I don’t think it will be a “tablet” cpu, as in comparable to the ARM processors in most tablets, that’s less powerful than current consoles.
I assume AMD will create a semi-custom processor like IBM did with the 3 core Power processor in Xbox.
There’s the Power Architecture, Sony’s Cell, AMD’s making something, and there are a TON of cross platform games that the manufacturers manage to get to function.
What gets me is the Boolean-ness of the argument. One or the other, and the Lowest Common Denominator will hold everybody back. If you look back, there’s still been graphically stunning PC games (Crysis, Bioshock, Skyrim), there have been AMAZINGLY popular games in drastically different directions (Angry Birds, Facebook as a gaming platform), Entertainment at EVERY level from $0.99 to $60, Used games sales to the pretty economically fair ‘you can install this in every iOS device you own’.
Minecraft. Man does it have a following. So does WOW and League of Legends if Reddit’s front page has any bearing on it, Arcade emulation rocks, there are healthy modding communities for games like GTA…hmmm Black Mesa.
But it’s all doomed because the PS4 won’t have a 4 Ghz single core processor with extra glint?
Your arguments are a weird combination of nonsensical and counterproductive.
So let’s take Crysis. You’re right, Crysis was a cutting edge, technologically advanced, beautiful game. It came out in 2007. Since then, nothing has tried to surpass it. From every point from the start of PC gaming in the 80s up through 2007, you’d have new games that came out every few months that would be the most technically advanced game you ever saw. Contant progress. Like clockwork.
Now we’ve had over 5 years in which nothing has surpassed Crysis. Certainly not Crysis 2, which actually serves as another major milestone, the first time I can recall that a major AAA title actually looked worse and was less advanced than its predecessor.
If it were a graph, we’d have a skyrocketing bit of progress from 1980 to 2007, a line going steeply up, even more dramatically from roughly 1998 to 2004, till we hit 2007 in which you start hitting a flat line, and depending on whether you were counting the cutting edge or the average, an actual regression from that point on. So you have up, up, amazingly up to… flat or down. You’re actually making my argument for me.
Bioshock and Skyrim? Please. Neither of those games are even in Crysis’ league as technically advanced game. Skyrim may be a better game, but it doesn’t look any better than oblivion did. Bioshock is a cool looking game because of art design, not anything technical. Even so, you’d be citing another 2007 game as evidence that gaming is still cutting edge.
As far as the rest - used games, angry birds, facebook is “all doomed because the ps4 won’t have a 4ghz processor” - how can you possibly even create the silliest straw man position that I said the lack of advancement in this generation of consoles will kill facebook games, angry birds, minecraft, and allowing you to use purchased games on multiple iOS games? It’s so ridiculous that I don’t even know how to address it except to dismiss it entirely.
But that’s the thing…ALL YOU CARE ABOUT IS GLINT.
I can come up with a thousand little improvements in games…but you don’t care. And you won’t be happy. Bud, I can’t make you happy. And by the look of things. You aren’t gonna BE happy.
So what are you going to do?
Nothing in gaming is improved by having lesser hardware.
It’s pure snobbishness to dismiss the idea that people who want games to look good, sound good, have large, detaled complex worlds, detailed and accurate physics simulations, etc as only wanting “glint” - it’s those people who say “oh I like gameplay, not graphics” making the implicit argument that you can’t have both, and if you enjoy your games being more detailed and more immersive, you are a silly plebe.
Every game that tries to put you in an immersive world - whether it be a shooter or a racing game or sports or really anything along those lines - benefits from having a more accurate, more detailed simulation of that world. Technical advancement allows you to create an experience that makes the user get lost in that world. Is the difference between Crysis and Wolfenstein 3d only “glint”?
More power allows game developers to take whatever new direction they want. Want an environment that’s fully destructable by the user? Simulation-quality physics for the driving in your game? Want a huge, seamless world in which you can see things far off into the distance? Want AI that’s clever enough to surprise you and outsmart you sometimes, always challenging you? Want a game in which there can be tens of thousands of objects or people in your play area? Or a thousand other things?
