Unlike many, I want zero loading times and a stable frame rate on all games more than anything else. Couldn't really give a monkeys about the visual upgrade apart from the ray tracing maybe. I think audio should get a massive step up. Hopefully.

The zero (or one second) losing times are what Sony are promising. I just can’t help feel that devs will just load even more stuff into the pipeline and somehow manage to fuck it up.

I want to be able to send Sony pictures of my ears.

I also want to send them pics of other ears like shrek, Gary Lineker and block lesser just for the lols and watch them scratch there heads at how they are gonna map them funkers.

(wonder how many dick pics they will get instead)

I honestly don't get the desire for no loading times, I can wait a minute or so if needed to start playing. Browse the internet, roll a fag, sip your beer. It's like people who use Amazon NOW! rather than wait a day for regular postage.

b0r1s wrote:

The zero (or one second) losing times are what Sony are promising. I just can’t help feel that devs will just load even more stuff into the pipeline and somehow manage to fuck it up.

They won't fuck it up, this is a stupid way to look at development. When you're given better tech you don't just look at it as a game dev and go "ok that's our limit!" you push it, to achieve better.

It wasn’t stupid, I just didn’t elaborate. I guess I should have explained what I meant by fuck it up. Which is they will pack that 5 to 9gb of bandwidth with more and more detailed assets, which will not move us past where we are now. Not everyone will, but I feel a lot of triple A stuff will still focus mainly on the shiny at the expense of other benefits. Perhaps we’ll start to see more sliders where we can choose our focus (like we did with some PS4 Pro games) pretties vs performance etc.

The zero loading benefit obviously isn’t for that initial load (with probably the exception of games like GTA) but more for the ongoing loading of “levels” or quick travel etc. Having said that playing a game like StS on Switch vs PC is night and day difference of even getting into the game.

nick_md wrote:

Moot_Geeza wrote:

I don't want the arse to fall out of the indie market and I want game worlds to stop getting bigger. Also, stable framerates please. And more 'AA' titles like Hellblade/A Way Out/Plague Tale.

Visuals are fine as they are, I don't need Nintendo games to look better than BotW and I don't see the point in PS5/XBox titles looking any better than the likes of Horizon (pick ZD or FH4) or RDR2.

I'd agree on the visuals, although 9yr old me thought the flame sprites in SF2 were unbelievable and couldn't be bettered.

Heh Heh, I remember when they introduced the bigger character flame sprite for super sf2. Mind blown. How easily impressed I was.

What games are we talking about that have such an abhorrent load time between levels?

I've come across some but it is normally bad design.
Fallout New Vegas stands out, that had lengthy load times and lots of them. There was a mission that had you walk from the quest giver to another person, have some dialogue then return to the quest giver. There were 3 or 4 load screens between the two NPCs each way but probably only about 500 metres distance of straight forward walking.

I cant remember coming across much of that this gen.

I'm with Moot in wanting more AA stuff.
I think it has lacked a fair bit this gen, especially stuff that is just straight up fun.
I want Binary Domain type stuff.

I was thinking about Ninja Theory They did Heavenly Sword which was fine then Enslaved which was a great game, it shared ideas and concepts from other series but really stood out on it's own. This gen they did Hellblade which was decent but lacking in gameplay had some nice ideas though. Now they have made Bleeding Edge which is just another dedicated MP class based thing that nobody will give two shits about in 6 months time like Battleborn hadn't already made that mistake.

Go back and make some mental AA single player thing.

Or similar.

That is definitely true for instant restarts. Although again I tend to find this more a design problem.
If I have to go through several options to restart or a game makes me watch a cut scene again or travel back to the boss/arena etc.
Generally I find these more annoying and more common than long load times.

b0r1s wrote:

It wasn’t stupid, I just didn’t elaborate. I guess I should have explained what I meant by fuck it up. Which is they will pack that 5 to 9gb of bandwidth with more and more detailed assets, which will not move us past where we are now. Not everyone will, but I feel a lot of triple A stuff will still focus mainly on the shiny at the expense of other benefits. Perhaps we’ll start to see more sliders where we can choose our focus (like we did with some PS4 Pro games) pretties vs performance etc. The zero loading benefit obviously isn’t for that initial load (with probably the exception of games like GTA) but more for the ongoing loading of “levels” or quick travel etc. Having said that playing a game like StS on Switch vs PC is night and day difference of even getting into the game.

Bringing in stuff like ports re: Slay the Spire isn't helpful. Porting to different architecture is clearly not an easy thing to do. It also isn't about the devs being too ambitious, architecture is architecture and original code for one architecture will end up butting heads with bottlenecked architecture. I also don't think we be furstrated at Devs using things like Game Maker or Unity when they can come with poor performance here and there (which i've seen on here a bunch). Not every dev is a wonder coder, and these packages are designed to allow people to create games when they have the ideas and not always the intense technical know-how or development/financial structure for them to exist. 

I disagree that the stuff devs will inevitably pack in won't take us past where we are now, but it may take it past where you want it to be. I also dislike "shiny" as a way to hand wave a bunch of incredibly intense and difficult work. I dunno, I just think you have to accept that progress is a cycle, and your favourite games would never have been made if people hadn't looked at limitations and constraints and then worked their ass off to work up to them ad break them to an acceptable degree for the player.

nick_md wrote:

What games are we talking about that have such an abhorrent load time between levels?

Have you played Destiny 2 on console?

During my Masters research, it was insanely eye-opening to read about how Guerrilla made HZD. They had something like a 4 man team design the World Map, because it was largely created by procedural generation. Erosion maps, density maps, detail maps - just a tiny team tasked with operating these algorithms and parameters to create a huge, huge world with an insane level of detail, following naturalistic models to create something unthinkably vast even 5 years prior. So why can't everyone do it? Because Money, Money, Money and Time. And the fact that Guerrilla had that, meant those and had those opportunities now other devs will too.

Whereas it's take me all afternoon to fix a low poly mesh in Blender to work right in Substance.