Next Gen Question ?

Now with virtually both new consoles on the market a thought came to mind,with the added extra power and performance should we now expect every game thats released to at least look good as there is no excuses for games like Duke Puke em and Aliens Colonial Marines and a whole host of other tripe that appeared on both the playstation 3 and xbox 360.

I know this is me living in Fantasy Island and some developers will release drab boring looking games based on a film franchise or some other rubbish,but i think this is a kick in the teeth for those developers because seriously there should not be bad looking games on these consoles anymore with Glitches like clipping,extreme frame rate drops,pop ups like scenery failing to load in the distance and all the usual rubbish associated with last generation systems.

I think that we will still get some tripe unfortunately mate

You would like to hope they would take a leaf out of Spidermans book "with great power comes great responsibility....to deliver quality games for an eager audience".

But it's doubtful, will still get those developers pumping out some rubbish. Have a look at the list of games coming up on Xbox One on Wiki, some of them sound questionable.... but some absolutely epic

I think we will see games with frame rate drops for sure, especially with all the fuss about 1080p which adds work to the GPU. Driving games and sports games will probably be fine but more complex games and games optimised badly may suffer.

Personally I dont care too much about how a game looks as long as its good enough to know what everything is. But granted that depends on the game, if a game strives on realism for its experience then how it looks probably has more value.

Got my new graphics card the other day and have been giving it a thorough workout with BF4 and FC3 set to ULTRA!

So, I can still report textures not popping into view as developer's haven't set the draw distance correctly for BF4 and Skyrim. But I never realised what a difference anti-aliasing and suchlike could make as things look super dreamy now in BF4 and FC3 at least.

Still have frame rate issues at time. I'm using a computer so sometimes things are running in the background and decide to update themselves or somesuch so I can't be sure it's the game itself causing these occasional slow downs that last a second or two at most.

On a console, you'd expect better harmonsisation of the OS so it serves the game better. I expect, with a well optimised game on the PS4/XBO, the graphics potential should be a lot greater than what we've got on the PC right now. My own PC might be bottle-necking on the CPU though I have fast ram and a speedy SSD.

You will definitely continue to get poorly made games, rushed or even just sloppy by design as publishers push devs to churn out money making titles just for the dough ray me. Generic titles, cash in deals with movie studios, toy makers, cartoons, celebrities, you name it. The only excuse for poor coding could be down to the old PS3's architecture but not 6 or 7 years on! Or even 18 years on for Duke Pukem. The new architecture should help devs pool their resources but there will still be tripe for a whole host of reasons. And one very good reason is people will still buy tripe when they see it.

yeah draw distance I think is a important factor, things dont feel right when objects just pop into view not very far away.

The reason you stated is why the 360 and ps3 seemed to overpush the hardware boundaries. A developer on the pc has to make the game work on many different hardware configurations, different driver versions etc. Plus of course the OS may be doing stuff in the background as well. On consoles its just one hardware configuration (revisions aside) and the OS at least on previous generations was more or less dedicated to gaming. Of course we do know that the xbox1 is designed to multitask, with the snap functions etc., the PS4 is also capable of a degree of multitasking as well with eg. recording/streaming the game whilst you play. So the new gen is no longer a dedicated gaming OS, especially on the xbox1. Although the OS of each console will still be optimised for gaming.

I must be odd as for a quick gaming hit so long as the game is fun then to some extent the graphics don't matter.

I don't want cinematic quality rendered cut scenes I want to be able to get down to playing the game, be that Plants vs Zombies or Battlefield

Have any of the shooter games got to the point where smoke is coming from an over oiled barrel, or the paint flaking and weapons developing jams if you fire too much?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Have any of the shooter games got to the point where smoke is coming from an over oiled barrel, or the paint flaking and weapons developing jams if you fire too much?

Um, yeah. Like ages ago!

Anyone ever played Boiling Point? That game reminds me a lot of Far Cry 3 which I'm playing right now. It was basically set on a pacific island somewhere or in South America or somesuch but essentially you drove around jungle terrain trying to find clues so you could find your missing/abducted daughter.

BP was pretty ambitious in scope for the time, drivable cars, NPCs you could (sort of) talk to and interact with and wild animals that would bite you. But you had guns, lots of guns and they would wear down at a bit of silly rate so you had to repair them all the time, along with the car actually. Hmm. Now I think about it, in Borderlands you had to fix your weapons too no? The state of repair would affect weapon performance and jamming would be more frequent if something had been used a lot. It was a bit of a pita fixing them actually.

In BF4, there's no status on weapon conditions to worry about. The only guns that jam up are ones the fixed vehicle machine guns that overheat if you use them overlong.

As for the barrels, I didn't get what you meant really but there's been a bit of evolution in the good old exploding barrel in some games or at least more attempt to make them look like they should be there. Gas canisters is an obvious one. Plenty of flaking paint too and games like BF4 have a massive amount of environment destructibility to play with so you can reduce the entire place to rubble in some instances. It's fun stuff.

Now this is not a dig at PC gaming but i read a very interesting well informed article from developers claiming at the moment at least the Playstation 4 Has the potential to even beat a High end PC .

Now don't quote me but its because the Playstation 4 is basically a dedicated gaming machine and a PC has to do so much more the playstation apparently has a huge advantage when it comes to games on the system.

This is not my theory but some developers talking about the new consoles .

They are sort of right but they are over hyping it for marketing reasons.

A PC will be running background stuff, this puts some load on ram and the cpu plus hdd also. The GPU? usually no.

95% of games on the pc dont task the cpu.

Also the ps4 now isnt purely dedicated to gaming, there is some multitasking stuff in that now such as recording/streaming.

What I have noticed on the pc is if I have aero enabled plus tons of apps windows, thjat can use quite a lot of video memory just for those windows, right now with about 100 windows open I am using 359meg of video ram for desktop usage, so if I was to fire up a game now 1/3 of my video ram is tied up by the desktop. Less available for textures etc. This itself is not usually an issue as most games dont even use 512meg of video ram on the pc, but occasionally I have come across games that do such as oblivion with the high quality textures mod, (that uses all my video ram), in those situations if the graphics have to fall back to the basic ram then things slow down a lot. Generally this is a non issue as people tend to reboot before playing a game and firing it up from a blank desktop.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 27-Nov-13 01:13:33)

In reply to a post by SPOOKish:

Still have frame rate issues at time. I'm using a computer so sometimes things are running in the background and decide to update themselves or somesuch so I can't be sure it's the game itself causing these occasional slow downs that last a second or two at most.

I remember in my PC gaming days I would be obsessed with shutting down as many programs and services as I could to maximize performance and also make sure nothing was set to auto update to avoid lag...I was only on 56k then though so if something updated it would be unplayable