What to expect from next-gen graphics [XBSX, PS5]

This

 

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.

 

A lot of tools will need to focus on procedural generation in my opinion. It’s the only way to get a high level of fidelity without the labour to produce it all. You’re going to need an engine that just knows how to build an environment fairly quickly. Ray tracing to adjust for all sorts of dynamic situations involving the environment instead of relying on static light maps. Etc

 

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.

 

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.
But who says this has to cause a lack of AI and physics?
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.
Ofc. current game design paradigms will no longer work so easily. But that's only good and an opportunity. Want new games anyways not the same crap again with better gfx.
In fact, this video shows some of this ideas already by using animation driven from vector fields. It's not only Hollywood that we see here, it's lots of all this procedural tech we all have in mind all the time, no?
... but we've had this discussion already...

 

My hope is that they spend most of the power chasing 120fps minimum

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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 seems procedural content generation finally starts to work well. With open worlds generated this way for most already, it's just obvious the same will happen to higher frequency details.
This will reduce costs and so shift what's economical and what not, so your prediction of costs being the problem is not necessarily more true than mine.

We'll see. I bet we get games that look like this during next gen.

 

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...
Not a fan of devs putting so much performance towards resolution, targetting true 4K given Dennard's scaling has long ended and improvements in cost per transistor are diminishing.

 

You said it will happen whether we want it to or not. If the economics don't allow it, it won't. If procedural content creation (realtime or offline) mitigates the costs, then it become economic to have bigger worlds, but that's a dependency and we can't assume game worlds will be far richer than they presently are without a clear solution to the economic constraint.

Kinda look, we look at each console generation and the RAM increases x8. Therefore, it'll happen for PS5, 64 GBs RAM, whether we like it or not...except there's a financial barrier now stopping that from happening. In game dev, to date it was possible to increase content an order of magnitude each generation, but at some point that exponential growth will hit an economic wall and need some alternative solution to remain sustainable (the equivalent of introducing an SSD into consoles instead of gobs of RAM).

 

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.
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?

 

There will be outliers that can spend more and deliver widening the gap between them and the others. GTA V sold over 100 million copies I'm pretty sure the budget for GTA VI could be astronomical and with the extra power of next gen will widen the gap that there is already with Rockstar games and everyone else.

 

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.

 

See the reflection of one people at 13 seconds he is not inside the room.





Not the same marble on the stair.

 

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.

Cost of video game production has increased exponentially throughout the entire games industry.

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).

 

Easier to implement more detail, but significantly more labor work to create it.

edit: I can see it with my self.
To make a simple polygon character when 3D was at it's infancy you could finish the model with UVs and textures in one day. Rigging was easier too because you had to deal with few edge loops and few extra items where on a character. Parts of clothing sometimes were nothing more than a texture on the same mesh that made the body. Hair were one bulky mesh. Limitations meant you could make simpler assets
Now you have to model an a complex character with every possible detail, requires some serious preplanning because you are considering this will become a game model than needs to be retopologized, UVed, baked and animated. Now a character consists of tenths or hundreds of meshes that must be translated to proper in game assets. This requires more skillsets because if something goes wrong it will cause issues in the next steps of the workflow.
Now animation includes physics, blending, muscle simulations, understanding of animation principles, you have to consider accessories, hair and clothes and the list goes on.
Originally you would put some simple textures materials and things would work.
Now in texturing you have to consider realism, story telling and understanding of how materials work in real life. Simple light sources dont cut it. Now you have to consider use of multiple light sources and how to invoke a proper feeling.
The list will never end.

You cant impress anymore with a character that was considered ultra impressive in the PS2 or PS3 days

 

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.
So those tools can save money. Thus people will work on them and there will be ongoing changes in workflows and economy.
Maybe we have a current peak in inefficiency when it comes to cost / effort and outcome, but it does not have to stick at this.

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.
Just to mention - no idea how accurate this data is and won't argue. There is a need to reduce costs everywhere and always in any case.