen console on quad overdraw -- it would run at ~5fps at 240p on a ps4. The last gen consoles depend on having gpu headroom to do basically anything -- in what world would a game that struggles at ~900p on a ps5 gpu scale down for a ps4? At a certain point a while ago they made a decision and then based everything off of that decision. It's a current gen game.
To my eye I'm pretty sure it's brute force -- letting the art team work like that is one of the clearest next gen things about this game (even though it's technologically simple) given how quick they are to downres scalable things like the volumes and the particle effects it would be very strange if the foliage looked how it did if it was vbuffer.
As an addendum: There are definitely different priorities between elite american game art teams and elite japanese teams -- not to fall into any kind of crude cultural stereotyping, but it's pretty evident from the best looking japanese games, artstation posts, etc, that teams there are really clamouring for: Tons of particle fx, cg-style smoke and fire sim, and lots of geometry and crisp shadows to capture that geo -- putting this game in the tradition of other great looking japanese games like mgs5, dmc5, death stranding, or ff7r it is a clearly great use of resources to empower this art team to do what they want.
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You’ve made a whole bunch of assertions in your post and tried to pass them off as fact. If you’re going to do so, the burden of proof lies with you to do so. I didn’t see anything when I played the demo that gave me the indication that it couldn’t be scaled down to run on base ps4 and the pro. In fact, I’d argue that the devs can scale down to run on the ps4/pro and the only reason they’re not doing so is due to time which the confirmed in the article I referenced. We’ve seen other devs do it with other games ranging from hogwarts legacy to Doom to Arkham Knight to Horizon to Spider-Man to Cyberpunk and the list goes on and on. You talk about geometry as if geometry complexity can’t be reduced. The lighting is baked and you can use that in conjunction with shadow maps. Shadow complexity can also be reduced. The destruction complexity can definitely be reduced. It won’t look as impressive but it can be done. In unreal you can do so and I know it from first hand experience. I don’t know what engine they’re using but I imagine it could be done there as well. There are a whole of intelligent cuts that can be made to the point where they look relatively similar from a glance. I simply don’t accept the assertion you’ve made to be true.
As an aside, you shouldn’t construct your argument in an all or nothing format. You started off by saying nothing on screen is scalable. That means that if even one minute thing on screen is scalable, your whole argument is false/a lie. It’s a very bad way to have a discussion.
Ok, except working in an industry doesn’t make you infallible. The user said and I quote “Nothing on the screen is scalable or smart for a cross gen game”. If you make a big claim like that, then the onus is on you to provide the proof required to back up that claim. Afaik, the user didn’t claim to work of Final Fantasy 16. So who should I believe, the user who works in the industry or the actual devs of the game?There is a big difference between him and you, one work on game and not the other.
One claims that nothing on screen is scalable or the actual devs of the game who were successfully working on a scaled down version of the game for last gen? I think the choice on who to believe is very clear….
Again, my original claim was that the game is cross-gen based on the information provided by the devs. I provided a source to back up my claim. The user contradicted my claim and provided no evidence to support their counterclaim. I’m more than happy to change my stance when new evidence comes to light but no new evidence has surfaced.
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Anything can be scaled down, of course, with sufficient time. With sufficient time you can make a whole new game from scratch with the same features. What makes a game cross-gen, which you very authoritatively said this game was, is having a release-quality version of the game running on last gen (or of course the ability to quickly make one.) The most impressive cross gen game we’ve seen (horizon, imo) looks amazing, often better than final fantasy , but it’s built on a core of scalable tech — the visibility buffer foliage being a standout — and it runs effortlessly on ps5.
All of the things I called out are difficult to imagine scaling down without re-creating them from scratch. The lighting and modeling is very dependent on the sharp shadows, the whole game would look very flat with last gen-res shadow maps, so the lighting would have to be re-tuned, there are tons of volumetrics and even more particles with alpha , environments and characters use tons of geometry, and frequently are made up of fundamentally already fairly low poly bits — if you look closely at the brick walls in the demo you can see some pretty low res details — which means there’s not a ton of room to reduce them further automatically without surfaces turning into blobby messes. I would expect the performance mode at least to do a little better if they had scaled down content and settings in their back pockets.
Fundamentally I do not think this is a cross gen game. I of course could be wrong about some or all of these details — but it’s far from a open and shut “this is obviously crossgen” game like you presented.
Back on topic for the actual game: I’m firmly in the “these probably aren’t raytaced shadows” camp, they’re just way too stable and I’ve seen some camera transitions that show shadow map-looking artifacts. Really hope they reveal something about the approach, it looks amazing in almost every shot.
I guess the source of our disagreement is in the definition of crossgen. To me, a cross gen game is a game that was initially designed for one platform and then released on a next-gen platform. To me, it doesn't matter if it's then released on the last gen platform as it's design was compromised due to originally targeting the last gen platform.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Then by that definition, FFXVI is a current gen game as it was always targetted at the PS5. IE - the PS5 was always it's first platform target. PC will come later as will potentially XBS-X/S.
They were considering whether or not they wanted to port it to PS4 and make it run well there, but discarded that idea early in the development process as they wanted to fully concentrate on PS5 visual quality. It's been 100% PS5 targetted since 2020.
In other words at no point in its development cycle was it not targetted at the PS5.
Regards,
SB
That's not how I understood the article at all. "Yoshida previously revealed that Final Fantasy XVI began development on PS4, before the decision was made to proceed with PS5 development only." - article. The development of the game started in 2015 5 years before the ps5 ever released. They couldn't have targeted a platform that didn't even have dev kits out then as if my memory is correct, reports of devkits being sent out started only in 2019.
Addendum: As an aside, this "argument" is essentially pointless so I'm just going to bow out.
Subtlesnake
Regular
Given the length of development cycles, that would apply to PS5 games launching before 2022. So Rift Apart for example would have had the initial foundations built before any dev kits were available. And historically there have been some amazing looking console titles released at launch or early on. So I don't think that fact alone can tell us whether a title is making good use of the available hardware.
I don’t think that’s how it works.
Regarding why develoeprs at SE choose FSR1.0 in FF16, I saw some people purpose the reason that this game features a lot of particle and transparent vfx, and a temporal upscaling method would totally ruin those stuff (especially we know fsr2 don't work well with transparencies). So they choose fsr1.0 and only allow temporal antialiasing instead of upsampling.
That might be a good point?
That might be a good point?
isnt those things works fine in forspoken? so maybe engine limitation? maybe the engine didnt expose things that FSR2 needs to work?
Their argument is actually "forspoken's vfx looks awful under fsr2, so maybe that's why they switch back to fsr1".
From a technical perspective, I don't see a reason why they can't apply fsr2 -- it has temporal antialiasing already. Unless fsr1 is added as the very last minute resort.
Until the vast majority of console gamers are willing to pay for performance beyond the $500 price point... console gamers just need to accept the realities of what these systems can deliver within their price point.
I hate to be that guy, but if want more performance and higher IQ settings, you know the deal? PC...
That we can agree on.
alternatively, a TV that supports motion interpolation in game mode.Until the vast majority of console gamers are willing to pay for performance beyond the $500 price point... console gamers just need to accept the realities of what these systems can deliver within their price point.
I hate to be that guy, but if want more performance and higher IQ settings, you know the deal? PC...
That we can agree on.
i think... cyan... or someone in this forum, got a TV that can do motion interpolation in game mode.
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