o.O
Are the dev salaries that high in the US??
No wonder the game prices are so high. It wouldn't be odd to have a salary like that as the CEO where I live.
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DF: Halo Infinite Gameplay Reveal Analysis: Are The Graphics Really Flat?
- Thread starter FLX-II
- Start date
Are the dev salaries that high in the US??
No wonder the game prices are so high. It wouldn't be odd to have a salary like that as the CEO where I live.
Regarding the SSD, that may be the case for conventional game design, where developers have to keep devices with mechanical drives in mind. Halo Infinite, however, runs a completely new engine - one designed to power the game as a platform for the next 10 years, and on next-gen hardware, which is my point.
What is the limiting factor, here? It shouldn't be the engine. Even if it was created to support lower-end machines and current-gen Xbox One consoles, its full capabilities should be unlocked when running on hardware that supports new features, such as the Series X, with its Velocity Architecture (which, according to Microsoft, is designed to "radically improve asset streaming" and to "effectively multiply available memory", thanks to the SSD), a dedicated hardware decompression block, the new Sampler Feedback Streaming technology and the new DirectStorage API.
Are we to assume that none of those features are currently being implemented by 343? The demo was running on PC, which indicates that the console version may be on an even worse state, graphically. There were rumors late last year about Microsoft facing delays when supplying developers with devkits, which may explain why the game doesn't look "next-gen". Or, as I mentioned, 343 really is having issues with their new engine, which is not yet ready for prime time, despite the studio most likely being forced into showing something at the Games Showcase and releasing the game this Fall.
What I do know is that Thursday's demo looks nothing like the E3 2018 trailer, with its amazing vistas, draw distance, character models and even volumetric fog - none of which could be seen this time around.
As for the models themselves, I don't think it's a problem with the quality of their assets (even if the native 4K resolution does end up highlighting some low res textures, like on the Brute's veiny right hand on this screenshot, or the aforementioned main antagonist's face during the closeup), but with their actual geometry.
Take a look at Craig here. He looks undeniably low poly, especially when compared to something like Gears 5's enemies - and that game has some pretty large maps, with tons of characters showing on screen at the same time. That Halo Infinite demo had what? Five or six enemies fighting concurrently at any given point? The map also looks barren, and from the glimpse we saw of the map screen, it's from a canyon-like environment, which limits the scope. We still have no idea how big or how open the world really is.
Video game designer salary ‐ CareerExplorer
The average salary for video game designers in the United States is around $90,270 per year. Salaries typically start from $47,350 and go up to $172,094.
www.careerexplorer.com
That doesn't include benefits which pushes that number way higher plus Seattle cost of living probably puts those wages higher too.
Whoa is pretty high haha at least where i live, if i earned something like that i would be considered rich.Video game designer salary ‐ CareerExplorer
The average salary for video game designers in the United States is around $90,270 per year. Salaries typically start from $47,350 and go up to $172,094.
That doesn't include benefits which pushes that number way higher plus Seattle cost of living probably puts those wages higher too.
Had no ideia
Okay the lower end figure made it less crazy but it still surprised me. What's a normal salary if you're not a game dev? Like if you work at a store it factory?.Video game designer salary ‐ CareerExplorer
The average salary for video game designers in the United States is around $90,270 per year. Salaries typically start from $47,350 and go up to $172,094.
That doesn't include benefits which pushes that number way higher plus Seattle cost of living probably puts those wages higher too.
Yeah the cost of living is fucked in a lot of US cities, so even that average salary isn't great in a lot of places if you have a family.
With their whole 10 year plan thing, are we going to have to wait until ~2030 for a Halo game that doesn't look like this? What a depressing thought.
Okay that's about the same as in Sweden. Didn't know game devs had that much higher salaries. The work conditions seems to be crappy though so might be justified I guess.
It's targeting 4k on XSX because it's an Xbox One (2013 console) game. Upscaling is the simplest way to scale the graphics. There are likely some XSX-specific tweaks, but they're certainly not redisigning the game for the new console.
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I'm paying 3K a month to live in a 700 square foot apartment in LA that I could never raise a family in.
Holy crap that's crazy! That's more than my monthly salary! :o
I split the costs with my wife, we have a few kids, and it probably total at roughly 1.5k per month all things included, house loan and all. Edit: Food and fuel comes on top of that. $400 more maybe just for me.
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Jealous that you can buy a house lol. There are definitely more affordable places in the US but a lot of game studios are near expensive cities. It is why you are starting to see most games outsource their art to Asian countries. You get the same quality output at a mere fraction of the price and a lot of the art in games can be pretty hands off if managed correctly.
Finished watching it now, and a very well done video. Sort of confused as to why Alex doesn't compare it to lighting in similar open world games with dynamic lighting like RDR 2 and several other open world games. Why is RT the only solution? Am I missing something obvious?
