The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

[The Decline]

Emulate the original Demon's Souls (the Remake is shit) and buy a PS4 for Bloodborne, if you must (not worth it imo).

Buy a used PS4 and a used copy of Bloodborne, dont give money to Sony

Just buy a ps4 with firmware 11.0 or lower, jailbreak it, and pirate/play Bloodborne with the frame time fix.

 

[Tehdagah]

What you get for subbing to PS Plus Premium, lol

The quality of the PS+ service is plummeting despite the +33% price increase last year. And they don't even give discounts to current subscribers anymore.

Sony realized the Xbox stopped being a threat, there's no longer pressure to improve.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Lol @ that last sentence. What planet is HERmen on?

What, that shows bring in new players? He’s right. Fallout sales went up after the Fallout show. Last of Us sales were up after that show. And Cyberpunk 2077 sales were way up after Edgerunners.

 

[The Decline]

Lol @ that last sentence. What planet is HERmen on?

What, that shows bring in new players? He’s right. Fallout sales went up after the Fallout show. Last of Us sales were up after that show. And Cyberpunk 2077 sales were way up after Edgerunners.

He means the part about getting pc players to buy a console in order to play the sequel to a game they played on pc. Which is absolutely retarded.

 

[deuxhero]

It might have had something if it was previous gen titles getting ports (where even people who didn't, by definition, already have a PC that outclasses the PS5 could run them) then release a sequel PS5 only (like Gravity Rush 1+2 on PC then releasing Gravity Rush 3 on PS5 only). The problem is Sony is releasing current gen titles, explicitly said the future titles will come within a not that long a period, and not making sequels anyone gives a shit about.

 

[Tehdagah]

Sony will release a non-Gaas game day-1 on PC.

 

[ferratilis]

A generation of nothing, from an industry devoid of any creativity. Bringing nothing but decline.

https://insider-gaming.com/halo-combat-evolved-remaster/

Microsoft is Going to Remaster Halo: Combat Evolved Again and is Considering a PS5 Release, Says New Report​

Microsoft is reportedly in the early stages of developing another remaster of Halo: Combat Evolved and is considering releasing it on PlayStation 5.
That’s according to Tom Warren at The Verge, who received the website’s new ‘Notepad’ newsletter (subscription required, but the first 30 days are free).
The report outlines other details surrounding the upcoming Xbox Games Showcase, including the fact that Microsoft is going to port other games under “Project Latitude”. However, according to Warren, Fable, Gears 6 and South of Midnight are currently not planned for porting. The new Doom game, which will be called Doom: The Dark Ages will be.
Halo: Combat Evolved has already been remastered once before as part of the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. The remaster included the game being remade with 343 Industries’ in-house game engine and would include achievements, Terminals, and Skulls. The game was originally released in November 2011 and re-released as part of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
What do you think of a Halo: Combat Evolved remaster coming to PlayStation 5? Let us know in the comments below.

 

[Caim]

Combat Revolved.

 

[911 Jumper]

What you get for subbing to PS Plus Premium, lol

The quality of the PS+ service is plummeting despite the +33% price increase last year. And they don't even give discounts to current subscribers anymore.

Sony realized the Xbox stopped being a threat, there's no longer pressure to improve.

Those subscription prices are just one of the reasons why Sony can boast about PS5 being the most profitable PlayStation platform.

 

[911 Jumper]

Mark Cerny: When making consoles, we're not trying to build low-cost PCs

Mark Cerny has just added something to his growing list of achievements.

I'm not talking about the global success of last year's Spider-Man 2, on which Cerny worked as executive producer. But something, in many ways, just as impressive.

"I just finished playing Animal Well, and before that and I was very heavily into Neon White, which is my first speedrun," he says.

"I actually platinumed that. That was a real challenge. I wasn't sure if I could do it, because reflexes as I head towards 60 are very different from the reflexes I had when I was a teenager and playing in the arcades. But I am glad I went after it. The precision and stamina that you need to get through a game like that is different in the way it feels, compared with these character action games like Spider-Man that I've been working on."

Cerny is explaining to us that despite his current role as the architect behind PlayStation hardware, what he finds interesting about a game isn't necessarily what it's doing technically, but rather what's new about it. In fact, for all the different roles that Cerny has had in his 42-year games industry career, the one he's never stopped doing is that of 'gamer'.

"I continue to be a massive player," he tells us. "I got into this 40-something years ago because I was an arcade addict.