All that stuff gets better with technical advancement. Dismissing it all as “glint” is pretentious.
Nah, you just care about raw cycles. Thats the only foundation your arguement sits on. Unlimited maps and draw distances on a 1080p display are perfectly doable now, and will get better a year after the next gen consoles come out. On the PC side of the fence you can have 12 cores and two GPU’S with liquid cooling…and you can have crap games. Likewise, some of the best gameplay comes from pushing the developers to eek out that last little bit of oomph, bend the bits slightly differently.
Besides, I can’t be pretentious, I like minecraft. I’m going to chalk this into the agree-to-disagree column, because nothing either of us is going to say will make a difference.
What? Liking minecraft is right up the alley of “I like gameplay, not graphics” pretentiousness. Was that sarcastic? Which is not to say that everyone who likes minecraft is pretentious, but if you’re the sort of person who scolds people for being simpletons who like glint while you appreciate all the quirky little low tech games, minecraft is exactly the sort of thing you’d play.
I also notice you’re being inconsistent. You’re praising the fact that games will be better able deliver bigger draw distances when games improve technically because the new consoles will be coming out, yet the whole rest of your argument is that technical advancement is all glitz and irrelevant. If you’re acknowledging that it’s good console games will be better, with new capabilities in a year, then you have to acknowledge that it’s bad that they’ll be stuck in that particular point in technology for a decade rather than having similar advancements every year.
The rest is just another false dichotomy. Yep, with powerful hardware, you can have bad games. So what? You’ll have good and bad games with any particular level of hardware. With powerful hardware, you can still have minecraft and FTL and angry birds, but it opens up new options to have realistic simulations, great looking games, physics puzzlers with more complex interaction with objects and a thousand other things.
As far as “the best gameplay comes from pushing developers to eek out that last little bit of oomph”, why? Instead of spending all that time trying to cripple down their game to run, if they had the extra horsepower they could make their game exactly as they envision it, without trying to cram it into limitations. I fail to see the positives.
As far as agreeing to disagree - feel free to stop talking to me, but I refuse to acknowledge your argument as valid. You are fundamentally arguing that there’s an upside to being technically inferior. This simply isn’t the case. Having a more powerful machine does not preclude you from running minecraft or ftl or angry birds, but having a less powerful machine does preclude you from having all of the good stuff that comes with technical game advancement. You are essentially arguing in favor of something that’s all downside, no upside.
If you say so. I’m not the one dooming game development for the next decade because of the clock speed of a not yet released console. If anything, I’ve been extremely permissive of EVERYTHING happening in gaming, because there’s been a lot of positive.
I’m also, secretly, playing both sides of the field. I’ve dropped quite a bit of money on PC gaming, I enjoy it, but I’m obviously not as rabidly dedicated to it as some.
“Cripple down”? If they’re really designing games that have to be “crippled down” then they suck as game designers and they’re probably creating a gruesome piece of bloatware that would have been a huge train wreck and only run on 1% of hardware if they’d had the ability and budget to make it “the way they intended”.
No one is EVER able to make a game “exactly as they envision it” regardless of how shiny the technology is, and, in fact, to a large extent, having shinier technology makes it harder.
If you set realistic/restricted limits on the design of your visuals, because you know the limits of the hardware you’re working on, you are far less likely to assign an overly large portion of your time and budget to your visuals, giving you more time and budget to devote to other facets of the game.
You keep asserting that it’s incorrect for people to assert that “you can’t have both [good gameplay and shiny graphics]” and you’re right, but your point is hopelessly simplistic, AND that’s not what most people are asserting. The actual point is twofold. First: All games have finite budgets of both time/manpower and money, and time/manpower and money that is spent on one aspect of a game is time/manpower and money that is not spent on a different part of the game (up to a point. Yes, the art team isn’t designing the AI, but you DID make the decision to hire 10 artists and 10 modellers and only one AI designer - if you even bothered to hire a full time guy for that at all.). Second: Designers/publishers have shown us time and time again that they will sacrifice gameplay, AI, level design and pretty much anything else in favor of shiny graphics, because they can’t put screenshots of their AI and level design on their box/steam page/press releases/trailers.