It's a tiny house, 120 squaremeters on 2 floors with 400 squaremeter grass around it :p So no pool etc heh
I can rock the guitar real loud without angry neighbours bothering me though ;)
I understand that it evolves like that, games need more people and they can't start lowering the salaries, and game prices can't increase much. Makes you think even more about how crazy Game Pass is, I play more games than ever for less money than ever. Somebody is paying but I don't know who. :/
Doesn't matter as long as you get to enjoy the games. 😉 I'm still flabbergasted I was able to upgrade my Gold subscription to Game Pass Ultimate for a dollar through 2022.
I really want to see someone artistic and competent at photoshop attempt to re-invent those hexagonal cliff-faces, because they're painful to look at currently, and I'm unable to imagine how one would remedy it. There have been plenty of artists who've already shown that with just a quick and dirty Reshade-esque filter and a few new textures on weapons and enemy armour, that the game could easily look significantly better. What I have yet to see however is someone making those gaudy hexagons look great, which is a shame as they're one of the most glaring issues visually. They look great in concept art, but I'm a little worried that they're something that simply fails to translate over cleanly to 3D visuals.
I really kind of miss the art direction from 4 and 5.
Well, maybe not the art direction... but how good the character models looked for Lasky, Hallsey, Palmer, Buck, Locke.
Well, maybe not the art direction... but how good the character models looked for Lasky, Hallsey, Palmer, Buck, Locke.
Choose the most appropriate time of day, for their game to give a good first impression.
Oh well, it does look fun, especially the grapple
Yeah that shouldn't be forgotten. I'm underwhelmed by the visuals but blown away by the gameplay, I thought the grappling hook was a brilliant addition!
The game doesn't look bad merely because of the lack of lighting. It looks bad because the textures, effects, character models and environment detail is of such low quality. Furthermore, the art style doesn't lend it any favours.
This looks vastly inferior to their earlier release trailers, and many current gen games such as Doom Eternal which do a wonderful job in running at 60FPS.
This looks vastly inferior to their earlier release trailers, and many current gen games such as Doom Eternal which do a wonderful job in running at 60FPS.
No no no. If you didn't like the graphics we all know that all you care about are those and you didn't care about the gameplay at all. That's what I'm reading anyway.
Did you watch the video? I Touch on All of this. I do not say 'it only looks the way it does because of lighting'.
I saw the full video yes. The main talking point was the lighting system used in the game (versus baked lighting in other games such as TLOU2). Raytracing won't fix Halo Infinite's graphics.
Did I say it will fix them completely or that it will improve them? You are reading my words completely wrong or not listening to what I said.
All of my points about Material choices, Art choice, or LoD, or resolution or other things are tertiary to the indirect lighting Problem.
That's 450 employees at 343i, not 450 343i employees working full time on Halo Infinite over all 5 years. 343i is part publisher and brand manager too - they're effectively what you'd get if The Pokémon Company and GameFreak were one studio. So there's lots of people there that wouldn't be working on the game. Plus a small pool is continuously working on MCC.
Im 99.999999% sure that destiny was supposed to be a trilogy and that this was known even before destiny 1 came out.
Re: pop-in, as I said originally, the limiting factor is CPU and GPU performance. Drawing a lot of foliage on screen is very demanding. I've no doubt the game could take more advantage of the XSX. It's just important to note that loading and rendering are interconnected but still different functions.
The brute doesn't really look low poly to me. It's a fairly simple model, but there aren't any glaring polygonal edges that I recall.
Sigh. The majority of the company has/is working on this game. What's the point of trying to dispel the notion that they are spending a boatload of money on this game?
The pop-in issue is weird, because the density on display really doesn't seem like it would be that taxing on the system. Something's definitely up with this build.
It's weird because you sort of did, but I think it just felt so minor it was easy to gloss over. A lot of people in the youtube comments and in other places seem to have the same sentiment. I'm seeing it repeatedly.
I didn't see you touch on the poor quality textures (like in that infamous official screenshot, where the brute's arm textures look REALLY bad, or where up close even some rocks still look really low res) or how sparse the environments are of just....anything. The whole thing looks really bare and sterile, like a fanmade game might. There's a lot of things beyond just material choices and LoD and resolution. Like that metal platform that just has no detail at all. There's just spikes coming up from it and other ways it's just flat and featureless, as if you've noclipped your way over to a far off model you weren't supposed to go to.
I guess perhaps the feeling is that you are saying lighting is the "Main Problem." But I think while it would help a lot, there are many other issues that are just as important Main Problems that it would not address at all and the game would still look really flat. Because you mention that the game doesn't seem to have these issues as much in the better lit areas...but they do. The game looks really bad in direct light too. You point out the AR looks bad in shadow...but it looks bad the entire time. The blurry textures on even close up items like enemy models contribute to the flat look, and no amount of better lighting will even begin to address the fact that those textures are really low resolution, and so make it look flat.
I think overall I agree with the video and I found it very educational (I made this big "OHHHHH" when you used the Death Strandinge example), but idk if this is helpful on why you are getting this feedback a lot. I understand your pushback. Just trying to be helpful.
