Microsoft fires the first shot in the "NEXT" generation.... - Page 103

Gameplay/graphics have never been mutually exclusive. A poor game with great graphics is still a poor game. A great game with poor graphics is still a great game.

But when they come together, it's magic. Skyrim is a great game. And it also has great graphics. A huge draw in the game is exploring the beautiful landscape - take the beauty out of the game, and it loses a lot.

Metroid prime is still one of my favorite games of all time. And it still holds up. It also had great graphics for its time - another case of 60FPS making all the difference. A next gen metroid would still blow my mind though.

I think people are generally incredibly stupid. People ring up for COD x year after year b/c all their friends are doing it - not because the newest is significantly different or better. They line up in droves b/c they want to be on top of the leaderboards with all their friends and talk snap. Not because 'the game is awesome'. I bet more people think MW3 sucked but keep playing it b/c 'that's what they do' then anybody would care to admit.

I'd take COD4 and a unhacked lobby any day over the other trash that has come out since.

Are you serious? I mean that is the most backwards thinking I have ever read. People line up bitching in line for 3 hours for midnight launches all over the world to complain about the latest version? I don't know anyone that would think of doing this. Sorry but to the people that do buy it the game is AWESOME.

I mean you think people are spending money on the Prestige Edition but in the back of their minds they cat control themselves screaming "shut up and take my money"?

I think it was the haunting atmosphere that made it so increadible. Neither of the sequels ever captured the magic of stepping out onto Tallon IV for the first time. And as you said, at 60fps and on hardware that is ancient. The only other game to make me feel like that was Skyrim, It's when everything comes together that a game draws you in, and it doesn't take a supercomputer to make it happen.

Indeed....yet the mindset of "it's good enough", would have prevented us from ever getting to the point where we'd have a GameCube or a 360 on which to run these games. Both games are driven by impressive tech AND art. The atmosphere could never have been haunting, the vistas never as inspiring...on an n64.

One day....360 games will look quaint too. Every new generation, it seems like it could hardly get better....yet it always does.

Quite true, "good enough" only stalls out progress.

COD's graphics engine is so heavily modified. Look how simple Q3A looked and compare it to COD. It's not even close.

And you compare the shooters around the time of COD and it makes you appreciate COD even more. You look at a game like Rainbow Six Vegas 2, an outstanding game in its own right, but a graphics weakling at 30 fps and simpler graphics:

Totally disagree. What's happened is that the stalled top-end has led to a boom at the bottom end. We're seeing a greater focus on visual design rather than raw graphics horsepower. "Necessity is the mother of invention," after all. What we're seeing at the bottom end is a huge renaissance in visual and mechanical design--and it's all being fueled by the bloated, stalled top end.

Would I love to see an incredibly designed game with amazing technological innovations using the best possible hardware? Sure, but that top end has gotten too expensive, so now that kind of combination won't happen more than once or twice in every five-year cycle. And when it does, you can bet it'll get milked to the point where everyone despises it. I'd much rather see a solid dozen amazing games come out every year rather than one or two every generation.

So I'd take the opposite stance from you and say that the focus on pushing technology forward has actually stalled progress for good, innovative design.

To be fair that was a PC game running on Unreal 3 engine, and way dumbed down in the GFX dept for the consoles. It's well known that there were major issues around the start of the gen porting between consoles and porting PC to console. Alice is running on the same engine, and I bet you would never guess so.

And I never said COD looks like Q3A. I said COD is using the same base tech. You can take Q3A now a days and throw in high resolution texture packs and high poly models and it'll look like a new game (albeit running on a quad core 8GB RAM system), but still be running on 10 year old software tech. You're still using some old physics, animation, and shader engines. And while it's cheap, both in licensing and hardware implementation costs, it does give you some big problems if you're trying to keep it cutting edge in terms of gfx, physics, and shaders.

Maybe I got spoiled by early gen console games that did show off the tech, but my point is they also didn't sell as well as COD. Most of them ended up being tech demos, not fun to play games. IW said screw to that, and quietly proved you don't need a bleeding edge tech to sell a **** ton of games. But the industry, specially the big publishers who rely on AAA movie like budget games, do not want to learn that lesson. Same with us tech geeks who love new bleeding edge toys.

