Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
Since one of the big technological advances with the PS5 is the new DMA content loading pipeline that lets the developers load data from the SSD directly into memory at insanely fast speeds, it's probable that some fundamental structural aspects of the Demon's Souls engine are going to be built very specifically around the PS5's capabilities. Making a PS4 version would be a different project. We're long past the point where the deciding factor of what hardware a game should run well on is how pretty the shaders are.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Attitude Indicator posted:

Is there any reason to belive that the Demon Souls remake is going to be anything but a purely technical upgrade? Bluepoint has never previously touched gameplay and content. Even the Shadow of the Colossus remake was just new graphics built on top of the old game (minus one small bonus cave)
I've been assuming and hoping this is the case. My guess is they'll leave the base gameplay code intact, making sure it runs properly at 60fps, and just replace the renderer, input, audio, networking, etc. They already said there's going to be something called "Fractured Mode" (which I'm personally hoping is a built-in randomizer, but who knows) so they'll definitely be adding to the base game in some respects.

Sakurazuka posted:

They should get rid of item burden and leave everything else exactly the same
If they do introduce gameplay changes like this, I hope they at least have the option of leaving everything the way it was originally. Including pure bladestone drops :getin:

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

fridge corn posted:

There is definitely skill involved in reading and plenty of books that will be difficult to understand to those lacking in skill.
Name of the Rose is a particularly funny example to pick:

Umberto Eco posted:

After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Vikar Jerome posted:

If the last of us part 2 can run on base ps4s then so can demon souls remake with no raytracing and a lower resolution, going by the screenshots. Easily.
The Last Of Us Part II is able to run on the PS4 because it is a PS4 game

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Vikar Jerome posted:

Have you played this loving game.

The ps1 to ps2 style console leaps no longer exist my dude.
I don't get it, are you disagreeing that it is a PS4 game? You're arguing that a game that is being expressly built for the PS5 should be able to run on the PS4, which is pretty clearly not true for a number of reasons. It's not like they can just click the "Compile for PS4" button and a PS4-compatible binary comes out, ready to ship. It would be a separate port with its own set of performance and support requirements.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

stev posted:

I think the point is that it could quite easily be made to run on the PS4 if they wanted to make it a crossgen game. They've chosen not to do that. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that, but it's a choice they made.
I don't think anyone is disputing that it is possible for them to have remastered Demon's Souls for the PS4. But saying that the PS5 game that they currently have in development and have already shown off could run on the PS4 is baseless and, in fact, doubtful given what we know about how developing for the PS5 will be different from the PS4.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Vikar Jerome posted:

Lol are you kidding me or am i just not explaining this poo poo well.

Would like to take this moment to point how i dont care either way where ds comes out on, juat saying, like nutt is, that what we've seen can be ran on a ps4 with options turned off. Both ps4 and 5 are x86. Ps5 like two ps4 pros duct taped together.


Then you dont understand what im saying, mgs5 ran on a ps3, thats fact, of course i dont mean demon souls remake is gonna run on a ps4 and look 1:1 with the ps5 at 4k. The look of the buildings and models could remain but take off raytracing and drop that internal resolution to sub 1080, lower texture resolution etc, and unless theres unannouced ssd features then it would run on a base ps4 no problem. Keyword there is run and be playable. Its up to your eyes on how acceptable that is.
That's a really simplistic view of software development. The CPU instruction set being the same is only a small part of being compatible with a different platform. Game engines aren't some a la carte thing where you can just "disable raytracing" by unchecking a box. If you get rid of raytracing, then you're going to have to replace it with something. If you want it to look halfway decent, that's going to mean a second very different rendering pipeline with a completely different set of passes for calculating shadow cascades, specular light sources, global illumination, etc. And despite being a less modern, lower fidelity representation of real-time lighting, that may in fact be more demanding of resources and result in lower performance, especially without years of performance tuning behind the engine. This isn't Unreal Engine which, as an explicit design goal, is meant to scale to run on every sort of platform and makes a ton of tradeoffs as a result. A first party title designed for a particular platform is more likely to lean heavily on platform-specific functionality and libraries or rely on known performance characteristics of the platform. The PS3 had a somewhat strange architecture with a PowerPC CPU and a bunch of high-speed vector processors running in parallel, and code that uses that to its full advantage would not necessarily translate directly to x86. Even if it did, its performance characteristics may be completely different.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Zedsdeadbaby posted:

The transition from Earthen Peak to Iron Keep is physically impossible

You go to the top of this tower


To take an elevator that goes up

And end up here

The game is full of incongruous connections. The easiest example is Majula to Heide's Tower, which you can see in the far distance across the water and then walk to in about 10 seconds by going down a hallway. For all that people dunk on that Iron Keep transition, the whole game is structured like that, which I think makes sense with the fractured dreaminess of the story. I definitely think it's intentional for better or worse.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
When I was a kid I was playing Doom II and a cyberdemon teleported in front of me suddenly and I physically recoiled so hard that I hurt my neck for a few days.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Fuzz posted:

FROM actually confirmed that schedule crunch was a big part of why the world in DS2 ended up that way, so they just leaned into it and made up explanations IG for it to excuse the cutting corners.
I don't doubt that (I think you'd be hard pressed to find a game where certain design elements weren't influenced by time pressure), but they could have done the same transition as Sen's Fortress to Anor Londo or any number of other spatially disconnected transitions that don't involve bizarre world layouts. The fact that they chose this peculiar abstract way of connecting disparate areas over other potentially simpler and less jarring options still feels intentional and thematically appropriate within that scope.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Fuzz posted:

I mean, they straight up said otherwise, was my point. It took them literal years to design DS1's Onion world because they always felt the Archstones in Demon's weren't as satisfying as a world that was all connected. A completely separate team started working on 2 and only had under three years to make it while the bulk of the team from 1 basically shifted over to Bloodborne and DS3, which is why both of those games have a similar connected world that makes sense while DS2 is the lonesome game where stuff is thrown together.

You can keep rationalizing it as an intentional design choice, but it was essentially a retcon to explain away rushed world design. It's also why DS2 is a wheel with spokes vs anything approaching a vertical or central "world" because it was easier to just have to go on some linear path and teleport back rather than design the world to wrap back on itself like any of their other major games.
Sure, the disconnected world was a product of being rushed, but I'm saying the specific elevator that people keep bitching about (and the other hallways that connect distant places) was an intentional choice influenced by that constraint. It's not like "big nonsensical elevator connecting two obviously unconnected parts of the world" is the default state and they just didn't bother to change it. Someone answered the question "how do we get from Earthan Peak to Iron Keep" with "a tall elevator" and then did the work to implement that transition. Having a special bonfire/archstone that you touch and instantly teleports you between the areas or something would have presumably been less work and made more sense, but they went with the elevator anyway. The fact that it is thematically appropriate doesn't seem accidental. Even if the whole basis for the story of DS2 is a reflection on not having enough time to do everything that needs to be done in the game, that doesn't make it a "retcon".

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Bad Parenting posted:

As someone who loves VR, I find it strange how people say it's not immersive. For me, playing a horror game in VR is bloody terrifying.

I wonder if it's some weird genetic thing how some people can't suspend their disbelief while others can?
Different ideas of immersive I think. The only games I can get immersed in are ones where my imagination can do a lot of the heavy lifting. The only two games I can think of that I felt immersed in in recent memory are Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. I don't even feel like actual reality is particularly "immersive" so piling on additional stuff to make a game closer to a realistic sensory experience is almost certainly going to move that needle in the wrong direction for me, especially when it's a janky approximation of reality.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

exquisite tea posted:

Not nearly as much as Ice Cap Zone factually, literally ripped off the Jetzons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2OWC5Hosv8
Brad Buxer of the Jetzons was the one who contributed it (an at-the-time unreleased track) to Sonic 3 so I'm not sure I'd call it a ripoff.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
If there was no PS5 upgrade path at all and it was just a separate full priced PS5 version, I doubt many people would be complaining. Or if they marketed it as "buy the Ultimate Edition for PS5 and get a free copy for PS4 to tide you over", which is effectively the same thing as what they are currently doing. There's nothing in what they're doing with Control that's particularly unusual, but they basically tailored the marketing to make early adopters feel scammed. There's no real scam though, at least not one that other developers haven't participated in since the birth of DLCs and GOTY editions. At no point in history has it been standard practice that buying a game and all its DLCs entitled you to the Remastered GOTY Version on the next-gen platform. There's certainly an argument to be made that it should (or at least a discount), but I don't see any new precedents being set here. If anything, this is 505 doing what has always been standard practice while other publishers are being uncharacteristically permissive on what they will give away on next-gen platforms. If Doom Eternal had come out on PS3, I don't think there's a chance in hell that the PS4 version would have been a free upgrade.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Necrothatcher posted:

I.... dunno what you want from me.

you said that PS4 Cyberpunk won't (can't?) take advantage of PS5 hardware.