I'm not, I'm just saying you're doing bad math to support a baseless and comically excessive figure.
No one doubts it's an expensive game in general, because no shit?
Yeah, like maybe it is still months away from release and they haven't optimized performance and didn't have time to do a normal E3 demo due to a pandemic?
When a game uses a PBR pipeline the lighting and shadowing can make or break the game as it affects the textures and completely dictates how good and "high res" they look. This helps it not just in indirect light situations but also direct light. Not having self shadows on gun is just weird to have in games now seeing how you can cheaply do it with screen space. More so in a next gen game. I also think past Halo games have had character shadows on the gun falling off too (if I recall it correctly).
I get the feeling that 343 designed the game knowing they'd atleast have some sort of voxel based AO or ray traced AO, so they never baked any of that into textures. And since it's not ready yet they didn't have it on the demo and this is what we get.
But then again you also get the distinctive feeling that the game's environment design itself is done with base Xbox One in mind, so that they never keep the screen too busy. But they still can't get rid of pop in.
It seems like two different sorts of development priorities, one that looks to the future and one that looks backwards and trying to gel them both together. The result is ofcourse gonna be disappointing when you do that and achieve neither.
I get the feeling that 343 designed the game knowing they'd atleast have some sort of voxel based AO or ray traced AO, so they never baked any of that into textures. And since it's not ready yet they didn't have it on the demo and this is what we get.
But then again you also get the distinctive feeling that the game's environment design itself is done with base Xbox One in mind, so that they never keep the screen too busy. But they still can't get rid of pop in.
It seems like two different sorts of development priorities, one that looks to the future and one that looks backwards and trying to gel them both together. The result is ofcourse gonna be disappointing when you do that and achieve neither.
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No I'm fucking not. Those devs cost at least 100K a piece in total compensation and there is a shit ton more money spent elsewhere. And pretty much everyone there is working on the damn thing including non technical people who still count in the budget. Publishing, HR, you name it count towards the cost.
Great video, Alex did a fantastic job explaining lighting concepts and how changes to the tech in Infinite would result in a dramatic improvement. Very informative, too!
I do find the posts that have zeroed in on the 4K/60fps set up as the main issue a bit odd, however.
Lowering the resolution to implement ray-traced global illumination would be necessary and would end up making the game look way better, but 4K/60 isn't the reason why the game looks so poor right now.
As Alex and others in this thread have pointed out, lighting is a huge part of the issue, but it is far from the only culprit.
You can fix the lighting and effects all you want, but it still won't look genuinely impressive or truly next-gen because all the assets, animation, and physics are decidedly last-gen.
This is what a lot of us have been saying about cross-gen games being held back by last-gen hardware, but people kept denying it. Well, that Infinite demo was the perfect example of a game being handicapped by having to run acceptably on old hardware.
I do find the posts that have zeroed in on the 4K/60fps set up as the main issue a bit odd, however.
Lowering the resolution to implement ray-traced global illumination would be necessary and would end up making the game look way better, but 4K/60 isn't the reason why the game looks so poor right now.
As Alex and others in this thread have pointed out, lighting is a huge part of the issue, but it is far from the only culprit.
You can fix the lighting and effects all you want, but it still won't look genuinely impressive or truly next-gen because all the assets, animation, and physics are decidedly last-gen.
This is what a lot of us have been saying about cross-gen games being held back by last-gen hardware, but people kept denying it. Well, that Infinite demo was the perfect example of a game being handicapped by having to run acceptably on old hardware.
If the rumors of this being run on PC is true, then it's very likely that this is simply a build configured with base Xbox One settings. It would explain the aggressive LODs and culling. I've said it before, but I think the trailer was put together at the very last minute (in response to the poor showing of the first event). 343i is a very capable studio with a lot of excellent artists. I've interacted and worked with a few of them in the past and I know their standards. There's no way in hell any one of them would approve the stills that were released alongside this trailer lol.
Since when have devs ever shown PC builds running on lower settings? it's always maxed out.
Alex touched a bit on that, it's mostly due to the insane requirements of 4K60. Even a 2080Ti will have trouble with that if there's too much stuff visible in the distance.
I think a lot of the pop in seems ill-timed rather than engine limited.
There's really weird near-camera foliage popping with camera rotation that almost looks like messed up clipping planes. Except other geometry is rendering fine. Maybe the foliage is on a different camera/render target with wonky clipping parameters. That could be an easier fix than the more distant pop-in anyway.
Its not really a baseless and comically excessive figure. sure a company that size has a lot of people that do not actively contribute to the game, but then again that headcount was from 2016. You can bet your ass its grown since for halo infinite.
also destiny's budget was 500 million.
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It's possible that at that time it was a manually controlled region when FoV was a separate control and they screwed up the numbers (someone did a 1:1). When in reality you want the culling planes slightly larger than the FoV.
It's that kind of stuff that makes me think this demo wasn't quite baked properly.
God this thread is sad, accusing DF of "damage control".
