FTP “ongoing” games tend to have many updates and can vary quickly making the content produced a point in time effort. Way more than retail games as the studio often needs to move on. Communities of these games generally have hardcore players dedicated to dissecting every aspect of it. I just don’t see the business sense for DF here.
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
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Very good point. Netcode is an art, and the best and worst should be analysed and discussed along with other gaming features like visuals, AI, and interactiveness. Comparing and contrasting multiplayer games on different tick-rate servers would be a great investigation - contrast Apex's 50ms update cycle with Counter Strikes 8.33ms. Test out different games with different Wifi connections, adding noise and seeing how they fare. How much difference do different priced routers make? Quite a bit of relevant content for PvP games that actually affects your chances, so more significant on whether AO is Medium or High.
F2P games tend to have many, many casual players making up the huge numbers. The hardcore are a tiny fraction (although still in the many millions!).
Very good point. Netcode is an art, and the best and worst should be analysed and discussed along with other gaming features like visuals, AI, and interactiveness. Comparing and contrasting multiplayer games on different tick-rate servers would be a great investigation - contrast Apex's 50ms update cycle with Counter Strikes 8.33ms. Test out different games with different Wifi connections, adding noise and seeing how they fare. How much difference do different priced routers make? Quite a bit of relevant content for PvP games that actually affects your chances, so more significant on whether AO is Medium or High.
I also hope Digital Foundry gives some coverage of The Finals now that it's officially released. It fits in the "live service" category they do not prefer, but it has synced destruction of a scale beyond Bad Company 2. The buildings seem to have defined break points, but the major pieces that break off do sync between all players, so they have the same views and the same obstructions to navigate. I can't recall another multiplayer game that will let you knock the face off a building and have it fall into the street, and actually become a part of the game play. Edit: Also the game supports RTXGI, which has been modified/improved somehow, so as all of those buildings are getting destroyed you get pretty good lighting.
I would never expect digital foundry to start pumping out videos to test "seasonal" updates to multiplayer games, unless there was some major piece of tech like when fortnite debuted UE5 lumen, nanite and VSMs.
Also, I do think DF's mandate is graphics and that's fine. Usually the leaders there are single player games. I just think things like DF Direct Weekly they'll take about the industry more broadly and it would be nice to have some differing perspectives there. I don't have any issues with their technical analysis.
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This collection of arbitrary data should be formatted in a defined way and should have a reasonable number of attributes per meshlet.
If some arbitrary data were compatible with the graphics pipeline, mesh shaders would not have been needed in the first place.
To what level are they compatible? While AMD's mesh shaders are compatible with task shaders, they have to use compute to emulate them and make a roundtrip through memory, essentially neglecting the main benefit of mesh shaders, which is to keep the data on-chip. In that case, compute shaders should also be considered perfectly 'compatible' with the rest of the graphics pipeline.
The more powerful and flexible programming model wouldn't make a 'Cull_Triangles()' call difficult, right? In the same way, it doesn't make 'TraceRay()' any more difficult, so what's the catch then? Why is access to fixed pipeline blocks not exposed anywhere?
I think at this point, the benefits of Mesh Shaders for faster culling are crystal clear: cull at cluster granularity as early as possible and do finer-grain per-triangle culling if it's beneficial in the second pass (replace with free Cull_Triangles() on consoles). Should be an easy win, but it's not.
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That was supposed to be Crackdown 3 but I don't know how the final game ended other than much reduced from early showings.
Gotta rewatch this. Honestly can't remember how it works in the final game. I never played it.
D
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Don't forget Star Citizen, which is both shiny and sparkly.
Silent_Buddha
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If this is 'laser scanned' T10 need to get a refund on their laser. Look at the track width and and run off. Esp on the right side. The track irl and proper sims is more narrow while the run off irl is much wider than FM version.
This looks like they knew the edge to edge width of the track + runoff and then took liberties on how to spend that budget instead of staying true to the track. How do you get run off width that far from reality?????
That photo isn't really comparable. Wide angle lens (distorting the image and making the track look narrower than it is) combined with in car camera vs. overhead camera combined with different location on track (right side vs left side).