"Back in the day, I was one of the best players in the country at Defender. That's actually how I got my job at Atari. There was a reporter who was writing a book on arcade games strategies. We're talking about an era so distant that there weren't even games magazines. So if you wanted to learn arcade game strategy, you would go to the supermarket and at the checkout there would be a book that you could buy that would tell you how to play whatever game. And he interviewed me for Defender because I was a well-known local player. I bumped into him later, I told him I wanted to get into the business, and he very kindly called Atari Coin-Op and got me an interview, and the rest is history."

Cerny's career has taken him from designing and programming games like Marble Madness and Major Havoc in the 1980s, to producing and developing iconic platform games such as Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon in the 1990s, to today, where's he's led the creation of the PlayStation 4 and 5 hardware. There are not a whole lot of game leaders who have been able to stay on top for over four decades, and Cerny believes that variety has been key to this longevity.

"The industry has certainly changed a lot in the last 40-something years, and one thing I've noticed is that the people who are very actively participating after that amount of time tend to have done a lot of things," he says. "[Game developer] Amy Hennig and I talk about this a lot. In her case, she's been a writer, an animator, an artist, a director, and I'm sure a few other things. For me, because I'm much more technical, it’s been programmer, designer, producer, executive producer – which is a bit different – I've run a small publisher, I've been a game director, and then of course there's the hardware work today."

He adds: "One way I look at it, if you want to have an interesting career in games, don't do one thing. You really don't want to be the physics programmer, because then you end up being, after a couple of years, perhaps just the programmer who integrates the physics middleware package. This is nothing against physics programmers, some of whom are incredible. But if you have a very specific niche, my feeling is that, after a few decades, you're probably not doing as interesting a set of things as you would if you had kept evolving your role."

Of course, when Cerny was starting out, games developers didn't really have roles.

"When I joined Atari in 1982 there was one job, and it was a hybrid of programmer, designer and artist," he explains. "You even had to make your own artwork. There were about 15 of us programmer/designer/artists, and so Atari Coin-Op was making 15 games. That was how it was. We didn't see any real specialisation until the 1990s."

Cerny still does multiple things, but to the current generation of gamers, he's probably best known as the lead architect behind PlayStation 4 and 5.

We're roughly at the mid-way point in the PS5's lifecycle, and so we wanted to ask if there's anything developers have been doing with the hardware that has surprised him.

"I have been very surprised by the degree to which developers are using ray-tracing," he begins. "Putting that in, that was a big decision and actually a rather late one. I thought that this is not going to get much use initially, but if we look at generations, and a generation is seven years or so, software is created for ten years, and so later in the lifecycle we will start seeing people using that technology. But instead we had launch titles that were taking advantage of it. I guess, having worked on games for consoles that were a bit difficult to get into, like the PlayStation 3, I can be a little skittish about very deep technology like that. But in this case, my guess as to how things would go was totally wrong. And I am so happy to have seen the early adoption of the technology.

"The other thing that has been surprising is the push to 60 frames per second. Based on previous console lifecycles, I would have expected there to be a lot more games that are 30 frames per second only, just because the artwork can be so much more detailed if you have longer time to render it. Instead, the almost universal rule this time around has been the games run at 60.

"It's great from a play perspective. Gamers overwhelmingly prefer games that are higher frame rates. I just didn't expect such a departure from previous generations."

Cerny says building a console takes about four years, and nowadays that's less time than it takes to make some of the big AAA titles. There is a lot of focus right now on the time it takes to build these games, and Cerny says that, ultimately, it's the developers that have chosen this path.

"With the consoles, one thing I've been trying to do is reduce the amount of time it takes [developers] to get going with their games. I call this 'time to triangle'. All that means is that if I just want to get a triangle up on the screen, how long does it take to build the engine technology that will allow me to do that? That might not sound very difficult. The first PlayStation you could maybe do that in a month, but the consoles got so complex that by PlayStation 3 that was taking probably six months to a year. So I've been working to bring that down. PlayStation 4 and 5 are much quicker. It takes a month or two before you have those fundamental graphics technologies up and running on [those systems].

"I probably shouldn't, but I spend a lot of time on the boards. And I see people asking… if the time to triangle has been greatly reduced, why is it then taking so many years to create a game? And the answer is that is what the teams are choosing to do. They are going after these massive creations that really do need four or six years to put together."

Another shift in the development landscape is around multiplatform games. Developers are increasingly building their projects for as many platforms as possible. Even PlayStation has been bringing its games to PC (albeit a few years after the console version). The issue is that consoles often have bespoke technologies in them, and if developers use these technologies, it might hinder their ability to port the game elsewhere. Cerny admits his team is aware of this challenge, but actually it's an opportunity for them to lead.

