*spinning* Next-Gen Discs

[TheWretched]

Then your hand has a lot more than 5 fingers, though^

Off the top of my head, the Mass Effect series (not sure if the first one, on PC it does come on two discs, but the other two do), Forza, Rage, Final Fantasy, Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield... (yes, some counted here separate between SP and MP, but it's still valid, as they couldn't fit "the whole game" onto one disc, or they would have). And the ones counted are just the franchises, where sometimes several games have multiple discs.

Now, they surely don't make up the majority, but they aren't "niche games" either.

 

[AlphaWolf]

He said first party which excludes mass effect, rage, call of duty.

 

[TheWretched]

He said first party which excludes mass effect, rage, call of duty.

True... didn't read that word... and your post didn't mention it, so I "guessed". But what's the difference between first party and third party here anyways? It's still games being hamstrung by size contraints.

 

[Acert93]

True... didn't read that word... and your post didn't mention it, so I "guessed". But what's the difference between first party and third party here anyways? It's still games being hamstrung by size contraints.

LOL really? 1st and 3rd party are fairly well defined -- trying to diminish the difference between such is a back track to skirt admitting the error. Moving the goal post just averts the point. Now if we want to concede the specific point about 1st parties and broaden it to the general market then that may have some legitimacy of 3rd parties have regularly had to use multiple disks and/or cut content, or more importantly, the disk size impacted the game product in a significant way.

 

[I.S.T.]

I think maybe twelve X360 games had more than one disc. Off the top of my head:

Final Fantasy 13, F13-2, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, Forza 2(Or was it 3?), Rage, L.A. Noire...

Yes, we're having space constrained games, but this isn't like the days of PS1 games where it wasn't that uncommon for a big name game to have more than one disc(Though most of them tended to be jRPGs).

 

[Brimstone]

That's one hell of a good point, I.S.T. o___o; Maybe after using that ridiculous amount of space, gamers will start to believe developers who usually talk big.

Now that I think of it I recall Molyneaux words about his games and how he builds up expectations of him.

It isn't about using ridiculous amount of space for the sake of it. More like letting artists be as creative as they can be. Not having to worry about technical aspects and painting detail that exists in the minds eye of the artist. Like Steve Balmer yelling "developers...developers...developers" Carmack seems to me focused on "artists...artists...artists".


Give developers large storage disc space and that can be leveraged into more creative and unique looking experiences.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They grow as much because they can as for any good reason.
If you looks at the so called 50GB PS3 games, the bulk of the space is eaten up by FMV and dialog is 20 different languages.
Uncharted for example has a complete duplicate of all of it's pre rendered cut scenes for 3D support.
Force developers to use a 20GB disc they'll certainly fill it, give them a 200GB disc they'll fill that with the same game.

But for good reason. That is, the developers will not waste time adding data if it's of no benefit to them. The end result of giving devs a ludicrous amount of space will be better quality and/or better performance and/or easier development. That might be a tiny improvement, but it is an improvement none-the-less. Similar to how much RAM is a in a system - devs will always use it all, but the benefits between 8GB and 4GBs might be very few. The main issue with a glut of disk storage is it's too slow to be particularly useful. If mass storage could be made much faster, it'd be very beneficial I'm sure.

 

[I.S.T.]

Give developers large storage disc space and that can be leveraged into more creative and unique looking experiences.

That is definitely possible, but I'd wager it also raises development costs like crazy. After all, art asset creation is often the most expensive part of development.

Plus, development time would go up. Look at the time between the Doom 3 expansion and Rage... That was a very long wait. Yes, Carmack was doing other stuff including various iOS games and his rockets, but I doubt they delayed Rage by more than a year.

I'd prefer more texture and whatnot variety too, but not at the cost of my mythical 5TB before compression games. Or hell, 1 TB. Rage is a good game, but I want it to an exception, not the rule. Completely unique texturing has too many costs, IMO.

 

[TheWretched]

LOL really? 1st and 3rd party are fairly well defined -- trying to diminish the difference between such is a back track to skirt admitting the error. Moving the goal post just averts the point. Now if we want to concede the specific point about 1st parties and broaden it to the general market then that may have some legitimacy of 3rd parties have regularly had to use multiple disks and/or cut content, or more importantly, the disk size impacted the game product in a significant way.