Taking those into account, the FM shot looks pretty similar and I wouldn't be surprised if the measurements were spot on. The GT7 one, however, looks off ... but again it's a different camera angle than FM making visual comparisons a bit iffy WRT actual track dimensions.
Regards,
SB
Listening to them wonder why CD would make a live service game like Marvel's Avengers is sort of painful. I should preface this with the statement that I love Rise of the Tomb Raider. And Marvel's Avengers I couldn't be bothered to finish. But the quality of the rendering and the writing were both well done. I just didn't like the combat with many of the heroes, and they won't let you play with whoever you want on many of the missions. But to complain about sales... I always felt like something about the way SquareEnix talked about the sales of any game CD made was off. I think I remember them having a positive reaction to Rise's sales, but that was also a timed Xbox exclusive that I think would be politically troublesome to complain about with the rumored money involved. But IIRC, the TR reboot and Shadow both failed to hit targets IIRC, as did Avengers. But Avengers released jus a couple of months before Mile Morales and 5 months after FF7 Remake, and it was the 11th best selling game of 2020. #10 is FF7 Remake and #12 is Miles. How well should it have sold? Better than a Spider-man game? Better than a remake of a legendary RPG that was on the market for 8 months as opposed to Avengers' 3? I can't find any solid information as to how many copies of Avengers were sold, but I wouldn't be surprised if it outsold Rise of the Tomb Raider at all. Here's another article to support that theory.
Marvels Avengers is a live service game, not a single player experience. It likely had huge targets for ongoing engagement and micro transaction purchases that didn't come close to being met. It wasn't solely about base game sales.
It has a single player mode. I never played it, but I'm pretty sure you can play through the whole thing solo.
arandomguy
Veteran
The term "PC Gamer" really is too broad these days. There's so many sub demographic nowadays and there's also been several generations of PC gamer's now likely with very different viewpoints.
The view towards live service for instance likely has a very strong generational divide. If you onboarded into PC gaming around the late 2000s or later you might have basically grew up on live service games.
I actually have always found that hardware enthusiasts and graphics enthusiasts (especially those in online forums, which let's face it is somewhat "dated," yes we're all likely on the older side if not in age but viewpoints) generally tend to be less representative of what the overall PC gaming demographic feels towards MP and live service games.
I'm just going to throw this out there but I wouldn't be surprised if the licensing terms and costs might be rather different here. I don't know the full details here but I believe the Spider-Man license was initially acquired (via Activision) off Marvel way back before the the explosion in mainstream popularity via the MCU as well as Disney acquisition. Sony itself might have a play here as they also own some rights to Spider-Man in media. While the Square Enix and Marvel license was acquired much more recently and in likely a completely different licensing environment.
Circling back to the GAAS comment for all we know the terms also promised ongoing revenue via microtransactions as well.
I never played the multiplayer. It has a perfectly serviceable single player mode. Except that the combat is dull.
The game is based entirely around its combat.
cheapchips
Veteran
If you're not playing on a laptop, with integrated graphics, using the track pad, you're not a real PC gamer.
Yes it has a single player campaign although many of the 'levels' feel like regurgitated multiplayer content.
That said, I thought the combat was great, and very true to the source material, so for me that kept me playing right to the end. Although I didn't finish all of the add on campaigns.
@Scott_Arm we do have a big multiplayer person on the team, Will Judd! It is just Will is pretty busy usually and cannot be on DF Direct
There is a big leak of 1.7 Tb after the hack of Insomniac games. Spider-man cost 100 millions of licence fee for Marvel Spider-man. The cost out of licence fee for Marvel Miles Morales is 120 millions dollars with marketing. Insomniac expected only 75 millions of profit if the first Spider-man sold 10.5 millions. Disney take 50% of revenue for bundle with a marvel game. This is insane.
Wolverine is only 50 millions dollars licensing fee and I suppose a part depends of the number of game sold.
Horizon, TLOU or Uncharted are probably much more profitable for Sony than Marvel game but they sold consoles. This is why out of Ratchet and clank and two new ips Insomniac will do a Venom game,a third Spider-man, Wolverine and a X-men’s game. We have the Insomniac games roadmap until 2033.
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Was that an up front license fee, or what Disney took after release? Because 100M up front after Marvel approached developers, followed by a large profit share, seems a rough deal!
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