“One of the exciting aspects of console hardware design is that we have freedom with regards to what we put in the console," Cerny begins. "Or to put that differently, we’re not trying to build a low-cost PC, and we aren’t bound by any particular standards. So if we have a brainstorm that audio can become much more immersive and dimensional if there’s a dedicated unit that’s capable of complex math, then we can do that. Or if the future feels like high-speed SSDs rather than HDDs, we can put an end-to-end system in the console – everything from the flash dies to the software interfaces that the game creators use – and get 100% adoption.

"I like to think that occasionally we’re even showing the way for the larger industry, and that our efforts end up benefiting those gaming on PC as well. It’s a tech-heavy example, but on PS4 we had very efficient GPU interfaces, and that may well have spurred DirectX to become more efficient in response. Or to look at something more consumer-focused, I believe that releasing PS5 in 2020 with a very high-performance integrated SSD put pressure on the PC world to get their corresponding DirectStorage API into the hands of their gamers.

"There’s a recent development here, which is console exclusives that were created to run on bespoke PlayStation systems are now making their way to PC. That conversion has been simpler than many thought. The main consequence is that the minimum spec for the PC version of the game gets a bit higher, perhaps more CPUs or more RAM, in order to replace the missing systems.”

Not only can gamers now play PlayStation games on PC, but they can also use PlayStation hardware, including the DualSense and PlayStation VR 2. Meanwhile, on the other end, we're increasingly seeing AAA developers getting a version of their games running on mobile. The lines between platforms seem to be blurring, but Cerny feels consoles continue to play a crucial role in the ecosystem.

He points to an amusing video by Linus Tech Tips, which attempted to 'kill' the PlayStation 5 by building a $500 gaming PC that outperformed the console.

"They had to get a used motherboard," he says. "That was the only way that they could build a PlayStation 5 equivalent for a PlayStation 5 price. And if you're using used parts… well you can get a used PlayStation 5 for eBay for $300-something.

"I think as long as we continue to create that very nice package, the future of consoles is pretty bright."

Cerny turns 60 this year, and it's at moments like this when one might look back on where they've been. He says he tries not to get nostalgic, but if there are days he looks back on with fondness, "it's probably back to the days when a single designer could lay out a third of a game, half of a game or even an entire game."

He explains: "I am not talking about what we would call today an indie game, but what we would have called a AAA game back in those days. Something like Crash Bandicoot 2, where if you are running down the path and there's an apple that you picked up, odds are I was the one that put it there."

Since the days of Atari, Cerny has been – step-by-step – moving away from pure game creation to more of a support role. And although that might be a shame, it does afford him the ability to work with a variety of developers on all sorts of projects.

"I see incredible games getting made," he says. "It's not bittersweet at all to say that instead of creating games, I've chosen to support the creation of the games. Because there is really good work being done."

With a big birthday on the horizon, the question of retirement inevitably comes up.

"It is something that's a bit on my mind," he admits, "but I do believe I have a bit of time left in this industry."

I suspect a few people reading this would have hoped to have heard a definitive: 'Retire? Never!'.

"Well, Clint Eastwood is a pretty good role model," he concludes.

"At least the part where he's still directing movies at age 90-something, not the part where he started a movie with a chimpanzee."

Source: gameindustry.biz

 

[911 Jumper]

‘I think we should have a handheld too’, says Xbox boss Phil Spencer

Xbox boss Phil Spencer appears to have all but confirmed speculation that Microsoft is considering launching a handheld gaming device.

Asked if he wanted to comment further on the subject, Spencer said: “I don’t want to say anything. I think you’ll have to have Sarah [Bond] on, our president of Xbox, which is awesome. But the future for us in hardware is pretty awesome, and the work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play, I’m incredibly excited about.

“Today was about the games,” Spencer continued. “We showed some of our Gen 9 consoles, Series S and Series X, the work that we’re doing, but we will have a time to come out and talk more about platform, and we can’t wait to bring it to you guys.”

Spencer was then asked whether a hypothetical Xbox handheld would be a dedicated gaming platform or a cloud-based device.

“What I’m finding, I like my ROG Ally, my Lenovo Legion Go, fantastic, my Steam Deck. I think being able to play games locally is really important,” he responded.

Source: VGC

 

[gabel]

What you get for subbing to PS Plus Premium, lol

The quality of the PS+ service is plummeting despite the +33% price increase last year. And they don't even give discounts to current subscribers anymore.

Sony realized the Xbox stopped being a threat, there's no longer pressure to improve.

Those subscription prices are just one of the reasons why Sony can boast about PS5 being the most profitable PlayStation platform.

