Next-gen Cross-Platform Strategy [2020]
- Thread starter Shortbread
- Start date
Fanboy wet dreams are not rumors.
Source?
Is this where I say "Rumor from Cyan is MS could buy Sony after buying BET and Take2 with blank checks"?
Metal_Spirit
Regular
The big question is... When the game is still on paper, you cannot just go wild on what you intend to do. You must look at your hardware specs and make an educated guess, based on some testing, on what you can and what you can´t use. Be it physics, IA, streaming, etc, etc.
At this point if a hardware level doesn´t appear to be capable of doing such a thing, you cannot go on, hoping to be able to manage to optimize stuff, and make it run ok later on. You need to be on the safe side, and this will affect game design choices.
What we are talking about next gen consoles, is for them to take games to a next level... we are talking about next gen improving on current gen quality. Not about having current gen reducing detail to be able to run next gen improvements.
What this means is that, on cross gen games, and, for now, speaking just about streaming capabilities, we cannot hope to create a world with a tremendous high detail using the streaming capacities of the new gen SSD, and then create a bloddy pixel mess on current gen HDDs to make it also work. This would be ridiculous! It would reduce current gen level of quality, and it would make the game suffer to a terrible degree.
What needs to be made is to create the maximum level of quality current gen HDDs supports, and thet improve on it for new gen SSDs. This would create a high quality game on both gens, with the new gen showing benefits.
But althoufh clipping, view distance, and even detail could increase, some legacy would be present. And the biggest one would be movement speed. It would be the lower specs that would define it.
This is true for everything else... You cannot create a physics model that current gen does not support, and then use a simplified model on current gen. This would not be the same game. If your game requires the advanced physics, you just cannot port it to the current gen. You could create a new game with the same name, add the "Lite" extention or something to the name, and then use a simplified model. But not on the same game! It would be ludicrous, since the nuclear part of the game is not the same!
A good example is IA, you cannot use an excelent IA model, tht requires high CPU usage, and then stupidifie it for current gen. How ridiculous would this be?
It must be the current gen who defines the IA level.
It's such a bizarre way to extrapolate what the Xbox division can do just because of market cap. Granted, I'm not an expert in corporate culture, but I don't think it works that way (directly) as they're suggesting.
I do wonder if/when we'll see another big purchase ala Mojang though their string of small studio purchases is certainly another thing to add to the bookkeeping over time.
Agreed. But we do both agree that both carts and CD-ROM have their own advantages and disadvantages, and there isn't really a great example of a game that leveraged N64's massive read speed advantage to enable revolutionary new gameplay. That's really the point I was trying to make. Even games that showed new gameplay, stuff like Mario 64, were eventually replicated in a convincing way on PS1 with stuff like Spyro and 40 Winks.
At the time, N64's 4MB of RAM was massive. When the expansion pack was added, it's 8MB was also massive. Windows 95 has a minimum requirement of 4MB and a recommended 8MB, for contemporary comparison. Also, remember that most games back then weren't 600MB of game. It's FMV and redbook audio filling those discs. Surely there must be a game that leveraged the massive read speed of N64 and opened up new, revolutionary gameplay. So far DSoup has done a pretty good job pointing out how a slower, larger media has been leveraged to allow bigger games, but why wasn't N64's read speed leveraged?
D
Deleted member 11852
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Yes. I'm old and the Atari 2600 was my first gaming device. It was instant. It's been downhill since then, except that particular low with 8-bit machines like the C64 with games loading from tape before fast-loaders were a thing. But even carts now come with load times. I have Breath of the Wild on a card but it still has load times (as do plenty of other Switch games) because it's not just pulling data off the medium, but about the game's ability to generate the world.
Of course, N64 could load data fast but it wasn't a lot of data. The nextgen consoels may hit a sweet spot of speed and capacity. But we'll see.
Yup it wasn't a lot of data and so it's not necessarily a good comparison of where we are at now.
I think it was Scot_arm said N64 didn't use the faster storage speed to make big changes to games so there probably won't be this time.
I feel it will make a big change and so does Cerny. "a true game changer" and " the key to the next generation" is what he said in the first Wired article.
Edit: it was see colon not Scott-Arm.
the difference is real-time streaming wasn't nearly as ubiquitous then as it is today. Most AAA games, even very linear ones, rely hevily on streaming for everything from audio to graphics, physics data and gameplay code. And they would easily rely even more on in if only they could.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
Yup, Most open world games are ludicrously limited regarding how fast you can move through it. In many cases you don't need it, but if if you do, you can't. Not without tricks to keep the streaming bandwidth under control. The use of 20MB/sec for Spider-Man is frankly astonishing.
To be clear it's not that I don't think faster IO isn't going to be important, especially when comparing this current generation to the upcoming ones, it's just that I think that if MS goes with an off the shelf NVME drive and Sony has some custom solution that's faster, that the difference will be less substantial than the increase in speed would suggest. I'm more comparing the next generation offerings than say, PS4 to PS5. So, yeah, it could be a "true game changer" in that sense.
Yeah I agree with this completely, I'm talking from a current gen to next gen situation.
love this article written by a girl named Paloma, who talks about the issue:
https://translate.google.com/transl...ra-tu-hate-a-xbox-series-x-y-microsoft/849746
https://translate.google.com/transl...ra-tu-hate-a-xbox-series-x-y-microsoft/849746
Phil Spencer explains, in a radio interview for Gamertag Radio, why they decided to make initial Xbox Series X games intergenerational.
One of the topics that people talked about the most is the Xbox Series X and its initial exclusive games. During their first year of life, Microsoft exclusives will be intergenerational, and will be released on both the new console and the current Xbox One. A decision that, according to Phil Spencer, has been taken that way because his priority is the players, and not just the machines.
He also said that they want to be bolder with Series X, and explained the reasons why the first Xbox Series X exclusives will be intergenerational:
"It's about putting the player at the forefront and not the machine [...] If we look at the PC ecosystem, we see some of the best games, with the best graphics, running on high-end PCs, and those same games can be run on computers from several years ago with fewer resources. And the current state of the engines and capabilities make it possible for developers to make the most of the hardware that's put in their hands."
"Of course, when creating our strategy for Series X we did it with that in mind. We wanted to build a console that's the best of the best on a TV, one which gives creators the ability to create the best games. But you don't want to do that by excluding the rest of the people," Spencer said..
Just as on PC, games can scale in performance, the Xbox leader hopes that his strategy will make games reach the widest possible audience without compromising their quality.
"I'm not going to tell every third-party studio what they ought to do, but what you see today is that players just want to play with their friends no matter what device they're on, people want to have as many games as possible at their disposal , and developers want to use the best technology available. We built this plan with those three things in mind, and we're very comfortable with our situation."
One of the topics that people talked about the most is the Xbox Series X and its initial exclusive games. During their first year of life, Microsoft exclusives will be intergenerational, and will be released on both the new console and the current Xbox One. A decision that, according to Phil Spencer, has been taken that way because his priority is the players, and not just the machines.
He also said that they want to be bolder with Series X, and explained the reasons why the first Xbox Series X exclusives will be intergenerational:
"It's about putting the player at the forefront and not the machine [...] If we look at the PC ecosystem, we see some of the best games, with the best graphics, running on high-end PCs, and those same games can be run on computers from several years ago with fewer resources. And the current state of the engines and capabilities make it possible for developers to make the most of the hardware that's put in their hands."
"Of course, when creating our strategy for Series X we did it with that in mind. We wanted to build a console that's the best of the best on a TV, one which gives creators the ability to create the best games. But you don't want to do that by excluding the rest of the people," Spencer said..
Just as on PC, games can scale in performance, the Xbox leader hopes that his strategy will make games reach the widest possible audience without compromising their quality.
"I'm not going to tell every third-party studio what they ought to do, but what you see today is that players just want to play with their friends no matter what device they're on, people want to have as many games as possible at their disposal , and developers want to use the best technology available. We built this plan with those three things in mind, and we're very comfortable with our situation."
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