I'd like a new expensive toy. I just don't see console manufactures thinking so if they're looking at this logically. Especially with dev costs, and hardware costs finally coming down this gen.

The top end is only stalled because the hardware is ancient.

I don't really disagree with you - there's some great stuff being put out there artistically, often by small teams with limited budgets. But what you're seeing at the top is purely a function of them taking the current gen as far as it can go.

I wouldn't say it's "purely" because of hardware limitations. There's still a lot more that current teams could do. One of the big problems this gen is that it's simply too expensive to do it. If every game were graphically at the level of a Gears 3, a Skyrim, or an Uncharted 2, we'd be having a very different conversation.

IMO the bigger problem is growing budgets and waning sales, not tech. However, you're not wrong. With new tech, it would be cheaper to make better looking games (since teams would be able to be less efficient and still have great looking/performing engines). But then the bar gets raised, consumer expectations go up again, and you're back where you were before, only spending even more money than you were before!

But, yes, admittedly it's a bit of both.

Like Oblivion & Fallout 3?

A better comparison would be morrowind or ocarina of time, since the two you mentioned are still current gen games.

Imagine a decade from now....skyrim will look as weak as morrowind does today.

Maybe. Maybe not.

AAA games take thousands of man hours to do. Takes a lot more work to draw a 2K photo-realistic texture than a 128 texture. 30,000 poly models take a lot more work than a 3000. Every time you increase the hardware, you increase development costs substantially because you need more people to create assets, and the need for quality of those assets has now increased, so you need to pay more money for better qualified workers to pump out better qualified assets.

Yet games cost the same. And gamers expect them to be the same length. Ect.

Honestly, that's the reason alone we've seen quite a few less 12-20 hour SP games, it's just too expensive to produce. Even though there's still a large market for them a better return in investment is creating a small MP game with 8 maps and selling additional stuff as DLC.

It's also why the golden years of PC modding has been in step decline. Back in the day of HL2 it was easier for a group of fans to create a CS or DOD and get it shipped on their spare time. It's been getting harder and harder ever since, because the sheer amount of time it require to get a mod up to snuff.

Shaders didn't even functionally exist back when Quake 3 came out. It's all a bit hazy in my memory but I think fixed function shaders debuted with the GeForce 2 which came out in 2001. Programmable shaders didn't debut until the GeForce 3.


I know it's easy to forget, but back when COD4 came out... it's graphics were widely hailed as some of the best out there. Put it next to Halo 3 for example. I think COD4 looked great, especially the lighting (which, needless to say, was not present in Quake 3).

I played COD2 on a high-end PC back in 2006. It looked great. It didn't look dated in the least.




I don't think hardware manufacturers have a choice. I posted up thread - this gen is flatlining. Hardware sales are way down. Maybe a price drop will help through the holidays but I can't imagine many people caring about these systems next holiday season.

Yep!

No one said we had to make it easy on them.

Decades do do that. But i think it's also safe to say MS/Sony are going to look for a inbetween route from what they took last time vs Nintendo. A lot of people in this thread are talking the next consoles getting bleeding edge, expensive tech again. 4K, ect. It's simply not going to happen.

After Nintendo and the poor early sales and hardware issues of the Xbox and PS3, I don't see them making that mistake again. What we get will be better, but I don't think we're going to see $500-700 consoles where the MS/Sony are very deep in the red right off the bat on unproven tech.

Which means the leap is going to be marginal.

As someone said above, native 1080P locked at 60FPS is really the best thing they could push and keep costs down. Better shaders, and better dev packages too.

Yup, by who? Joe gamer and payloa review guy at IGN?

Thats my beef, as I didn't forget. COD was never bleeding edge (it wasn't bad either). They said the same about the vasaline smeared GTA4 too. Objectively it wasn't, but most opinion get caught up in subjective hype.

As for the lighting, if it's the world lighting it's baked into the maps. It's how radiant maps work, and then mixed with well placed dynamic lights you can get some really neat visuals. You get awesome baked in lighting, but you can't easily do a day to night transition dynamically for instance. HL/Source stuck to radiant style maps and likewise has some pretty slick lighting.

Didn't I just make that clear - by me!

