Oh you're limiting it to PS3/360 and above?Since the PS2/Xbox/GCN era? Yeah, I think it's probably pretty true. Everything is prototyped and run on the previous hardware to some extent; it's just a matter of how far in development those games got before being pushed over to the next console. Even industry shattering, revolutionary launch titles like Wii Sports were originally developed on Gamecubes with wired Wii Remotes attached to them. We are not privy to everything behind closed doors, and only rarely do we get to see actual builds that were made for previous-gen consoles, but it's pretty obvious that everything comes from previous hardware from some stage in development. It's the only realistic way that launch titles could ever get made in the modern era, as game development takes too long and is too complicated to start from scratch each time a new console comes out.
And as time has gone on? That window of how long a new console relies on leftover projects from the previous console has gotten longer and longer. Take the Switch for example; after 3 years in, we are still seeing new releases that began their life on Wii U; like Luigi's Mansion 3, which Kensuke Tanabe has gone on public record to state that it originally began life as a Wii U game - and this is a game that has launched almost 3 years into the Switch's lifecycle! (Now you know why the Virtual Boo menu resembled a Wii U Gamepad screen so much ;) )
This is standard practice and has been for almost 2 decades now. Microsoft are just being transparant about it now, because they have no need to pretend that their new hardware is some groundbreaking amazeballs gift from God, because their corporate focus has shifted away from selling hardware now. The Xbox Series X is just a faster version of the current box on the market and nothing more.
You will not see anything different from Microsoft in terms of what you would typically expect from a new consoles first 2 or so years into its lifecycle, because all consoles go through this initial process where their first party titles are leftovers from the previous console anyway. We're just not used to seeing such transparancy from a console manufacturer before.
No, we will do the arm chair development game, try to make the best educated guess from both sides and fight the usual fight as always. Did I mention that games were faster on Genesis because blast processing?
No, they can't. Its pretty obvious. If you have to cater to the lowest common denominator then there will be drawbacks.
Catering to the super underpowered and old ass original Xbox One in 2020 is a big fucking yikes.
Sony has the right approach.
I would be fine with crossgen if it was base ps4 but not this, Microsoft can keep all their Halos and Hellblades Gears ,and cancelled games there are other systems out there
This explains why that first Halo reveal last E3 was so underwhelming.
I do expect impact on games due to SSD but I don't think we'll see it immediately. And of course Microsoft is already building games exclusively for XSX, these games will just not release soon because they are in active development.I think this whole discussion is pointless. The consoles will be more or less the same PCs, probably one will have a better gpu and the other a faster SSD.
Take a look at a game in ultra settings on current high end pc and you'll see what you can expect from next gen console games. Feel free to imagine a view additional "coded to the metal" improvements which finally don't matter.
And a SSD is of course better than a HDD but it's also a lot of marketing to convince people to buy new consoles. And maybe also wishful thinking. I mean shorter or no loading times at all is great, but I'm sceptical about revolutionary new game experiences or concepts some people seem to expect from the switch to SSD. It's a nice improvement, that's it.
If you mean on PC, the minimun required CPU on PC will crush the Jaguar in the base XB1, and yet the base XB1 will run it.Yes, and it is overwhelmingly likely that the minimum required CPU would crush the 1.75 GHz Jaguar in base XB1 were XB1 not a target platform.
I think this whole discussion is pointless. The consoles will be more or less the same PCs, probably one will have a better gpu and the other a faster SSD.
Take a look at a game in ultra settings on current high end pc and you'll see what you can expect from next gen console games. Feel free to imagine a view additional "coded to the metal" improvements which finally don't matter.
And a SSD is of course better than a HDD but it's also a lot of marketing to convince people to buy new consoles. And maybe also wishful thinking. I mean shorter or no loading times at all is great, but I'm sceptical about revolutionary new game experiences or concepts some people seem to expect from the switch to SSD. It's a nice improvement, that's it.
I don't remember games sucking on PC because they also work on low-end computers. Next-gen games will be fine, plus they'll only keep Xbox One support around for a year, which already kinda happened this gen with games like Forza Horizon 2, Titanfall, Garden Warfare, Ground Zeroes, Rise of the Tomb Raider and CODs up until Black Ops 3 getting a last-gen version too.
The existence of Lockhart actually makes a little more sense now:
Wait I thought they were just supporting the X and not the XS. There is no way they are cross developing for the XS
Wait I thought they were just supporting the X and not the XS. There is no way they are cross developing for the XS
Tbf even on the Xbox One X you'll find the same bottlenecks that would limit game design.Wait I thought they were just supporting the X and not the XS. There is no way they are cross developing for the XS
Okay we're approaching madness now.
