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Sony PS5 buyers and owners (3 Viewers)

Morgan Jolley

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This started out because I was saying the Xbox is a weaker brand, I think the power difference between PS5/XSX won't matter much, and I worry that MS will basically kill the studios they're buying up since they have a smaller platform than Sony.
 

Morgan Jolley

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How many games did Rare pump out as a 2nd party for Nintendo? How many since they were bought by MS? Lionhead?

How well did, say, Gears 5 sell compared to Uncharted 4? How about Forza versus Gran Turismo? Anything from MS against Spiderman or God of War?

Half of that is quality and the other half is player base. It's easier to sell 10M units if there are 100M consoles than if there are less than 50M consoles. And it's easier to allow creative freedom and larger budgets if you have a higher base to sell to.
 

LeoA

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At the end of the day I'm glad I just like games.

Forza for instance has been excellent with both the mainline series and the arcade Forza Horizon spinoff series. Yet I suppose you're hinting to us that Gran Turismo Sport outsold Forza Motorsport 7 and that Forza thus isn't good enough?

While I'm not shy at opening up things like annual reports and engaging in some debate about the business side of this industry, I've found much to love as a gamer so far with both the PS4 and XB1. And I look forward to adding a Nintendo Switch someday soon. Business side doesn't matter when it comes down to holding a controller.

I've never thought much of platform loyalty. I've always been a multiplatform person that appreciates the unique aspects of each system. It's the games themselves that matter and all three of the main console platforms have no shortage of fine games to offer.
 
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Edwin-S

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Looks fantastic. Have to try to maintain perspective that that is an optimized demo. Real games may never reach that level of detail.

Still, I cannot deny that I will be in possession of yet another shiny new toy in few months and my wallet will not be thanking me.
 

Morgan Jolley

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Leo - I don't want to dwell on the topic much more, but my point wasn't necessarily that MS makes bad games or that nobody does/should enjoy them. I was saying that their brand is weak, as shown by their lower sales (hardware and software), and that concerns me because they've bought up some good developers and I've seen them squander good developers in the past due to their current market position. Sony allows their studios to take huge risks and puts a ton of money/support behind it. MS doesn't.

Edwin - Epic said that the UE5 demo was fully playable. Sure, it's probably more detailed than most games will end up being and was designed to show specifically what the PS5 can do (meaning there are some pieces that may not be feasible on the Series X and third party multiplatform games won't look quite as good) but it really was an interactive game and not just a pre-rendered video.

Personally, I thought the demo was really impressive but that doesn't do much for me. I want to see this tech used in an actual game that does something more with it than just appear really pretty. Cerny talked about how Jak 2 involved corridors in the game design to hide loading times. I want to see what the new open-ended abilities for developers look like. I want to see a new gameplay experience. I don't want Assassin's Creed with better light bloom or Uncharted simply running at 120 fps.
 

Sam Posten

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Sure Morgan keep spreading unfounded FUD that PS5 will be more powerful based solely on your feelings. We simply don't know right now. Even if one is more powerful specs wise than the other it will be within a few percentage points difference not anything major.
 

LeoA

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I thought the demo looked great.

I thought it had potential to be a real game. Other than the bizarre end where the character takes flight at supersonic speed for a few miles, I could see getting into it.

Sure Morgan keep spreading unfounded FUD that PS5 will be more powerful based solely on your feelings. We simply don't know right now. Even if one is more powerful specs wise than the other it will be within a few percentage points difference not anything major.

I think it's safe to assume they will be very comparable with their capabilities. Perceived advantages and disadvantages will only matter to the fanboys.

The stock Xbox One and the XB1S for instance don't appear inferior with actual games to my eyes, yet I believe they're said to be a fair bit weaker than the PS4 and PS4 slim thanks to Microsoft dedicating a good chunk of the selling price early on to the Kinect capabilities of the system rather than pure horsepower.

I know Digital Foundry can nitpick some differences to show minor frame rate advantages and how they show heavily zoomed in still frames to demonstrate minor differences. But at the end of the day when you're sitting down in front of your tv with a controller in your hands, the disparity ends up pretty meaningless 99% of the time if a game was competently programmed and optimized.

And if they were 1:1 with power, it would put the Digital Foundry folks out of a job...
 
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Morgan Jolley

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I was really referring to the comments that Epic said alongside the release of the UE5 demo. They specifically talked about how the power of the PS5 enabled them to create that demo. I'm sure UE5 will be on Series X but there was zero mention of Xbox at all.