Humans WANT to own nothing and be happy.
Man, the Jews must be bored at how easy everything is.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Cinematic and gameplay trailers for Sony's new sci-fi shooter CONCORD

u GuYz ReMeBeR gUaRdIaNs Of ThE gAlAxY???

Oof.

 

[Tehdagah]

 

[tritosine2k]

Cinematic and gameplay trailers for Sony's new sci-fi shooter CONCORD

u GuYz ReMeBeR gUaRdIaNs Of ThE gAlAxY???

Oof.

good thing valve helped to spark this quirky shit vs. classes huh

 

[MasterofThunder]

What you get for subbing to PS Plus Premium, lol

The quality of the PS+ service is plummeting despite the +33% price increase last year. And they don't even give discounts to current subscribers anymore.

Sony realized the Xbox stopped being a threat, there's no longer pressure to improve.

Those subscription prices are just one of the reasons why Sony can boast about PS5 being the most profitable PlayStation platform.

Humans WANT to own nothing and be happy.
Man, the Jews must be bored at how easy everything is.

 

[Tehdagah]

 

[deuxhero]

https://archive.ph/hsvoy
Some website is estimating (looks like same basic idea as SteamSpy: Polling of random Steam accounts with public game ownership) that of the 12 million copies of Helldivers 2 sold, 11 million were on PC. I have no idea if it's accurate, but if it is even remotely, PlayStation is already dead.

 

[911 Jumper]

Edit: Ghosthunter and Daxter

 

[911 Jumper]

Shawn Layden's advice on making games faster and cheaper | GI Sprint
The former head of PlayStation Worldwide Studios on ways to bring down the cost of games

TLDR

Shawn Layden shares his tips on ways to make games faster (and therefore cheaper):
1. Most gamers don't see the end of your game. So design fewer levels, make your games shorter.

2. The tech advancement in games is not getting noticed by the majority of your players, so ask yourself: is this worth the investment?

3. Try AI and develop tools to do some of the heavy lifting, and don't just throw people at the problem.

4. Be disciplined and strict on what you can deliver and when. Don't spend too long on an idea if it's not working.

 

[Modron]

Shawn Layden shares his tips on ways to make games faster (and therefore cheaper):
1. Most gamers don't see the end of your game. So design fewer levels, make your games shorter.

Achievements were a mistake, always knew 'tards and suits would start using them as a metric to justify delivering less game.

 

[deuxhero]

Real ways to bring down cost and make games quicker

0: Get the fuck out of California.
1: Pick a unique genre with unique gameplay. You're not getting the Cawl of Dooty audience when you make another generic FPS.
2: Limit team size. In PS2 era credits would be ~120 people when counting absolutely everyone and closer to 50 when you only count people making the game itself (not translation, marketing, voice actors, the 20+ people responsible for translating/marketing/producing the game for Europe, the 30+ people at the external studio that did the animated intro etc.). No "consultants", no "sensitivity reader",
3: Pick an aesthetic that isn't "realistic" or "Overwatch". 130,000 polygons was a ridiculously large model in the PS2/GCN/Xbox era only possible with never rending the thing in full, very good looking fighting game characters only had ~8000 triangles at the most (many closer to 6000, a few reaching almost 10,000). Now you've got over 3600 triangles on random sandwiches and for what? By picking a unique or rare asthetic you've done loads for marketing (Even people who seriously study video games can't remember which of the generic looking modern titles are which, meanwhile tiny games get loads of attention purely for unique artstyle like Mouse, or Unrecorded) and made the game cheaper.
4: Reject the open world, and make a bunch of levels with unique twists on gameplay (even if they're very well used ones like "ice level") and aesthetics. People get tired of these 200 hour slogs because it's the same gameplay throughout (you've cleared a few towers, you've essentially cleared them all).
5: DLC is a trap. Its market is limited to squeezing more money out of people who already bought the game and turns people away from the game till you released all it, but ties up the dev team for a year+ (a fifth of the console generation or more). If the game is a success, you should instead set the team to work on a standalone sequel that reflects lessons learned and builds off the tech and assets of the last game.
6: Cute girls

 

[Tehdagah]

Edit: Ghosthunter and Daxter

The Timesplitters trilogy needs a remastered version for modern platforms.

 

[deuxhero]

One was leaked in Jensen's Prophecy. Since we know there was an awful Fortnite wantabee third person TS4 in development at Free Radical, it may actually have been done by another studio and thus still in development (though I doubt it).

 

[911 Jumper]

The Timesplitters trilogy needs a remastered version for modern platforms.

Timesplitters 2 and 3 are playable on Xbox Series via BC, if I am correct. I tried to get into the series with the first game during the PS2 days, but it wasn't for me.