There was recently a study done that indicated that games that release demos sell less well than games that release only trailers. This should come as a shock to no one, because people who see a shiny trailer go “HOLY CRAP! That game looks awesome!” and then they buy it, whereas if they play a demo, they might realize that behind all those shiny graphics is a game that actually isn’t all that much fun, and pass. Shiny graphic sell games. And therefore they receive what many people regard as a disproportionate amount of attention during the design process. Increasing the amount of potential shinyness in the graphics means that companies will feel obligated to spend more money on graphics so that their trailers look as good as the trailers for the other guy, even if it means that the actual fun value of the game suffers.
That is the position that you are failing to argue against effectively.
Games have finite budgets but more powerful systems lead to more powerful development tools which allows development teams to create more powerful games without a direct linear increase in time and energy.
Conversely, a lack of more powerful systems means the development tools for them will be of less value and likely more expensive on their own. So it acts as a barrier for more powerful game development.
More powerful development tools don’t compensate for the addition cost of developing for new technologies. EA is budgeting that the ‘transition’ to the next gen of consoles at “under $100 million” And that’s them being careful.
Is it good that technology continues to march forwards and provide more powerful development tools? Yes. Does it need to go forward at the maximum possible rate, as SenorBeef wants? Some of us aren’t convinced of the benefits.
Of course they won’t 100% compensate for it. But your earlier post was (in my opinion) far inflating the costs. From your same article:
This is what I’m talking about. New technology means new game engines, new graphics tools, new AI tools, etc. Most games aren’t built from the ground up, they’re utilizing these engines. Once the engines are in place, a lot (not all) of the heavy lifting is done.
Then why, do you think, are we seeing increasingly simplified, increasingly graphics intensive games? Why are we getting lines from Square Enix saying “Yeah, we can’t actually remake FF7 the way we’d want because it would cost too much”? Why is the media filled with comments about how much games cost to make? Someone is now going to step up and point to Skyrim and say “Look how complicated that is!” and then I will go back and point to Beef’s comment that it “doesn’t look any better than Oblivion did”. Because it was held back by technology. So they had money to build a more complicated game.
Every generation has significantly increased the cost to make games, resulting in the goofy, stratified market we have now where there are very few “mid range” games - only either big AAA “all our eggs in this basket” games that cost 10+ million dollars, or “small projects” - either indie or mobile, generally - with a budget of under a million dollars.
What is “not a huge uptick”? 10% 15% 25%? Even if the cost to make games goes up “only a little bit” each generation, that’s still pure technology overhead. You can go on about “Oh, more powerful dev tools do this and this” but at the end of the day, if it still costs MORE to make the game (and it does, often, significantly - you might not have to build the engine, but all the art and modelling cost more and more everytime you need increasing levels of detail), then either the game somehow make more money to make up for it (via dumbing down to sell to more people, perhaps. You think the demise of the run&gun FPS in favor of COD clones happened by accident?) or they have to take that money from somewhere else in the budget.
The problem with possibly crappy console hardware is that this is either the end of consoles, or at the very least, it’ll be a very long console gen. Longer than the current one, likely.
We need consoles to improve by a large margin, or we’re going to stagnate with in terms of technology even faster than we did this gen.
This gen we at least had the new GPU architecture when the consoles came out. Technology that allowed for modern lighting and a ton of other things that we couldn’t do before. The larger size of the RAM, and the more powerful CPU’s also allowed open world games like we never saw them before.
But there is no such architectural divide this time around, and all rumors seem to point to a mid range system as their target.
Because they sell? I personally think the whole “simplified” thing is a bit of a canard as there’s many complex games doing perfectly well out there but the obvious answer to “why are they making these games” is “because people are paying for them”.
Because they’d like to remake FF7 in a way that exceeds current technology? Because the tools to help remake FF7 for a lower cost don’t yet exist? How do you propose we reach the point where making FF7 is affordable? By not taking the steps towards that point?
