This is the exact reason why the videogame industry is in the hole they're in. Chasing fidelity to the point where revenue can't meet expenses. I'd rather a FF game have less fidelity but be profitable so that the next projects get made.
Mainline FF games have been graphics showcases for a long time now. I can't see this changing.
lol, I don't think this comparison is going to go the way you hoped.That's not I call barely...
The game lost a lot a stuff, geometry was reduced, texture was lower res, shadow map was changed, shadow resolution was reduced, lightning reduce or altered, reflexion and SSR was lost.
I mean tbf the FF that looks like a PS3 game and only will like a very late gen PS3 - early gen PS4 game is the one raking in the cash so it's not all the bad ig. Final Fantasy I think can be like Remake level graphics or even slightly above XV and still be alright. They should stick to that focus on fun thing they're touting.
They don't specifically rule them out in those words, but all their current exclusives are also timed exclusives. That's basically saying they will do what they already do right now, which is have timed exclusives. That's not an aggressive multi-platform strategy.
Hopefully this means they go full capcom and do day one releases on everything. I would hate to see a continued staggered pc release.
Yeah this develop for the Switch 2 then port upwards to Xbox/PC/PS5 and potentially PS6/next Xbox while also expecting them to take advantage of each one thing isn't going to happen. Realistically Square will have specific titles go to the Switch 2 day 1 but not every title. The others will be ported to later on.
i think they are timed exclusives built with Sony money which means they are probably not allowed to work on multiplatform pipelines as the games are in development which means exclusivity expires and they are sitting on their bums with nothing to release. They're probably going to start development on multiple platforms and just agree to timed exclusivities on a case by case basic and maybe only take money to pay for marketing, like how CoD does it.
Also noted this, so they lost money on their HD segment because of underperforming sales of their games despite two of their biggest releases on that segment
View: https://twitter.com/APZonerunner/status/1789961622980567091
Treasures came to PC so Monsters 3 almost certainly will too. It'd be nice if they ported to PS/Xbox as well but let's be honest, it's not like there's a huge untapped market there for these kinds of games.
Mainline DQ still goes everywhere and I'm sure if they went back to Builders or Heroes they would be too. Dai was everywhere (and probably should've been nowhere, lol). The issue with DQ is more the lack of releases generally the last few years.
Someone said it earlier in the thread, but the road to success with this strategy is creating a good dev pipeline for all systems, and not just porting things after the fact. There's probably some initial investment they'll need to do to get to that point.
Like...if Microsoft and Sony are even thinking about making more of their games multiplatform to some degrees than Square Enix, a third party publisher, should be doing this is a no-brainer. It sucks that Rebirth's sales were sacrificed for them to notice this but I'm glad it's finally happening.
Right obviously the more ambitious the game the more it costs but that's just the nature of the business. Even if you did "meet the expenses" that's not enough. You need to make a certain level of profits and that level goes up every year. With these Corporations making enough to cover what you spent will never be considered successful, and making what you made last year even if it's good isn't acceptable. Constant growth is the name of the game which to me is insane but that's business. Obviously things will need to change but it probably won't be as simple as "well we better just keep making games at the PS4 level of fidelity.
It's about damn time. I imagine FFVII remake part 3 will continue as planned, but FF17 and all their major titles going forward should probably target the Switch 2, then scale up to other platforms from there. Base PS4 level visuals running at 4K/60 still looks great today, and according to the leaks it sounds like Switch 2 will at least be base PS4 level.
DQ9 on the DS all over again. People will be pissed, but it's the right call given the current market. If a game as critically acclaimed as Rebirth can't do the big sales they expect for a major AAA current gen title, there's simply no hope. You have to scale back a bit and go multiplatform.
DQ9 on the DS all over again. People will be pissed, but it's the right call given the current market. If a game as critically acclaimed as Rebirth can't do the big sales they expect for a major AAA current gen title, there's simply no hope. You have to scale back a bit and go multiplatform.