I posted the dev saying they're releasing a free upgrade that will allow PS4 Cyberpunk to take advantage of PS5 hardware.

Like, I don't get it.
The first update is probably going to be something like unlocking the graphical settings so that they can go up higher and enable raytracing or whatever stuff is going to already be available on the PC version. Later on they might release another update (or full PS5 release) that takes advantage of the PS5 to its full extent, e.g., to eliminate loading screens or remove architectural bottlenecks caused by limitations of the PS4.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I played SotN for the first time last year after I finished Bloodstained and loved both of those games. I've played a bit of Super Metroid on the Switch but it didn't grab me quite the same way. I'm not sure why, maybe because SotN is mostly piss-easy and it only gets easier as the game progresses, so the game was totally about the exploration and unlocking of the world for me. The combat is more like a measure of my progress rather than a true test of skill. Super Metroid felt like something I had to get good at, and I've never been that interested in getting good at old-school platformers.

Volte fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Aug 25, 2020

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I didn't mind the Mortal Shell final boss but I didn't experience any of the glitches other people seem to have. Normally I hate boss adds but in this case they were super easy and allowed me to recharge my extra life, so I'm actually glad they were there. I wasn't clear on if the heal was actually a heal or just it entering a second phase and gaining a little bit of health back. It only healed once for me, but if it can heal at any point then yeah that's pretty bad. Otherwise I didn't find it too difficult once I got it into a familiar loop. I was playing as Eredim almost the entire game, so I had an assload of health. Almost no stamina, but still enough to do a full combo and dodge away, so the tradeoff was worth it to me.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

ShakeZula posted:

Started playing Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen this weekend, and I'm having a good enough time but it's a very odd game. Maybe I'm just more accustomed to RPGs where the primary focus is on the characters, whereas in this one there basically are no real characters, or at least none that have any unique or identifiable traits or characteristics. The PC is completely (and uniquely) un-voiced, the pawn sidekick is a literal blank slate that you design and who explicitly has no interests or desires other than aiding you, and the party-building mechanic is entirely based around rotating in dozens more pawns like that over the course of the game. It's like the story that would form the backdrop for most other RPGs is instead the sole focus of this one: who you are doesn't matter, just do whatever you have to do to get strong enough to kill the dragon, then go kill the dragon.
You're not wrong, but the ending shines a lot of light on why it feels like that and, for me at least, changed my perspective on the story and characters considerably on subsequent playthroughs.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
Maintaining emulators for PS1, PS2, and PS3 internally with any kind of guarantees for compatibility with literally thousands of games sounds like a nightmare, especially for a feature that's not even close to the main draw of the console. If anything I'd maybe expect a Virtual Console type thing with select PS3 games available on the store. That's already how they did it on PS3 for prior gens with e.g. Spyro and Crash.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
The Surge 1 felt like it had a decent idea of what it wanted to be, but after three(?) levels of basically the same junkyards, scaffolding, and metal corridors, I felt too burned out to go on. Surge 2 on the other hand really grabbed me and is my favourite non-FROM Souls-like. The fact that your healing items recharge from combat instead of just at recharge stations changes the whole dynamic of battle since you don't have to be super careful about getting hit and can be a bit more aggressive, especially later on if you spec into the battery recharge rate. Makes it feel closer Bloodborne than a Dark Souls game. The directional parry also took me awhile to get used to ended up being quite satisfying.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I accidentally went to the hardest zone first in Mortal Shell and I think I ended up enjoying the game more for it because I got my favourite weapon right away (hammer and chisel) and then managed to get good by fighting through that area totally unupgraded. I also used Eredim with his insanely huge HP pool and low stamina, which honestly felt a bit more balanced, since I basically had enough stamina to do a complete combo and dodge away forcing me to be more focused, but with enough health to take some risks. It's definitely a flawed game but once I fell into a gameplay style I enjoyed, I got through the whole thing without having to push myself. If I had to use the clunkier weapons I probably wouldn't have.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Thom12255 posted:

It's to get as many people onto the Xbox ecosystem as possible who feel that dropping >$400 on a console is too much. It'll appeal to students, parents with young kids, people that want to play on both Playstation and Xbox, etc. I don't think it's a bad plan business-wise for Microsoft but for devs that want to push the cutting edge of performance it kind of sucks.
The cutting edge of performance scales along multiple axes, one of which is resolution. The S being a machine capable of the same features at a lower resolution encourages devs to make games that will scale along that axis. I don't think you'll find many games that couldn't do what they wanted because they had to target the S, they just won't be able max out the X at 1080p. Which might be a good thing depending on where you're coming from, like if you want devs to prioritize 4K gaming rather than spend all that power calculating realistic volumetric clouds or something. The lack of RAM on the S is the only thing that seems like it could have a major impact, but I also don't have enough info to know how that will affect things in the end. If it puts pressure on the devs to fit their assets working set into 10GB instead of 16GB, then I guess we'll probably see diminished asset quality to compensate. But if asset swapping is handled internally by the SDK or something and less RAM just mean more frequent swapping, then I guess the impact of that depends on the performance characteristics of the SSD.

Volte fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Sep 13, 2020

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
Preordered my disc version on bestbuy.ca. :canada: My aging base PS4 is basically collecting dust these days (though probably not as much as if I was actually using it, am I right?) since long load times and 30fps is a hard sell these days when I have so many games I can play on PC and Switch. Last thing I played was God of War a few months ago and before that, I think Resident Evil 7 last year. I'm looking at the PS5 as being both an upgrade to my PS4 and a new console for next-gen games, and from that perspective it's an easy buy for me. Demon's Souls doesn't hurt either.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I feel like the "starting tomorrow" stuff was just more of Sony's typical miscommunication surrounding the PS5. I got an actual email alert from Best Buy (Canada) telling me that pre-orders were starting. It doesn't seem to be some unauthorized broken street date thing, so I'm not concerned about them not holding it. At least not for that reason.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I played Demon's Souls after Dark Souls (after PTDE edition came out and I spent 200 hours on it, I bought a PS3 just to play Demon's Souls) and it definitely held up. It was piss-easy and I only died like three or four times on my first playthrough, I think all from falling of ledges, but it was still extremely atmospheric and great. Tower of Latria, 3-1, is my all-time favourite Souls map.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

The Grey posted:

So I suppose we won't be getting monthly free PS5 games with PS+?

That's why they are giving away all those PS4 games, right?
I get the impression they are trying to blur the distinction between generations, so when you get free games on PS+, the pool will probably be from "games that run on the PS5" as opposed to "PS5 games". It's the double-edged sword of full backwards compatibility.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

John Wick of Dogs posted:

The only complaint about the empty shrines is that you get forced through two loading screens. They are at the end of an interesting quest or environmental puzzle. It isn't bad shrine design, it's just the real shrine was on the outside. One just hopes in the sequel they put rewards for that kind of puzzle on the outside just to save you the loads.
There are definitely some of them that didn't have a puzzle on the outside, or at least I didn't solve the puzzle before finding the shrine. The other issue I had with the shrines is that I never found any of them very interesting. They're mostly physics-based and I had my fill of physics puzzles in about 2007. I still want to finish BotW one of these days (maybe I should start over at this point) but to me, the best Zelda game this generation was God of War.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I thought that Baldur fight (really one of the only ones of its type, since everything else you fight tends to be constructs, beasts, or monsters) was a bit silly and reminded me of over-the-top superhero fights where Superman gets knocked through a wall or something. I mean it is literally The God Of War versus an invulnerable guy so I would expect some crazy poo poo to happen. It didn't feel very edgy to me.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I would agree if PS4 backwards compatibility wasn't a thing, but being able to play my existing library in boost mode with potential PS5 patches, or at the very least with an SSD and better GPU is enough to make me want to upgrade now instead of waiting. It's like buying a new gaming PC - my old Steam library is still there and I will still play stuff from there even though the machine can also run the latest and greatest.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
The larger games get the less I'm going to want to have to download them over my mediocre internet connection. Downloading 100GB already sucks rear end, and they're just going to keep getting bigger. If anything I'm going to become more inclined to buy physical this generation.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
Halo, the Microsoft Game, is on Steam. I don't see why anyone is worried about these games not coming out on Steam now. Also not sure what a hypothetical Portal 3 has to do with anything though, that's Valve.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

JollyBoyJohn posted:

I played Halo 1 and Reach on PC near the start of lockdown and they were both brisk but fun experiences that I really enjoyed.