I don’t think that holds as well as you suggest. There’s plenty of smaller developer games coming out with very respectable graphics. Not the “look, RETRO!” indie stuff but games by smaller studios with AAA graphics. How do you think they get to that point? By developing from the ground up? There’s also a decent strata of mid-level PC developers doing well (such as Paradox or CD Projekt Red). Maybe it’s different for consoles. There’s also the fact that companies that reach “mid-tier” level tend to get bought up by the large publishers and put under their umbrella.
I disagree with SenorBeef’s suggestion that Skyrim looks no better than Oblivion but that’s neither here nor there.
No, I think it happened because of changing preferences. If there was a huge market for run-and-gun FPS games, someone would be raking in huge profits by selling them. It’s not as though no one knows how to make that sort of game, there just isn’t the market for it. There’s a giant indie game market – why isn’t someone making a RnG FPS with giant popularity?
Yup. People buy shiny graphics. Therefore, an increasing amount of the budget is spent on shiny graphics.
No, because while I paraphrased, they were talking about “current technology”.
By moving forward more slowly, so that tools and techniques have more chance to mitigate costs incurred by increasingly complicated visuals.
Like who or what exactly? I can name a couple, and they were financial wrecks.
Isn’t Paradox mostly a publisher these days?
But why does that necessarily change the budget of the games they are making?
Or perhaps there is a market for it, but not a large enough one to support the cost. And there’s no indie game maker making them because it’s too expensive?
Certainly, we’ve seen it proven lately that a lot of genres that publishers used to claim “there was no market for” turned out to actually have quite a few people interested, but not enough to justify the huge budgets that publishers work with.
Edit: Basically, it all comes down to the fact that a lot of us feel that game technology doesn’t need a huge forward leap right now, and all this “the sky is falling, games progress is being held back by these ancient, low powered console devices” rhetoric is exaggeration at best and outright misleading at worst.
People also buy more complex games. People also buy complex games with nice graphics. It’s an amazing world.
Without what was actually said, I couldn’t tell you.
Witcher 2 made $5.5mil profit in 2011. Presumably it made more in 2012. I’m not about to go hunting for a bunch of examples though.
List of games by Paradox Development Studios.
Because large publishers have more to spend? Because they budget differently?
Well, that explains why they’re making COD and Battlefield 3, now doesn’t it?
I honestly think that having consoles with long-standing technical limitations is a very good thing for the industry, since it forces algorithmic innovation. Yes, at a certain point you have to let the technology march on and provide features that build on what developers have learned. I’m not arguing that. But if you force them to work on old technology but still compete with each other to make money, suddenly you get really creative optimizations to squeeze out that last bit of power.
Did the current generation go on a little too long? Probably. But I really think it benefited the industry to have to push old tech to the limits with creative hacks and software innovations rather than merely being able to rely on the GPU getting faster so you could throw more polys at it.
(Which isn’t to say innovation doesn’t happen when you let the hardware get better too. I just think it increases at a slower rate because people can afford to be lazy)
A little perspective helps.
Today, THIS takes a hot PC and some dedication to do.
Three years from now, it’ll be done in a $60 value card, and three years after that, in a $300 Console
Right now, for $35, you can buy a RaspberryPi that’s a better video endpoint than my $400 launch day Xbox.
Moore’s law is NOT ‘computational power doubles every 18 months’, it’s more like ‘computational DENSITY’ doubles every 18 months. (cite)For a given application, your chip might get twice as powerful…but it just as easily could become four times cheaper to make. It’s also the reason (marketing aside) why a launch day $600 PS3 can be bought now for less than $300. Yes, the box has been simplified, but the main cut in price is due to being able to create cheaper guts that do the same thing.
The reason next gen consoles will be using mid-grade components is simply because that’s what the market will bear. They can’t sell millions and millions of units if they have to absorb the cost and thermal envelope of one (or more), high-end, $300 graphics cards.
Well, the Wii U was changed so it will be able run Unreal 4, which seems to be an engine the other new consoles will be using. It seems that scalable engines are in vogue now.
EDIT: Since the Roku is $50, I’m not sure there’s really any need for your console to also be an Internet Video device. Granted, you’ll still need a computer server to run Plex to get all the big stations, but most people have a computer that can handle that.