Star Citizen is literally mindblowing at times.
Have you at least watched this? Please, watch the whole thing.
NOTHING is doing what SC is doing right now, on its scale, at this level of detail, with no loading screens.
I have a hard time really seeing the problem here.
PCs work like that forever now, and no one complains. Imagine a new game that only runs on the newest $1000 GPU. Like, it does not even start in trash settings on older PCs...
I mean, everything MS develops will release on PC, too. Correct? So they have a game that scales with hardware anyway. And at some point the old hardware gets cut. Just as in PCs.
I think this whole discussion is pointless. The consoles will be more or less the same PCs, probably one will have a better gpu and the other a faster SSD.
Take a look at a game in ultra settings on current high end pc and you'll see what you can expect from next gen console games. Feel free to imagine a view additional "coded to the metal" improvements which finally don't matter.
And a SSD is of course better than a HDD but it's also a lot of marketing to convince people to buy new consoles. And maybe also wishful thinking. I mean shorter or no loading times at all is great, but I'm sceptical about revolutionary new game experiences or concepts some people seem to expect from the switch to SSD. It's a nice improvement, that's it.
And a SSD is of course better than a HDD but it's also a lot of marketing to convince people to buy new consoles. And maybe also wishful thinking. I mean shorter or no loading times at all is great, but I'm sceptical about revolutionary new game experiences or concepts some people seem to expect from the switch to SSD. It's a nice improvement, that's it.
And from the Digital Foundry - How SSD Could Radically Change Next-Gen Games Beyond Faster Loading thread:Not especially. There's always a portion of memory allocated to 'CPU' workloads, and even say - PS4 had two types of bus-access to help prioritize that, which meant developers partitioned memory anyhow.
If I had to look for caveat(s), based on this hypothesis you would have a fixed-partition instead of user-defined, and SSD may change our memory usage patterns in ways we can't fully predict or imagine yet. But as I mentioned earlier, it's not like unified-memory systems are common, they're more exceptions to the rule.
That's usually what we see with textures - IME geometric LOD is a bit more title dependant (though it can certainly have the same behaviour as well). All that said, detail management for everything not-texture is generally really really really hacky and it often gets abused in final stages of development for quick performance wins, so it's not solely a function of I/O either.
But I think important bit is that properly fast I/O gives us a real way to stop thinking about fetching data in 'asset' granularity alltogether, which drastically changes minimal per-frame memory requirements. We've had the first 'game-changer' of this sort in texture-streaming when you start operating on mip-levels instead of looking at entire mip-chains, but we can go to much finer granularity now, and don't need to convert your entire pipeline into 'mega-texture' to achieve it either.
I wouldn't exactly agree with that. Being able to pull data on-demand (and apparently un-compressed on the fly, so we're already saving some performance right there) with latency measured in miliseconds, at minimum gives us multiple-orders of magnitude increase in unique data available during a frame.
What you do with it will vary, but there are certainly options to do 'less' work at runtime because I have so much data readily available.
Crytek replied: "If visual quality will most likely continue to increase in the same large steps as is expected with any new generation of consoles, the real game changer will certainly be the new fast storage that has been promised".
...
Crytek continued: "Apart from the obvious advantage of crushing loading times, it will open up quite a lot of possibilities for games to be designed for it with regards to streaming. That's also a front on which game engines will need to evolve quite drastically, but it's definitely exciting".
Halo Infinite wasn't impressive at all to me.
Hellblade 2 made my jaw drop.
Says it all for me at least. I'll be waiting until later in the gen to get a Series X if there's few to no exclusives for the first couple of years.
I think this whole discussion is pointless. The consoles will be more or less the same PCs, probably one will have a better gpu and the other a faster SSD.
Take a look at a game in ultra settings on current high end pc and you'll see what you can expect from next gen console games.
Got to say I really enjoyed the conversation and summaries in this video. Good work Digital Foundry.
To Halo's credit, Hellblade 2 didn't show any proper uncut gameplay in the least. Just facial capture and shader technologies.Halo looked like a last year current gen pushed to the max while hellblade looks legit next gen
True, but i would think it's representative of what to expect from actual gameplay (as far as graphics go). I doubt it will be a watchdogs differenceTo Halo's credit, Hellblade 2 didn't show any proper uncut gameplay in the least. Just facial capture and shader technologies.
Honestly this is utter nonsense and it's clear why it's even being entertained to death.