Ultimately baked lighting vs. dynamic doesn't matter. Dynamic is more accurate and and lends itself to other opportunities but comes at a cost. Whether or not the cost is worth it is up to the developer to make. If IW really wanted day-light transitions in the game they could've put it in, at the cost of other stuff they were doing.

This dynamic will always exist in game development, no matter the hardware. Better hardware just changes the terms of the dynamic. For example maybe next gen they can keep 60fps and do dynamic lighting. Well there will be some other trade-off they will make.

Except when I have to choose between A) a $400 system that they're making money on every box, and B) $400 system that's actually a far more powerful, but subsidized $600 system, and knowing that they'll both play 95% of the same games, but they look way better, run and/or load faster on console B....why would I even consider A?

They've used that model for decades for a reason. I don't see any good reason why that changes. The same calculus was done every generation, with the same result every time. Nintendo had a great short term run with a great gimmick, but the traditional model was vindicated in the end.

It's an investment. Businesses do this all the time, its hardly unique to gaming. Any company that's crippled by fear and is no longer willing to take risks and invest in their future isn't long for this world.

Especially considering the losses Sony has been taking as a whole for the last four years including almost 6 billion this last year. Their stock is at three decade lows. They need their games division to succeed and Vita isn't taking the world by storm.

MS is obviously doing better, but I don't see them wanting to take billions of dollars in losses again and their investors surely don't. Their brand is established.

I'd really be suprised to see a repeat of this gen.

Nintendo has always sold their systems for a profit. And the Gamecube was very impressive for it's time, and only cost $199

Generally speaking yes. Were I motivated I'd go back into the MW3 threads where so many people lamented it wasn't as good as BLOPS, but didn't want to go back to BLOPS b/c all their community was on MW3. MW2, same thing - SO many people wanted to go back to straight up COD 4, however the hobbies were all hacked so the game was effectively shuttered.

People have a herd mentality. Marketing in America pretty much banks on this. I have no doubt that BLOPS 2 may well break MW3's sales record and will reign king until MW4. And so on and so forth. It won't be because its dynamic or fresh or anything like that. It'll be because everybody else will be buying it day 1, and you just gotta know those maps man or you'll just end up getting raped match after match after match. And who wants that w/ their friends talking smack in their ear about how much you suck? So lots of people will buy it or ask for it for Christmas. By default.

Classic herd mentality.

Granted, many will buy it b/c they believe it to be mana from heaven - but not all. I bet not even half.

All I ever hear when playing CoD is how bad it is and how everyone hates it. It is quite sad really, which is why I usually mute everyone.

Yup, you and I both. But MS/Sony doesn't care about that. They just want to turn a great profit. Bleeding edge might be more reward, but it's also more risk. Look at the $3 billion MS siphoned off corporate to pay for hardware failures, or Sony running a $200 loss on every console sold for years (Sony should be paying for hardware failures too btw, YLOD is a huge problem in their old poorly engineered model). Then they look at Nintendo, and Minecraft, and COD.


Bingo.

good job with making up numbers.

Amazing how simple people around here think it is to produce a new game or console.

I am guessing Tyrant is about the only person who actually worked in the industry...

no one has the exact numbers, but many places site the return / extended warranty program for MS is into the multi-billion writeoff territory. The 1 billion price tag was just the first year writeoff. Most places think it's now closer to 3.

The first two yeas of the PS3 the 60GB version was initially taking a $247 loss. They got that down to a $50-75 loss on the respective models by xmas 2008, but it was still a major issue.

These consoles have been damn expensive and hit a few road bumps.

Those are my more fined tuned numbers (sorry for my less precise post). If you want the exact numbers feel free to google. Either way, they're real costs to the bottom line.

I don't think they will do deeply subsidized consoles either.

But even a $400 unsubsidized console goes far far far beyond what you have today.

My guess is that Nintendo is going to push for the $250 pricepoint.

just keep the faking information coming... yes, you are correct that those are "finely tuned" by you.

the Microsoft financial statements are out and Microsoft cannot hide losses by the Entertainment division from the SEC. You will see nothing related to this so-called $3 billion in any of the statements. You will see that the bulk of the losses were due to Bing search which has since been spun off into the online division and Windows Phone which is still part of the Entertainment division.