I feel like this is unlikely to suddenly result in more ports to Xbox, and much more likely to mean a strategy regarding not-already-in-development titles getting launched on Switch 2/PC as well.
I seriously doubt the 3rd part of FF7R is going to change scope or platforms in a meaningful way (and given Switch 2 specs, I am dubious of the trilogy getting ported there).
I seriously doubt the 3rd part of FF7R is going to change scope or platforms in a meaningful way (and given Switch 2 specs, I am dubious of the trilogy getting ported there).
Watch these motherfuckers release KH4 on Steam day 1 and the rest of the series stays rotting on EGS lmao
I mean that is their current problem. They made 14 billion yen profit with mobile and 20 billion profit with MMO. Only their HD games division lost money to the tune of 8 billion yen and that's not even including their canceled HD game projects where they had to write off over 10 billion yen.
I'm assuming that Remake part 3 is still going to be Sony-only to start, as I'm thinking that was a previously-contracted relationship. Going to be interesting to see if that includes Remake/Rebirth though but I doubt it - if they could come to Xbox Remake would have come to Xbox by now.
XVI will probably see a port though, and KHIV will probably be multiplatform whenever the hell it comes out.
XVI will probably see a port though, and KHIV will probably be multiplatform whenever the hell it comes out.
And then they also went ahead and delisted the original, at least on Steam.
But in this case, DQ11 was developed for PS4 and PC first, then S was ported [with the aforementioned graphical cuts] to Switch exclusively for a year (that Nintendo presumably paid for btw), then S was ported back to PS4 and PC.
They already had those higher fidelity assets for the original version is what we're trying to say; they just needed to add them back in. That's how the modders were able to restore a lot of the original settings on PC — they ripped the assets from the original version.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. It's what made the situation worse.
FF7 is arguably their biggest franchise - they'd be silly not to port it over to other consoles. It's leaving money on the table.
I hope this means their Switch/DS exclusive franchises come to PS/XB/PC now too. If they think the audience that wants FF7R is also on Switch then I hope they know people on other platforms want those other franchises too.
They used to be industry leading showcases but that hasn't been true for a long time now either. They can't really compete on that front anymore with the west.
Finding sustainability is more important than chasing the ghost of prestige. Honestly that's a lesson the big JP 3rd parties all could stand to learn.
That's uh, not really how it works.
Stronger hardware means given the same amount of investment the hardware will work less hard to give the same results — so you basically get some amount of framerate for free or the hardware is otherwise more idle for the same results.
New hardware capabilities don't really save you money, though. Pulling out your engine's lighting system in favor of ray tracing doesn't save you money/effort — both because you still have to support non-RT pathways and because all the materials and lighting work needed to make things look good is at least as intensive as before, and the performance is more constrained by the new dedicated hardware, increasing the workload on devs to make the entire thing run well in the presence of RT.
Most hardware capabilities beyond raw flops are like that — their presence does nothing for you unless and until you spend extra money to support them. And raw flops don't do anything for you unless and until you spend money to do something with them. If development budgets had held flat at N64 levels for the past decades of hardware advancement, we'd basically just have 3000fps N64 games with N64 graphics, textures, and AI. By itself the hardware enhances nothing.
They should just quadruple dip into Octopath art style and make it the standard for all their games. Fuck polygons, the pixel uprising is now!
Not surprised at all they were stupidly the only major japanese publisher not going all in on multiplatform day 1 and taking money hats left and right knee capping sales of their franchises.
Not to mention I'm sure Sony is pretty much done paying them off and no longer sees value anymore with Xbox pretty much being a non threat especially after MS themselves are supporting PS5.
Not to mention I'm sure Sony is pretty much done paying them off and no longer sees value anymore with Xbox pretty much being a non threat especially after MS themselves are supporting PS5.
I was thinking more day/date stuff. I can kinda understand KH3 not being on Switch or needing a port that takes more work, but KH being locked to EGS (to this day, I think?) still blows my mind. What a great way to ensure no one plays it on PC.