So... all the games that BARELY fit onto a 360 disc weren't impacted in a significant way? There's MORE than enough games that suffered this fate. And you can nearly always see the results in the abysmal FMV quality in a lot of games. This has even dragged down PC games in several areas (Mass Effect and Dragon Age for example have HORRIBLE fmv quality).

And yes, I missread, no question, thus in essence, my previous post was wrong. But the general point is still valid.

Thing is... even if the games only would need 8GB of data, this would still be true. It's especially true, since a second disc for a mere GB would be a waste, and thus a lot of effort would be put into place to save that tiny bit of data. And by virtue of "360 as a lead", most PS3 games get the same (downgraded) results. PC does too.

 

[Brimstone]

That is definitely possible, but I'd wager it also raises development costs like crazy. After all, art asset creation is often the most expensive part of development.

Plus, development time would go up. Look at the time between the Doom 3 expansion and Rage... That was a very long wait. Yes, Carmack was doing other stuff including various iOS games and his rockets, but I doubt they delayed Rage by more than a year.

I'd prefer more texture and whatnot variety too, but not at the cost of my mythical 5TB before compression games. Or hell, 1 TB. Rage is a good game, but I want it to an exception, not the rule. Completely unique texturing has too many costs, IMO.

John Carmack mentioned they needed to have less time between games, so the gap between RAGE and DOOM Next-Gen should be pretty modest. I don't think they are doing any radical changes to the engine like adding unlimited geometry.

Besides games that fit the standard mold, what potential innovation is possible? Take something like Minecraft, and a developer puts there own spin on that. I can see having a lot of data storage helping to create an innovative experience and immsersive game world.

 

[Cyan]

So... all the games that BARELY fit onto a 360 disc weren't impacted in a significant way? There's MORE than enough games that suffered this fate. And you can nearly always see the results in the abysmal FMV quality in a lot of games. This has even dragged down PC games in several areas (Mass Effect and Dragon Age for example have HORRIBLE fmv quality).

And yes, I missread, no question, thus in essence, my previous post was wrong. But the general point is still valid.

Thing is... even if the games only would need 8GB of data, this would still be true. It's especially true, since a second disc for a mere GB would be a waste, and thus a lot of effort would be put into place to save that tiny bit of data. And by virtue of "360 as a lead", most PS3 games get the same (downgraded) results. PC does too.

I expect next gen games to not need FMV at all. I certainly hope so.

In fact I enjoy more the cutscenes when I know my consoles are running them instead of a video, because they just go to show how capable your hardware is. I think many FMVs in games are mostly there in order to add artificial space and prevent people from pirating your game.

 

[Arwin]

I think maybe twelve X360 games had more than one disc. Off the top of my head:

Final Fantasy 13, F13-2, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, Forza 2(Or was it 3?), Rage, L.A. Noire...

Yes, we're having space constrained games, but this isn't like the days of PS1 games where it wasn't that uncommon for a big name game to have more than one disc(Though most of them tended to be jRPGs).

F13-2 is one disc, actually. Some of the RPGs you mention on the other hand are more than 2 (L.A. Noire complete edition, with all the DLC, is 4 discs even). There are quite a few missing from your list (Halo, MGS HD collection), but yeah, there are a lot more games out there that show they were limited (maxing out to something between 6-7, and now with MS having updated useable DVD space to 8 a little bit higher, and then having less audio, only having language support for one language, badly compressed video, etc.).

As for current use of FMV, it's most commonly used to hide loading, which is partly why BinQ is often used (when you'd really prefer something way better), because it allows a game to load while playing back a cut-scene more easily. An in-engine cutscene with a lot of complexity (which next-gen could be worse) would require to be loaded into memory itself, and because it's using memory, next level content can't be streamed into memory while playing because there's no room.

 

[TheWretched]

I expect next gen games to not need FMV at all. I certainly hope so.

In fact I enjoy more the cutscenes when Ï know my console are running them instead of a video, because they just go to show how capable your hardware is. I think many FMVs in games are mostly there in order to add artificial space and prevent people from pirating your game.

