Yea this is the problem. Animations can get more realistic with more power but to actually make the game do all that takes a lot of dev/artist time which isn't realistic to expect most studio to do. Not only that but it's much easier to script a cut scene to look good from an angle than a full game where people can do different things. These kind of demo videos are always going to be better than actual game play footage.If games are going to have this level of quality it's going to be a lot of pain for the artists and animators.
Very few will be able to meet those expectations. We will have some mega developers offering that and a lot of small indies offering small budget alternative titles, with the middle size developers becoming fewer and fewer.
Yea this is the problem. Animations can get more realistic with more power but to actually make the game do all that takes a lot of dev/artist time which isn't realistic to expect most studio to do. Not only that but it's much easier to script a cut scene to look good from an angle than a full game where people can do different things. These kind of demo videos are always going to be better than actual game play footage.
And the people expecting lots of complex interactions, AI and physics and such will be even more disappointed because all of that is going to heavily depend on the game play and time for devs to script it all. This stuff hasn't significantly changed since the ps2 days, it's not going to change just cause new consoles are more powerful. With more power, you can get wavy hair or clothe physics but things that require dev time will still be mostly the same unless a studio spends lots and lots of time on that aspect of the game.
While true, there is no reason to expect you need a new gen of hardware for smarter AI. Most of what people considers smart AI in games is just manually scripted interactions. There have been interesting AI in games that run on Nintendo consoles and those don't have even current gen hardware performance. If current gen games don't have good AI, it won't magically get better next gen just because the hardware is faster.Better AI =/= smarter AI.
AI has a lot of room for development if you think of it as more varied and sophisticated ways to create fun and interesting scenarios for the player rather than simply better tactical combat. To imedeately associate better AI with just harder enemies is just plain uncreative.
That's not true. The ultimate limiting factor will be cost. If it is not possible to recoup the expense back, games won't push that hard. The choices will be economically driven.But games DO go in this direction. It will not stop at current state of the art. So it will happen, if we like it or not.
That is the better idea. If animations could be AI driven, there's be no need to create them. That may be 'easy' for bipeds, but it gets a little trickier for animating aliens and whatnot. As discussed in the PS360 era, dynamic procedural content is the way to the rich, varied worlds we want.It can be the exact opposite: Use AI and physics to avoid the need to script and pre-simulate, pre-record, pre-what-ever-boring-and-expensive-else, all of this infinite manual work.
Simulate a truly interactive world, and it becomes a matter of creative technology, not just money.
Well before factoring in Youtube compression, being a launch game not taking full advantage of the hardware, and the game's art direction, if this game targets 4K 60fps like I've heard some people say, there goes alot of the GPU budget the PS5 offers over the PS4...Looks awful, pixelated Shadows, choppy Framerate , and these terrible Brown tones again. Sorry this has nothing to do with real nextgen Graphics.
Or you make smaller worlds with more detail. Open world is not necessarily more interesting. And shown video is not a big world - it's mostly facade at the distance with focus on certain locations and story. Pretty much a next gen SW Fallen Order.If procedural content creation (realtime or offline) mitigates the costs, then it become economic to have bigger worlds
If games are going to have this level of quality it's going to be a lot of pain for the artists and animators.
Very few will be able to meet those expectations. We will have some mega developers offering that and a lot of small indies offering small budget alternative titles, with the middle size developers becoming fewer and fewer.
Project Mara is a single location game, in a realistic environment from Ninja Theory. It shows what a posh shiny apartment will look like next gen.
Like the incredible detail in Uncharted 4's home environments. Sure, you can have some games with limited scope, but we're talking general terms here. Any game of a certain genre and scope has a current-gen cost. To add more variety for next-gen means adding cost for that same game and genre, without an increase in game price to compensate. Witcher 4 will cost more than Witcher 3. Uncharted 5 will/would cost more than Uncharted 4. You can't have more without it taking more effort to create and therefore cost more.Or you make smaller worlds with more detail.
Cost of video game production has increased exponentially throughout the entire games industry.I don't see how it could be suddenly too expensive to improve visuals further. So far this has not happened in the long history of video games. Why should it now?
With the advance of performance, the cost to create the same game goes down. So creating an Uncharted 1 on PS5 would be cheaper and easier than creating the same game on PS3. The raises the bar on the minimum level, with zero-budget indies able to make decent enough titles. At the top end though, more content means more costs. You can't create assets from thin air for free. Tools help push costs down from what they would otherwise be, so procedural texture generation save many artist hours. Individual model costs aren't likely to increase more either as they are already modelled in great detail and just converted to a quality suitable for the hardware. However, more of everything - more building variety, content variety, people variety, plant and animal variety, animation variety, etc. will cost more. With games able to stream unrestricted amounts of data, the limitation will no longer be hardware (how much variety can we get off the HDD in Spider-Man?) but how much the production budget can afford (we can stream 1TB of original varied content from the SSD for Spider-Man 2, but how much can we afford to make).wouldn't it be, to the contrary, easier for them ? Less limitations, not scratching their head to reduce details to fit the limited ressources while still having something looking good.
Easier to implement more detail, but significantly more labor work to create it.wouldn't it be, to the contrary, easier for them ? Less limitations, not scratching their head to reduce details to fit the limited ressources while still having something looking good.
You can, if you do have procedural generation with coarse artist control. It's a matter of creating better tools. Creating those tools requires research but is cheap in comparison to producing AAA games.You can't have more without it taking more effort to create
The graph shows scatter at the right, present side. If we would draw a more accurate curve instead a straight line, it would point downwards, with the peak at 2005.Cost of video game production has increased exponentially throughout the entire games industry.