For right now I am going to assume their "big franchises" like FF, DQ, Nier and KH are gonna be multiplatform. Smaller games might have a chance at being exclusive for one reason or another but will probably have to do with marketing/collab/publishing deals. But I believe they announced they are cutting back on the amount of smaller titles they release so who really knows, we don't have a post-shakeup trend on their release cadence yet. They will probably reassess in the next 3-5 years after they see how their new strategies works out.
Using UE will help as its very scaleable and widely supported on all platforms.
It's obviously more than just tweaking settings but will be much easier than porting an entire engine to a new platform first before they can begin work on a port.
I hear you, but would it recoup the cost on Xbox? And would the Switch 2 run it well enough to be worth it?
Assuming it's actually roughly "PS4" level, sure it might handle Remake, but not Rebirth.
SEGA has timed-exclusive switch games. CAPCOM has MH Story and RISE. KOEITECMO has Rise of Ronin.
I think the issue for me is the game on the right doesn't look bad. Obviously the game on the left has some nice bells and whistles, but ... it's not really that important.
Maybe not industry leading but 16 is one of the prettiest current gen games on the market. I don't see them stopping trying to create visually remarkable titles going forward.
Hmm I agree and disagree. FF7 at times was definitely one of the best looking PS4 titles. I say at times because they clearly don't know what they're doing with UE4 and are most likely using old tools ect. FF16 for most people is considered to be one of the best looking PS5 titles out to date. Rebirth is definitely Remake on the surface but clearly is far far more ambitious in essentially everyway outside of character models/lighting and texture work (more of the same UE4 problems) which realistically isn't possible on the PS4 from a sheer size standpoint.
So I'm pretty sure they'll still aim for making the best visuals they can for the major releases. Now hopefully once they leave UE4 maybe they'll have more luck with UE5.
Yes, lol. Why wouldn't it?
The current Playstation and Xbox are so damn similar that porting wont take THAT much work. If more niche franchises like Persona and Like a Dragon are worth porting surely Final Fantasy games are.
SD stands for Smart Device titles in this case, not Standard Definition.
I don't know a ton about porting work, but I would assume that it would make them money, give the games a second wind. Other companies find value in porting to Xbox, so I'd assume the same can be said for SE.
I still haven't played them even though I want to lol. I'm mostly Switch only at this point and I'm like, they've got to come eventually. Waited and waited then when the announcement finally came I was SO happy only to instantly be SO disappointed. :'( A crappy cloud version not even available in my country. Wow. Crushed!
Maybe next anniversary/re-release/whatever...
They act like SE is a brand new indie studio learning to use the Cell architecture and porting it to the 360's Power PC architecture.
SE has over 4 decades of development experience and I'm sure they can figure out how to develop a game for two very similar architectures.
They've said that the 2D-HD games cost more than people think. And there are polygons in the games🤣
your overall point stands and it maybe a bit of a nitpick but I wouldn't classify Persona as a niche series tbf
This is mostly just reinforcing what I said. "You get more framerate for free but get the same visual results", yeah and the decision that that's not enough isn't made by the hardware.
They don't need to support non-RT pathways unless they want to spend the money to make something cross-gen... Or spend the money to put it on Switch 2. It's a decision. If the hardware supports frame generation then there's a lot less work involved in combing through everything to try to get everything done on the CPU in under 16ms, unless they decide to use this to cram more things in there which is a decision not made by the hardware.
So coming back to the Switch 2, if they can shave off a whole lot of the "optimization" labour because they're content with what the PS6 can do for their release, it costs a lot to scale that back for a handheld restricted by the laws of physics.
One of the selling points for Unreal Engine 5 was that you could just take movie-quality assets and the engine will handle scaling it for draw distance instead of having to pay someone to spend their week making a bunch of LODs, for example. That's "the hardware working harder so you can work less".
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