Still can't quite understand the idea of being a 'Halo Fan' though
I played through Halos 1-3 on co-op for the first time and they are okay, but Halo 1 was a real tough slog to get through. A whole lot of copy-pasted areas meant I was constantly questioning whether I was accidentally going backwards, and even if I wasn't, it's not so fun to do the same room like six times. The Flood levels made me get back into Left 4 Dead 2 though.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
Every newly-acquired studio is going to develop a Halo game like a mid-2000s tournament reality show, Microsoft's Next Top Halo Studio

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
The first half of Doom 2016 is GOAT but after Kadingir Sanctum it goes downhill and by the end it had lost a lot of its lustre. Kind of like Dark Souls where most of my playthroughs fizzle out after Anor Londo, I have experienced the first half of Doom 2016 way more times than the second half. Eternal has its own issues but at least it kept me engaged the whole way through and I can't imagine not having dash now.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

il serpente cosmico posted:

Hopefully they still sell them on Steams, rather than the Windows store, which is pretty terrible.
MS already sell their games on Steam, there's no reason to think that would change now.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh
I'm imagining trying to convince this thread in 2015 that in a few years, you'd be able to pay a small monthly fee to access every single brand-new Xbox game on day one on PC and everyone going "yeah right Microsoft would never do that when they could sell just use them to sell Xboxes instead". Microsoft is a huge company and the "personal computing" division which includes gaming among other things is only a third of their revenue. Whatever they have planned, it's probably more complicated than just "force the Skyrim-wanters to pay for an Xbox", and dependent on how the Xbox ends up performing this generation. For all we know this could be them getting into position to launch Microsoft GamePass for Playstation as a contingency plan if the Xbox brand continues to flounder.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Quantum of Phallus posted:

There is zero chance sony would allow this.
You mean out of spite, or just the concept of a subscription service in general? EA Play is already available on PS4 which is basically the same thing but from EA. If a beneficial business agreement could be reached between the parties involved, I don't see why Sony would disallow a major value-add to their platform. Do you think Sony would refuse to allow Microsoft to publish their games on PS5 at all?

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

Quantum of Phallus posted:

I mean EA aren't selling rival consoles
I'm not really sure how MS's subscription service hypothetically being available on PS5 would help sell their rival console. If anything it would disincentivize the Xbox as a platform and be a way for Microsoft to still make money off of the success of their competitor. In this hypothetical scenario I'm assuming the Xbox hardware is being vastly outsold by the PS5 and Microsoft knows they're better off moving software units on a rival platform than moving their own hardware in the long run. I'm not predicting that this will happen, I'm just saying that it's way too early to start doomsaying about what MS plans to do because I doubt even they know what they're going to do in the years to come.

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

il serpente cosmico posted:

They sell some of their stuff on Steam, but not all of it (Forza Horizon 4 is one example).
Fair enough, but I think everything they've released since they announced they were going to start releasing games on Steam (middle of last year I think) has indeed come to Steam. Grounded in particular is not only on Steam, but it's taking advantage of Steam's Early Access feature.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Volte
Oct 4, 2004

woosh woosh

acksplode posted:

Yeah Eternal is absolutely designed for M+KB and you have to suss that out for yourself, which sucks. Marauder especially is designed around a mouse's accuracy and acceleration, and the ability to quickly switch weapons for DPS combos when he's vulnerable. It's doubly stupid that Eternal doesn't even support M+KB on PS4.
From what I've seen it's actually not too hard to quickswitch on a gamepad by using the wheel and flicking the stick. I'm poo poo at shooters with a gamepad but this video shows it's definitely possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDTIY9KD4qs

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply