A few weeks back, Insomniac patched Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on PlayStation 5 to introduce a revised version of its 4K30 fidelity mode. Tapping into the capabilities of 120Hz displays, what the team delivered is a potential game-changer for console titles - a 40fps mode that looked just as good as the older 30fps offering, but running considerably more smoothly and feeling better to play. On the face of it, a bonus 10fps doesn't sound like a huge bump, but in actuality, it's a very big deal.
teamLFG rallies developers from across the industry to bring to life an ambitious incubation project.
Definitely.
Looks like they haven´t abandoned their live service plans after all.
"Our first game is a team-based action game that draws inspiration from fighting games, platformers, MOBAs, life sims, and frog-type games. Players will inhabit a lighthearted, comedic world set in brand-new, mythic, science-fantasy universe. We can’t wait to reveal more."
At least it's not an extraction shooter. It's team-based, so not likely my thing. But perhaps it will at least add something new to the current slew of MP games out there?
"industry veterans who have shipped titles like Destiny, Halo, League of Legends, Fortnite, Roblox, and Rec Room"
"and richly social virtual worlds"
"where players can find friendship, community, and belonging"
"We will make immersive multiplayer worlds"
"but throughout live service as we continue to grow the game and community for years to come"
"Our first game is a team-based action game that draws inspiration from fighting games, platformers, MOBAs"
Jesus. Does Sony ever learn? Like if they want to partner with them that's cool and all but buying the studio right off the bat? It's insane thinking after all the money they've just lost from Concord, not to mention the lack of actual hype for Marathon. Who is making the decisions here?
This is their main multiplayer studio now. Hopefully nomore pullin teams like Santa Monica, Bluepoint, Naughty Dog etc into stupid multiplayer endeavors.
Buying it or not they still had to put a lot of money into it
They could have created a new studio to reboot some older titles or ones inspired by them. A JRPG like Legend of Dragoon, a first person shooter like Resistance or a platformer like Jak and Daxter.
Can't believe they killed Japan Studio, London Studio, and Pixelopus for this, Destiny, and Concord.
In an interview with Lex Fridman, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney shared the first details about the next version of Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 6.
It’s going to come packed with a bunch of flashy, buzzword-filled features that no one will actually be able to use without tanking performance. And just like every iteration of that engine before it, the excuse won’t be that it’s poorly optimized, no, it’s "forward-thinking" and the hardware just isn’t ready to keep up.
But since it saves studios from having to invest in developing their own internal engines, it’ll still end up being widely adopted across the industry.
What cracks me up, is a lot of games utilize Unreal 5 and yet gaming has become more expensive. So all that BS that they shoveled out the last big reveal hasn’t translated into savings and if it has, then the industry is just plain ol’ lying.
You mean like “going digital will bring down costs for customer dramatically. Because there will be no packaging/distribution.” Or maybe the “games going forward, will be cross-buy so you buy it once and will be able to access it across all platforms you own.” Or even the “if we increase the rrp it will mean we can get rid of micro transactions altogether.”
… I could be here all day quoting the lies from this industry.
Scope of games are way bigger than even just 10 years ago. Also keep in mind that Epic charges 5% for using their engine, Steam charges 30% just like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft's stores. That's 35% of your revenue gone. Steam infuriates me because they don't have nearly the overhead console manufacturers have but they know people are unlikely to migrate to Epic Games Store (which charges 15% instead but has a shit storefront compared to steam). I love UE5 (for the most part) and it has pushed the envelope in ways that would be too long to list here. I think UE6 will push things further and make it possible for devs who don't have Rockstar resources to make amazing games even further. Time will tell.
I find this odd. How am I expected to be excited with future promises when mired by the current legacy of UE5 and its myriad of technical shortcomings that have yet to be solved, even years after release.
Of course they should be working towards the future, but talking about it while UE5 still has many unsolved issues years after it has been the de facto standard? An engine used by so many, after so many years, with the backing of a company as grossly cash-rich as Epic shouldn't have so many problems still.
And the optics - even if not the truth of the matter - is you're putting time & resources into UE6 at the expense of UE5; your current product still needs quite a lot of attention. Unless the message is "we're abandoning UE5 because it's issues are systemic, and we hope UE6 can address that mess by moving on as quickly as possible".
I was attempting to reframe my comment as I watched more of the video, but the edit timed out. So here is a nearly completely different comment lol:
The number forks/fragmentations of UE5 feels like - from a laymen's perspective - a plausible explanation for why the engine, 3 years post release, has continued to have the same problems today as it did from day 1. Sounding as if they can't really find a way to cleanly coalesce each of the seven disparate variants, it seems hopes lie with being able to do so in the years leading up to the launch of UE6.
That said, if they have so many specific versions, then it does still kind of boggle the mind why issues, like compilation stutter, are still so pervasive. Seems in this specific scenario, the fragmentation could potentially be useful for at least helping to narrow down platform specific issues/solutions.
Clearly not the case, so hopefully they can make UE6 more unified to allow for more focused, streamline engine development.
Compilation stutter hasn't really been much of an issue for a couple years now if the devs know what they're doing. The problem is not all the devs know what they're doing in that regard. The real problem is traversal stutter. That is nearly universal.
I sort of ended up mentally putting both of those under the category of compilation stutter, which is surely too reductive. I should have just said "stuttering/fametime issues in all their incarnations". Because while there are improvements to comp stutter, even games that force you through long, even 30 minutes shader compilation stages before playing haven't managed to fully solve that issue. Heck, even consoles, with fixed hardware that can ship with pre-compiled shaders can't even seem to fully escape it.
Traversal stutter is definitely its own issue, though, and has only been exacerbated thanks to older cards being held onto longer, and companies - primarily Nvidia - opting to put 8GB VRAM buffers into cards for way the eff too long. If you don't have the top of the line CPU and high-end, overclocked RAM kits - most of the PC playing population - to help shuffle that info between system memory and the GPU, you're more screwed than most. And Nvidia could help the issue as well, if they could improve their years-long issue with high driver overhead. Freeing up any extra CPU usage, especially for those with weaker CPUs, would really benefit.
I really hope these things can have some kind of solution found for them sooner than later. As it is, it just feels like games are taking two steps forwards and two steps back a lot of the time. Improved pixel quality (world detail, lighting, etc), at the expense of degraded image clarity (softer image, heavy reliance on upscaling, increased artificing) and smoothness/performance (stuttering/poor frametimes).
And the fact this stuff occurs, when dev times are longer than they've ever been, with budgets creeping ever higher, it's that much worse to feel like a lot of experiences just aren't wins across the board. Especially as deep into this generation as we are, and with as much time as devs & engine makers have had to iron out issues. It feels like we may need to pump the brakes on the pace of research into graphics tech and rebalance towards optimization. Image clarity (native res, especially) continuing to fall further, with poor frametimes for a myriad of reasons, as the generation goes on doesn't feel the best.
I'm not just talking about shader compilation stages. There are games like Expedition 33 that barely have any pre-compilation stages (in the background on the main menu) and have almost zero comp stutter. It has to do with the way you use shaders and make your materials. It still has some small traversal stutter though.
It feels too soon to talk about UE6. It feels like UE5 barely got tapped, only a handfull of games really showed its potential.
IGN : One former Bethesda developer has cautioned that loading screens will probably always be a part of its games because of the way they're designed. Here's why.
Thanks for the insightful information!
Now I wanna see if all those that were complaining about loading screens on Starfield will give a hard pass on both upcoming Bethesda RPGs like TESVI and Fallout 5.
If you can´t stand load screens, stay away from those games. Period!
I don't think you understand the difference between them though and what makes Starfield and TES / Fallout different when it comes to loading screens.
When you're playing TES or Fallout, if you are doing a mission you have the choice to walk to your objective where on your travels you will run into many different encounters getting completely sidetracked, it's fun as it feels like you are exploring the world more. However with Starfield you don't get that choice because you can't walk to a new planet, the loading screen is more mandatory, even the Outer Worlds fell into this issue, so when you are constantly going to space, travelling from planet to planet there's a lot more loading screens involved where it slowly becomes more tedious in comparison.
What Bethesda needs to do is work on reducing the loading screens and fitting more within it. For example when you enter a town in TES it should load the entire town, houses, castles, sewers etc included, same goes for Fallout, take the Vegas Strip in Fallout New Vegas, it was chopped up into multiple segments where going back and forth doing missions become a chore nearer the end.
if they scaled down the "1000" planets to 10, 4 main hub. 6 unexplored, but actually filled with tings to do and explore, the thing Bethesda used to be good at. People like Obscure thin we shit on Bethesda just to shit on it. No we want better games.
It's a design choice they've chosen. RDR2 kind of proves the whole 'loading interiors' or 'having different events go on' isn't what's stopping it.
RDR2 didn't have you walk into a massive structure like a Starfield base/facility though, right? I'm sure log cabins are a lot easier to handle
That won't affect the need to load content. That's just static designs with a few interactibles. And did we forget RDR2 has towns you don't load into with multiple buildings, dynamic events, and ties to the world as a whole. You load areas to manage the specific scripting and the number of elements that need tracking constantly in that area. Bethesda designs it so you can leave a trail of cheese wheels from town to town, RDR2 designs it so the world interactions are randomized by a few factors and come to you.
Like I said, it's a design choice.
Ok but you can still have more seamless "loading screens" starfield has no excuse for how much its gameplay flow sucks. You're basically saying it will always suck because we don't want to spend the effort on improving that aspect. Hell every open world survival game has object permanence, from valheim to the forest, and that doesn't have tons of loading screens
I haven't played oblivion as yet but does it have loading screens? No one is talking about it.
Fun fact, the remastered version of days gone still has loading screens. It is not the instant load like you see on PS5 and series titles but you will have to wait a bit to load into certain sections. I am not sure why they didn't polish them out and no one is talking about it.
Oblivion has loading screens but it’s nowhere near the wait times it used to be (from what I remember) so the whole experience feels a lot better.
Agreed about Days Gone remastered, it definitely feels like it’s mostly a visual & feel (dualsense) remaster without much focus on optimization (I expected no loading times & in some cases I encountered the same kinds of bugs & audio issues that were on PS4).
Still love the game though & I hope the remaster will help pave the way for DG2.
Interesting. It presents a nice balance of quality and performance. Id just need the right tv to take advantage. I hope more games will offer this option.
GoW on PS4 Pro was soo much better with unlocked framerate. Even being inconsistent, it felt way better than 30fps to me, when it was 30-40 most times, and sometimes above 40. Glad devs are being more experimental and trying these things out now.
This should be adapted by other games. Giving the gamer options, some like more fps, some prefer higher resolution. Its the devs who should be praised for such inclusion.
I'd you haven't seen the video, basically:
The normal 4k fidelity mode had some head room where they could cap it at 40fps instead of 30fps. However on a standard 60hz TV the frame timing will be uneven. With 120hz TV's, running at 40fps has great frame pacing as it's divisible by 3.
This seems like a great option and should be popping up alot more with the adoption of 2.1 capable TV's.
60 fps = 16.7ms refresh
30 fps = 33.3ms refresh
40 fps = 25.0ms refresh
while 45fps may sound like the mid-point between 30fps and 60fps, in frame-time terms that is not the case: 25ms sits precisely between 16.7ms and 33.3ms
40fps is significantly faster, smoother, and there are also input lag benefits too. I tested this by pointing a 240fps camera at both screen and DualSense controller. I measured input lag by jumping 10 times and measuring the amount of frames between pressing the button and the character beginning the jump animation
on average, the input lag is only 6ms slower than the 60fps performance RT mode running on a 60Hz display
Insomniac mentions in the patch notes that the new 40fps fidelity mode is about reduced latency, but I was somewhat surprised at just how much of a win it is on my screen
What's clear is that many games do have CPU and GPU overhead left over when the 30fps cap is in place, the game control has some overhead, judging by the unlocked framerate in photo mode, and is also a candidate for a 40 fps mode