What you're arguing is that games have topped out in terms of game state and simulation scope?
Of course not, that would be ridiculous. I just expect that games for the new consoles won't go that far beyond current AAA on high-end pc in terms of graphics and gameplay. But I'd be happy to be wrong about this!
It's hard to believe how much importance was given to this completely non issue.
As if for the stated windows games weren't already current gen games re purposed to new hardware.
As if ports to switch from games that targeted a similar performance gap never happened.
As if it is a bad thing for developers to reach a single platform with many devices for the games that they do want to make and would fit in their vision anyway (I don't think anyone would seriously argue a game like Celeste couldn't be done on last gen consoles for example, and what Ms is making is that if the developer the attrition to support both generations is extremely reduced with a single SDK, apis, certification process, store, package etc.)
As if that doesn't already happen with phones and pcs for years. Where, grasp each piece of software can target the hardware it wants.
As if developers would not want to have the biggest installed base possible that makes sense for their games.
As if the only way to support the new features is to completely ignore last gen consoles (I would bet that even with ssd it will take years for games design to drastically change to use that in a way that standard drives can't keep up, specially for it to be common case)
As if they are forcing anyone to support xbone for the whole of the next generation.
As if Xcloud isn't a thing that they could use at a system level to ensure that the current consoles stay active even for games they can't run natively.
Honestly this is utter nonsense and it's clear why it's even being entertained to death.
It was insightful and nicely worked, even if there were a few further points that could have been discussed (cross-gen multiplayer lobbies, waiting for the slowest player with the slowest drive to load in, and ray tracing drastically cutting dev time for artists and programmers, for example). John said he was playing Devil's Advocate, but tbh, that was Richard's role.Got to say I really enjoyed the conversation and summaries in this video. Good work Digital Foundry.
Hellbalde 2 trailer was a real showcase for those technologies. Incredible.To Halo's credit, Hellblade 2 didn't show any proper uncut gameplay in the least. Just facial capture and shader technologies.
Have you at least watched this? Please, watch the whole thing.
It's far from just marketing speech. Some developers on this very forum have already said, that it will fundamentally change how games are made, including not having to use those ladder/crawlspace sections repeatedly for masked loading. Unfortunately, I haven't bookmarked any of those posts, so finding them now from the fast-moving next gen speculation thread would be hard.
EDIT: Found few...
And from the Digital Foundry - How SSD Could Radically Change Next-Gen Games Beyond Faster Loading thread:
Found also this via quick googling.
Facts.It's hard to believe how much importance was given to this completely non issue.
As if for the stated windows games weren't already current gen games re purposed to new hardware.
As if ports to switch from games that targeted a similar performance gap never happened.
As if it is a bad thing for developers to reach a single platform with many devices for the games that they do want to make and would fit in their vision anyway (I don't think anyone would seriously argue a game like Celeste couldn't be done on last gen consoles for example, and what Ms is making is that if the developer the attrition to support both generations is extremely reduced with a single SDK, apis, certification process, store, package etc.)
As if that doesn't already happen with phones and pcs for years. Where, grasp each piece of software can target the hardware it wants.
As if developers would not want to have the biggest installed base possible that makes sense for their games.
As if the only way to support the new features is to completely ignore last gen consoles (I would bet that even with ssd it will take years for games design to drastically change to use that in a way that standard drives can't keep up, specially for it to be common case)
As if they are forcing anyone to support xbone for the whole of the next generation.
As if Xcloud isn't a thing that they could use at a system level to ensure that the current consoles stay active even for games they can't run natively.
Honestly this is utter nonsense and it's clear why it's even being entertained to death.
Thanks for gathering all this! I mean it would be great if my first impression was wrong and SSD in consoles has a much higher impact on game design.
On John's point about Guerilla Games wanting flight in HZD but the hardware limitations holding them back, I hope with HZD2 we are able to ride Stormbirds etc now that they have a much faster SSD drive and much better CPU.
I don't think anyone is saying this would last a generation. But I think your idea of generations and Microsoft's do not align.Era is acting like this news is for the entire period of next generation
Good news for them? Sure. Good news for the types of people who invest in next gen day one? They should not expect anything made ground-up to justify "next gen", instead, for a period of time, it's effectively another mid-gen refresh. That's a harder sell and less appetising to early adopter types.... when this is nothing but good news for people who invested in a One X recently or even One at launch.
Thanks for gathering all this! I mean it would be great if my first impression was wrong and SSD in consoles has a much higher impact on game design.