Hm... I am not sure. It's usually an "easy way out", of sorts. It's more work to make a game engine run the cutscenes in real time, than to just render them offline beforehand. And I don't really care for "better graphics" in cutscenes... I'd rather see my "custom character" on screen. Some things make it impossible to omit FMVs, though. Like fast switches between scenes etc, which would necessitate load screens etc. In MGS4 for example, most cutscenes are in fact real time, and only a hand full aren't. Like the climax scene in Europe (end of chapter 3). It was probably not possible to make this run in hardware, and thus they opted to use FMV.

Other games (Uncharted, God of War) use it to mask load times and/or to add effects that aren't possible on PS3 (Zeus cloud/lighting in the beginning of GOW3).

I don't have anything against FMV per se, but they are often used just because they can... which is a waste, imho.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

John Carmack mentioned they needed to have less time between games, so the gap between RAGE and DOOM Next-Gen should be pretty modest.

Then they are failing miserably, because Doom 4 was started by a completely new team working in parallel with the Rage team, and now that they had those people for more than a year they're still not showing anything from the game at all so it's still quite far from release...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I expect next gen games to not need FMV at all. I certainly hope so.

I certainly hope not, as I'd be out of a job then

Seriously though, we're working on a game with some pretty amazingly advanced visuals now, and still our stuff is full of things they couldn't do in-engine, for various reasons.
So obviously I'm not talking about rendering out in-engine stuff to cover load times and such... and to be honest most of the work we do is actually trailers and not in-game storytelling, even this current project is an exception.

But there are things I expect even next gen hardware is not going to be capable of in terms of visual complexity.

 

[TheWretched]

Well, at Quakecon, Carmack also said that it was a mistake that they showed Rage too early, and that they wouldn't make the same mistake again with Doom, thus they didn't show anything. Let's hope that this is true (i.e. Doom not being TOO far off from release). Then I could live with that.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It's still pretty damn late IMHO.

Another reason they can't really delay it for too long is that the current gen will be replaced in about a year and whatever nice looks the virtual texturing allows will be diminished by the new games.

I was going to add that Rage didn't sell that well but it seems it actually did, even if not at full price. Perhaps the 'Doom' name still has enough selling power... but anyway, I doubt that it can be successful if it isn't released in about a year.

 

[eastmen]

Don't the artists already make extremely high resolution and high polygon count models and then scale them down for the game.

So it seems like by going high quality costs of games wont go up greatly since the work is already beign done. If anything costs could decrease as your removing the quality removal step.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

No, not really - the max is to work at 2x texture resolution, but they don't paint in any extra detail that wouldn't be visible after the downsize.

The geometry assets they're using for the normal map detail are also completely unfit for in-engine use, and any other use, really - we had to rebuild everything on our current project. Impossible to UV map, rig, sometimes even to render.

For nextgen, they'll have to build more detailed game models that'll still be 'low poly' and paint more details into the textures. It's not 'removing quality removal' at all. Also, expectations will increase in stuff like quality of facial animation and secondary deformations like muscles and cloth/hair dynamics, so assets will have to be higher quality in technical terms as well.

Completely unique virtual texturing is another level of additional work on top of that.

 

[Cyan]

I certainly hope not, as I'd be out of a job then

Seriously though, we're working on a game with some pretty amazingly advanced visuals now, and still our stuff is full of things they couldn't do in-engine, for various reasons.
So obviously I'm not talking about rendering out in-engine stuff to cover load times and such... and to be honest most of the work we do is actually trailers and not in-game storytelling, even this current project is an exception.

But there are things I expect even next gen hardware is not going to be capable of in terms of visual complexity.

I hope yours is a masterly game. Piggy-backing TheWretched on this, he may be right too when he says that some scenes need video. I can think of a couple of examples right now, especially when switching different settings and situations so quickly that the engine can't keep up.

In that sense, I can see the usefulness on that.

A bit off-topic btw, but I remember when you said Skyrim art has its flaws too. I love the atmosphere of the game, how they managed to perfectly represent the a nebulous atmosphere because of the weather, I haven't seen many games with that quality, if any.

I also like how good the mountains look from an artistic point of view, kind of realistic and majestic. But I am playing RDR as of late and the art style is much more consistent in my eyes, especially the characters look more convincing, their attires, and the weaponry, etc. Skyrim falls off in that regard by comparison.