Oh come on guys. We have impressive looking games, a lot of great things will come I am sure.
PlayStation Showcase 2023
- Thread starter Shortbread
- Start date
For sure. There will definitely be games pushing fidelity to new levels and they won’t all be UE 5. I just think it’s gotten incredibly hard economically, so it’ll be rare.
I think mainly lumen - we can have awesome looking geo and assets without Nanite. But if a game does not have some form of RT lighting... it looks really last gen.
I think lighting and materials is more important than geometry, for the most part. That gets a bit iffy when you start talking about trees, where it really shows if all of them are sparse.
Yup! I mentioned something similar about the lighting. That's the main part that really looks bad at the moment with SM2, especially in the outdoor areas.
This scene's lighting and shadowing looks quite nice though...
Spiderman 2 was running at 30fps, loads of games were running at 60fps beforehand
I wonder if they are using RT shadows now.
cheapchips
Veteran
The Talo Principle II trailer was the best looking thing at the show. They didn't say that wasn't running on PS5! Maybe they just forgot!
I'd say we'd be looking at a UE5 title, but as as far as I know, Croteam haven't gone over to the dark side and are still using their own tech.
4k version
I'd say we'd be looking at a UE5 title, but as as far as I know, Croteam haven't gone over to the dark side and are still using their own tech.
4k version
snc
Veteran
Games like Forbiden west, Demon souls r or Forza Horizon 5 looks better than most titles with rt (with exclusion of titles like Cyberpunk). I think rt is cheap approach for many mediocre looking titles to hype it has modern graphics. It is ofcourse future and makes games looks better but you can do so much more with frame time budget before adding heavy rt.
Easy to find:
: )
Played this quite a bit on huge screen Macs back then. It was not too good, but better than Photoshop.
Overall most (or many) people were highly disappointed by this showcase including Spider-man 2.
But as expected by me this is the result of the real legacy of Jim Ryan and his new strategy for the Playstation brand. Biggest stuff Playstation produced before (GoW gameplay reveal, Demon's souls + Ratchet and Clank or even the PS5 hardware and PSVR2 by Cerny) was the result of his predecessors' work.
Now we are starting to see the result of accountant management and greed dream of services, cross-gen development impacting PS5 dev, big pressure on studios to produce games, very limited type of games (third person shooters for single player + services games), cutscenes or PC builds to show off games, 90% of rail sections to show off your biggest game of the year.
The best thing of this show was indies / small games (The talos principle 2 and some others) and PSVR2 RE4 remake not developed by Sony own studios. FF16 stuff was OK (I admit I am starting to like what they are showing of FF16) but already shown elsewhere. Where are Sony killer apps for PSVR2? Where is Astro 2 on PSVR2 or PS5? What's Bluepoint doing?
I mean how could they green lit this "showcase"?
But as expected by me this is the result of the real legacy of Jim Ryan and his new strategy for the Playstation brand. Biggest stuff Playstation produced before (GoW gameplay reveal, Demon's souls + Ratchet and Clank or even the PS5 hardware and PSVR2 by Cerny) was the result of his predecessors' work.
Now we are starting to see the result of accountant management and greed dream of services, cross-gen development impacting PS5 dev, big pressure on studios to produce games, very limited type of games (third person shooters for single player + services games), cutscenes or PC builds to show off games, 90% of rail sections to show off your biggest game of the year.
The best thing of this show was indies / small games (The talos principle 2 and some others) and PSVR2 RE4 remake not developed by Sony own studios. FF16 stuff was OK (I admit I am starting to like what they are showing of FF16) but already shown elsewhere. Where are Sony killer apps for PSVR2? Where is Astro 2 on PSVR2 or PS5? What's Bluepoint doing?
I mean how could they green lit this "showcase"?
cheapchips
Veteran
The indie games were great. If you edited it down to an indie showcase it'd be a much better event!
snc
Veteran
Yes, very underwhelming show and litle alarming of playstation future. Almot 2 years absent and what they show was 70% titles that could be on state of play, gaas games that nobody cares about and will die in few months, no first party hybrid games for psvr2 and even spiderman2 looks rushed and only slightly improved over miles morales. For me only impressive trailer was Re4 psvr2 and its thx to Capcom.
That doesn’t have anything to do with releasing good games. Releasing visually stunning games? Sure it requires a bigger tech stack. But most of MS studios are using UE nowadays.
Indie scene is where we see the best games. They aren’t afraid to innovate.
If all you need are graphics to declare the best games, that is a shame.
you’re missing out on an incredible suite of games, That are super memorable.
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We have all been waiting for something to show us what the consoles can do, so yes I was talking about visuals. Doesn't mean that's all that matters of course.
There's a remake of Marathon 2 on Xbox 360 with high res textures, modern controls and smooth performance. It's also BC for One/Series, and has been on sale for as cheap as 1.99 I think. I'm fairly sure I got it on sale for that price.
It’s still subjective. Sony doesn’t have a monopoly on visuals. Most of these challenges for studios, all of them, is that making the game when it’s not fun they need to reboot and make the game in a shorter time frame and that is what kills visuals. Just not having enough time. If you can make a game from start to end without rebooting, the graphics quality bar I suspect would be quite high.
Overall I am very underwhelmed with this generation's offerings. The effort to push higher fidelity pushes the artists more to their limits and their peak, It is both diminishing returns in technology and in how much room there is for the artists to go farther.
When hardware was less capable, the expression of the devs skills was limited by the technology. But as the hardware and engines improve, they approach more the level of the devs skills and sometimes surpass them. So now there are more requirements from the devs to put even more effort to improve their skillsets and relatively less from technology. Although I expect this to change with nanite and the help of AI (WHERE IS THAT AI FOR UV UNWRAPPING? IT EATS HOURS AND MY SOUL)
For example I can easily make models that surpass the quality seen in a PS2 game, I can reach with a bit of effort and surpass the quality of models seen in a PS3 game. But reaching the quality and surpassing those of a AAA game on PS4 is becoming a challenge for me. Going beyond that, requires me to be cream of the crop. And to be on that level I need to spend huge amounts of hours to expand my skillset artistically and technically. At some point the requirements will reach those of movies. And thats on a whole different level of asset creation. Since games are far bigger than a 3h movie, interactivity is paramount, scenes are less guided and controlled by a director, and there is a plethora of capable talented artists who are amazing but not up to the task of reaching levels of perfect realism and detail, it is harder to maintain a perfect consistency in games, in pretty much every area. A lot of talented artists find their way in smaller studios because they can output a level they feel comfortable with, and the big studios are finding more and more challenging to impress the same way they used to in real time visuals. For example Square Enix was considered one of the best in the visual department during the PS2 days. FF16 is less impressive now than what FF10 was back then. It is not laziness. It is just harder to output even more from asset creation. Artists are relatively less held back by technology and more held back by their own diminishing returns now. This is common with almost every game we saw.
Unless, the technology improves in ways were the rendering in games is transformative at this point so that their assets are displayed better. Full RT implementation has that potential but it is not there yet. The initial SpiderMan reveal trailer is more or less using the same talent they have now. But making a one minute video, focusing on a small area that is controlled fully by the director, and pushing the rendering and lights beyond what an actual game allows, makes the assets pop out differently. Mimicking that level of fidelity across the board in a huge open space environment in a game needs mind boggling effort
When hardware was less capable, the expression of the devs skills was limited by the technology. But as the hardware and engines improve, they approach more the level of the devs skills and sometimes surpass them. So now there are more requirements from the devs to put even more effort to improve their skillsets and relatively less from technology. Although I expect this to change with nanite and the help of AI (WHERE IS THAT AI FOR UV UNWRAPPING? IT EATS HOURS AND MY SOUL)
For example I can easily make models that surpass the quality seen in a PS2 game, I can reach with a bit of effort and surpass the quality of models seen in a PS3 game. But reaching the quality and surpassing those of a AAA game on PS4 is becoming a challenge for me. Going beyond that, requires me to be cream of the crop. And to be on that level I need to spend huge amounts of hours to expand my skillset artistically and technically. At some point the requirements will reach those of movies. And thats on a whole different level of asset creation. Since games are far bigger than a 3h movie, interactivity is paramount, scenes are less guided and controlled by a director, and there is a plethora of capable talented artists who are amazing but not up to the task of reaching levels of perfect realism and detail, it is harder to maintain a perfect consistency in games, in pretty much every area. A lot of talented artists find their way in smaller studios because they can output a level they feel comfortable with, and the big studios are finding more and more challenging to impress the same way they used to in real time visuals. For example Square Enix was considered one of the best in the visual department during the PS2 days. FF16 is less impressive now than what FF10 was back then. It is not laziness. It is just harder to output even more from asset creation. Artists are relatively less held back by technology and more held back by their own diminishing returns now. This is common with almost every game we saw.
Unless, the technology improves in ways were the rendering in games is transformative at this point so that their assets are displayed better. Full RT implementation has that potential but it is not there yet. The initial SpiderMan reveal trailer is more or less using the same talent they have now. But making a one minute video, focusing on a small area that is controlled fully by the director, and pushing the rendering and lights beyond what an actual game allows, makes the assets pop out differently. Mimicking that level of fidelity across the board in a huge open space environment in a game needs mind boggling effort
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@Nesh You make a good point. People want movie fidelity, but just by simple reasoning that's kind of impossible. If the tools to make the models and materials aren't two times more efficient you'll have to throw bodies at the problem, and your production budget goes from $200 million to $400 million for a AAA game. It's just not possible, even if you have the technology built to support having a game made up of assets of that quality. That or you limit the scope of your games, so you don't have open world, or the games become really short. Like you could do a 3-5 hour game of that quality and not a 20 hour game with constantly changing environments.