The one area that the PS5 has an advantage (according to everything I've read from developers and journalists) is the speed of moving things in and out of memory. It basically erases loading altogether. We haven't seen games yet so we don't know what kind of a difference this will be, plus the idea of 5 seconds of loading for Series X versus 0.5 seconds of loading for PS5 is really nothing significant, but Cerny spent some of his GDC chat talking about how they designed Jak II around the limitations of the PS2 and had to incorporate winding alleys to cover up loading times which the PS5 won't require at all. A LOT of games do this (Uncharted 4 with the mash-the-button doors, God of War's fast travel system) but the PS5 virtually erases all of that. There has been really no talk of the Series X with something like that because MS is focusing more on raw processing power than moving things into memory. You'll likely get a game that looks slightly prettier on Xbox but loads faster on PS5.

If the PS5 architecture allows developers to make larger and more detailed game worlds because it effectively erases the limitation on what they can do, that could have a huge impact on game design. That part, the game design aspect, is what interests me the most. I really don't care if one console has more TFLOPs than the other (since they are quite close) and I don't care if one gets 4K at 120 fps while the other tops out at 4K 60 fps. If the console architecture is so open and strong that it lets developers design literally whatever they could possibly want then I'll expect we can see better games instead of just prettier ones.

In the end, this is about the GAMES. Sony is moving on to a new generation with PS5. Microsoft already committed to supporting Xbox One and Series X for the first year after launch. We will see games that take full advantage of the PS5 hardware from Sony right away (well, maybe, depending on what they produce). We definitely won't see that from Microsoft on the Series X, since their stuff is going to have to run well enough on the One. I actually think MS is making an incredibly wise business decision (it likely won't hurt their sales and they'll be able to squeeze more profit from a wider player base of One + Series X users for a while) but it means Sony will have the advantage for innovation in game design. Maybe.
 

Sam Posten

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If the PS5 architecture allows developers to make larger and more detailed game worlds because it effectively erases the limitation on what they can do, that could have a huge impact on game design.

Yeah not design at all but on art pipeline. You stop being hardware limited and start being limited by how expensive it is to create and manage all these assets at movie studio resolution.

Anyway, more tech details

And about Xbox:
"The key features we're debuting will work across all of the next generation console platforms," adds Sweeney. "We don't have performance comparisons, we can't share performance comparisons, but this is a feature set you can count on with that generation, particularly micro polygon geometry with the Nanite technology and real-time global illumination with Lumen."

 

Jeff Cooper

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It basically erases loading altogether. We haven't seen games yet so we don't know what kind of a difference this will be, plus the idea of 5 seconds of loading for Series X versus 0.5 seconds of loading for PS5 is really nothing significant, but Cerny spent some of his GDC chat talking about how they designed Jak II around the limitations of the PS2 and had to incorporate winding alleys to cover up loading times which the PS5 won't require at all. A LOT of games do this (Uncharted 4 with the mash-the-button doors, God of War's fast travel system) but the PS5 virtually erases all of that.

Yeah, I keep hearing that, but only 3 minutes into the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, and we are treated to a 'slowly shimmy through the crack' loading sequence. :rolling-smiley::rolling-smiley::rolling-smiley::rolling-smiley:
 

Morgan Jolley

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Jeff - yeah...Epic already commented that the goal of that "shimmy" sequence was to put the camera up close to the geometry to show the level of detail. Also, the sequence at the end had a lot going on without any loading so...

Sam - you're right, we have been at the point where only the biggest studios with the most money will take full advantage of the hardware for a while. No indie studio is going to push to the limit of what even the PS4 and Xbox One (launch models) can do for more than a couple hours of a game. That's part of the reason why I find the whole focus on graphics for new consoles to be weird. Most games won't push to what we can technically get, so why do we care?

That said, MS and Epic have been pretty cagey about UE5 on Series X. Yes, it will be on it but they won't even outright say, "This demo also runs on Series X."
 

Sam Posten

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It's gorgeous. And if it won't fit in your rack, Nobody cares.
1591910363958.png
 

Ruz-El

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I dig it. Maybe not enough to pre-order. but once it's confirmed on what discs it plays and having plex support I'll keep my eyes out for it. Did they ever confirm how deep backward compatibility will be? Is it only PS4 or well anything purchased on the PSN work?
 

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