Did this generation already meet your expectations ? (Technologically - Read OP)

Think I'm pretty much where you're at. I think RDR2 will change the scale and density thing for me, though. Maybe even the AI part, if they manage to deliver on their promise.

It gave me a handheld with console like graphics, which I can soon play Smash and Pokémon on. Yes so far it's great!

I think i agree with you on everything , op

ADee said:

It gave me a handheld with console like graphics, which I can soon play Smash and Pokémon on. Yes so far it's great!

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Tbh this. The Switch came out of left-field with how "next-gen" it is for such a small, and sleek format.

In regards to your thoughts though, I agree for the most part. No overworld map has touched GTA V in terms of depth and realism, but Spider-Man's New York City looks like it might dethrone it for sure. Just last week I was watching a YouTube video called "Jumping from the highest point in every Spider-Man game" and just seeing the scale of essentially the same setting get progressively bigger was honesty mind-blowing.

Density though, I'm not sure. Cyberpunk absolutely looks like next-gen with how many people take up the screen so organically, and since that's how you are evaluating density in your OP I'll agree that nothing before that has really come close. Aside from the number of people in a given area though, I'd argue Monster Hunter World and Breath of the Wild take the cake this gen for peak density in their environments. Areas like the Ancient Forest and Faron Woods made for amazingly convincing forest settings due to how dense the foliage and various points of interests like monster nests/enemy camps were.

SoundCheck said:

I never thought that putting 64 or 100 people on the same map would be possible.

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MAG had 256 back in the seventh gen on PS3!

RIP, Zipper.

It exceeded them. Simply because I had firmly believed that I had exited the console world (thus generations) by going to PC. Nintendo provided something new and fresh, and I've gone back to console without ever expecting to have done so ever again.

The fact that we got a competent VR in this gen already blew my balls away. As a kid growing up in 80s, this feels like a dream.

exceeded my expectations.
Devs and the systems constantly surprise me.

ADee said:

It gave me a handheld with console like graphics, which I can soon play Smash and Pokémon on. Yes so far it's great!

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Consoles from more than 10 years ago. Not like handhelds didn't already do that in the past.

You nailed it op. I also expected way more physics than what we got. Remember force unleashed? I thought that was the beginning. But it wasn't. Everyone went right back to scripted. We did get one huge scale game in no man's sky though.

Agree with OP. Most disapointing to me is the lack of AI intelligence, NPCs often still don't feel natural in what they do and have improved little from Skyrim in 2011. Experiments like the Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor are far and few between. Better graphics sell, and you can see where resources are being pumped into.

Visually, yes, lots of great looking games.

AI and physics have been disappointing. I really hoped that at least physics would improve by a significant margin. But it's just sad that physix stuff in Borderlands 2 from 2012 is still ahead of most current games. The worlds still feel so static and boring.

Features: Really like the added features for this gen like screenshots, video capturing, share play etc. Resuming a game exactly ehere you left it is the best.

I'm with you for the most part. I've been blown away by the graphics this gen and some of the VR experiences are mind-blowing.

A.I has been the big disappointment. I'm not sure if I agree with scale and density though. I think some of the Assassins Creed excel in those areas. There are also experiences like CYBERPUNK 2077 and DAYS GONE that are looking to make big strides in those areas as well.

Yes.

Witcher 3 with its scale, graphics, choices, rich story-telling, seamless world, etc., surpassed my expectations and ended up being my favourite RPG ever.

bane833 said:

Consoles from more than 10 years ago. Not like handhelds didn't already do that in the past.

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It's much more powerful than a PS3 and XB360, but yes you are correct that it doesn't have graphics like a PS4 or XB1, but I don't care because I think the graphics have evolved enough so what looks like on Switch is mostly fine.
Compare Doom on Switch and XB1, then compare what Borderlands 2 was on Vita and XB360, Doom is much closer to it's console brethren than whatever Vita had.

Aside from graphics it's basically the same shit or even worse. One of the most impressive games, BOTW, ran on a Wii U ffs.

the hardware is Ace. I like the idea of mid gen refreshes so thats a plus. Xbox One X is the cleanest piece of gaming tech I have ever had the pleasure of owning and the Xbox One Elite controller is my favourite controller all time.

visually they look amazing, VR becoming a thing is amazing and I love my Rift (switched from PSVR cuz games and power of pc)

AI feels the same as PS360 tbh the only real notable thing I remember was the nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor/war but even then that never was THAT impressive to me idk why.

Scale is awesome. I mean look at fucking Origins and Odyssey, if you want something that isnt literally desert (since Origins is set in Egypt) then games like The Witcher 3 help fill that world and it looks like Cyberpunk will do even more of that.

Overall this gen has been a blast and adds an interesting rollercoaster to the story of video games with the shake up of MS and the amazing rebound they are currently on, indie devs growing more and more, growth of multiplayer games including those with 100 people in a single game (on console!), the huge success of the PS4, Crossplay becoming a thing and tearing down walls that have been up for decades along with VR actually being something real. The reinvention of old IP along with the creation of new IP has been some of the highlights this gen with games like God of War, Sunset Overdrive, Forza Horizon (original was 360 but it came into its own imo this gen), Cuphead, PUBG, Bloodborne and so many more.


Shame we will never got to see Deep Down...Another E3 wish gets added to the list as The Last Guardian, Final Fantasy XV, Shenmue 3, Kingdom Hearts 3, Final Fantasy VII Remake are all announced and later released. Im still hopin for that Banjo Threeie :)


(I dont count Switch to be part of the Xbox One and PS4 generation, that was the WiiU and outside of Mario Maker and Smash 4 tbh I thought it was a complete piece of trash which is why I dont mention it.)

Graphics: No
To be honest the visual overhaul of this generation is mute compared with the jump from PS1 to PS2 and from PS2 to PS3. PS4 is just more PS3. Visual fidelity...or more to the point, sharpness, has progressed at a higher rate than any other aspect. It's all about resolution these days which means the fulness of a game will suffer. I'll always use Gran Turismo as an indicator and, although very nice, it's lost more features in this generation. Gameplay features. Things that should matter. Things that would enhance the experience.

Yeah, this generation has been mostly about a shift in balance at a developer level rather than pursuing cutting edge techniques to push visuals to the next level. Resolution just displays more pixels but it's pointless if those pixels are not doing anything different.

Scale: No
Generally speaking I agree with the OP. I would prefer it if Destiny, for example, felt genuinely open-word rather than sectioned-off pieces. I think that would be more immersive, seeing troubled areas that needed help miles in the distance. Even Grand Theft Auto V didn't deliver the trailer for this current generation (traffic density is greatly reduced).

The Crew is the only game, that I have played, in this generation that feels organically large (funnily, the technology in The Crew 2 takes that away). I can see Las Vegas street lights from miles away and it's an adventure getting there.

Density: No
Yeah, but this has been an issues for all the generations so far. Density tanks performance, especially this generation.

Artificial intelligence: No
Yep, again compute kills another dream.

Console software: No
Consoles have become bloated and unorganised jack of all trades. I just want a console. Considering it was mainly just text, PS3's OS was rapid.

Bonus: peripherals and VR
I don't have any right now.


If Sony still had Ken at the helm we wouldn't be stuck with off-the-shelf parts. I'd love to know what that would look like. It's hard to imagine it wouldn't be much more capable than this current generation.

Pretty much repeating what the others have to say. For most of those things lets wait for Rockstar to set the benhmark as always.

I've been very pleased. If you return to last gen games you'll find that a huge number of releases operate at very low frame-rates and feature poor image quality. It's rough to go back to. This gen smooths all of that out, for the most part. 30fps games are actually 30fps and there are many more 60fps titles. Plus, we've seen a huge evolution in terms of visual effects and techniques.

Many of the mentioned issues are more a limitation of manpower and budget than hardware.

Also, things like density and size of world can be detrimental to gameplay. A super crowded streets full of things getting in your way isn't fun. A large open world that requires an hour to traverse isn't fun. Games like AC Origins were simply far too big for their own good, I believe. Making a world that large while still delivering interesting content to use within it requires an insane amount of work.

I expected this gen to be side step with higher resolution and better framerates. So pretty much yes.

Yes on all except for AI, which is an area that didn't see any significant advancements since the days of the OG Xbox.

bane833 said:

Consoles from more than 10 years ago. Not like handhelds didn't already do that in the past.

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Yeah, handhelds have usually been like an advanced version of the previous gen. Which isn't a bad thing. PSP was PS1+, PSvita was PS2+. Both taking and downscaling current gen titles to their form factor.

I feel like Switch is the first time it has been perfected though.

Graphics: Don't care.
Don't care for quite some time now.

Scale: We have Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky.
Think what you will, those games (among many other) are large.

Density: No, not really.
But I don't know if it's actually feasible besides just processing power.
I mean there are a ton of readability issues. Like look at those movies with tons of action on screen where it's just a bunch of shit happening as you can't focus on anything.

Artificial intelligence: It'll never really get better than that.
Not unless we see a drastic change in most game design paradigms. You can't be the hero who slaughter thousands of enemies when each of them have at least a bit of self-preservation instinct.

Console software: They do as they are told.
Most of the time consoles allow what they are supposed to allow: play games, join games, chat with "friends".

Bonus: Don't care.
I want games, not gimmicks.

I pretty much agree with the OP.
All I wanted from this gen is material based shaders and the more advanced lighting tech, no or less jaggies and stable 30fps.
We got all of this and then some.

Dark1x said:

I've been very pleased. If you return to last gen games you'll find that a huge number of releases operate at very low frame-rates and feature poor image quality. It's rough to go back to. This gen smooths all of that out, for the most part. 30fps games are actually 30fps and there are many more 60fps titles. Plus, we've seen a huge evolution in terms of visual effects and techniques.

Many of the mentioned issues are more a limitation of manpower and budget than hardware.

Also, things like density and size of world can be detrimental to gameplay. A super crowded streets full of things getting in your way isn't fun. A large open world that requires an hour to traverse isn't fun. Games like AC Origins were simply far too big for their own good, I believe. Making a world that large while still delivering interesting content to use within it requires an insane amount of work.

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Yeah returning to most of the PS360 games is rough. I'm so glad that performance is way more stable this gen. And I believe that all those DF videos have contributed to that development, so thanks for your great work over the years!

I remember that I stopped playing TLOU on the PS3 because it was just so choppy.

Honestly, the jump in visuals was even bigger than I expected. Stuff like H:ZD can look incredible at times. Just compare that game to any open world PS360 games. To be fair, I played it on a PS4 Pro, so that comparison is kinda unfair.

This generation is held back by weak base consoles. The games are good but technologically only feel like a slight improvement over previous gen.

The sooner new hardware released the better because the 2013 hardware will still be supported for years into next gen.

I'd like to see more done with dense crowds, more geometry, more complex AI and more interactable objects all while pushing high frame rates and resolution with high fidelity textures, shaders and lighting. Some games do some of these things exceptionally well but then have to sacrifice in other areas because of the least powerful hardware that it has to run on (PS4/XB1/NS).

Graphics: Eh. Yeah Sony's first party in particular has been gorgeous, but very little has blown me away. Quite frankly, the janky yet masterful animation of Trico in the Last Guardian is the most next gen graphics we got in terms of advancing the medium.

Scale: Yes. Yeah game worlds haven't gotten much bigger, but they've gotten more dense and mechanically involved. Quite frankly we're in a golden age for mechanics led open world games.

Density: Nah. Resogun still feels like the most dense graphics of the gen TBH.

AI: Eh? I think it's been lateral. Again, Trico is the biggest feat.

Software: Yes, but it still isn't good. Quite frankly, give me the minimalist but speedy Switch UI any day over the PS4 or god forbid the Xbox One's UI.

VR: Call me next gen. There's some fun experiments and boundary establishing in VR, but I think the next VR gen is the one that will decide the long term fate of the medium.

Malovis said:

Aside from graphics it's basically the same shit or even worse. One of the most impressive games, BOTW, ran on a Wii U ffs.

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I do think it's funny how one of my favorite games this gen was originally developed with Wii U in mind lol. I wish I could see a version of BOTW where it was developed without the shackles of the Wii U in mind.

Render this gen has been a big step up. Especially when it comes to lighting and material work!

For me, what disappoints me this gen is the lack in physics and animation evolution. Back in 2001 to 2006 I was used seeing tech demo's for physics, unified lighting, ai, ect. that would eventually and up in the upcoming titles. Big jumps were made at the time.
While render tech seems to continue evolving this gen, physics and animation seemed to somehow slow down. One of the last big things i was excited to see this gen was DMM (Digital Molecular matter) and Euphoria (virtual skeletal system) for real time animation simulation.


DMM was tried in The Force Unleashed but not very successful, as well as Euphoria. Euphoria was also used in Rockstar's RAGE engine with a more successful implementation, but seems to have been toned down in later Rockstar entries to free up some CPU cycles for other stuff.

From what i could gather, it seems that Euphoria is really hard to implement. A developer doesn't receive a middleware development toolkit, but needs to hire a team within in the core tech team to custom develop the skeletal system: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-02-12-one-thing-about-gta4-has-never-been-bettered



On top of this, both seem to be very expensive on the CPU.
There are of course tech evolution happening in the field (look at Motion Matching for instance) but as someone who is into exciting simulation stuff in games, i can't help but feel a little disappointed stuff like euphoria or DMM didn't get mainstream appeal. :)

I think only AI has received no significant upgrade, the rest met my expectations.

Dark1x said:

Also, things like density and size of world can be detrimental to gameplay. A super crowded streets full of things getting in your way isn't fun. A large open world that requires an hour to traverse isn't fun. Games like AC Origins were simply far too big for their own good, I believe. Making a world that large while still delivering interesting content to use within it requires an insane amount of work.

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On density: i kind of liked it in AC Unity or Hitman 2016, even though the vast majority of NPC's had basic AI and no collision.
On traversal: On point here

Dark1x said:

Many of the mentioned issues are more a limitation of manpower and budget than hardware.

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This is kinda scary as we approach next gen. Things need to change on a toolset level for it to be sustainable.
Can stuff like RTX offload some of the workload when it comes to lighting a scene for instance? From what i understand is that lighting in raytracing seems to have a general rule for shadowing and number of lights per frame as opposed to how it's being done with rasterization with a lot of trickery.

I got to experience VR, a thing I didn't think would exist until I was an old man, so hell yes it met and exceeded my expectations.

My expectation was for the more accessible nature of these consoles to drawn in more developers and help bring back smaller or mid-sized developers back into the market and for the most part that has been the case. The indie scene is as thriving as ever, if not more so, and Japanese developers are making a resurgence and even learning from their mistake of trying to develop proprietary engines for each new title.

There are games released every month now that I honestly don't believe would have made it to the market in the last console lifecycle and to me that's far more important than the performance improvements that came with the new hardware.

Besides visuals nah. Games are fantastic looking and they'll look even better next gen but overall developers haven't been pushing other aspects of video games. We got GTAV last gen and hopefully red dead takes it up a level but I want to know where everyone else is with their detailed worlds. Rockstar can't be the only ones capable they aren't even the biggest developers out there, and their publisher is far from the mos rprofutable. It's just strange we haven't seen more sandbox open world. Hoping red dead shows off true density.

I pretty much agree 100% with the OP.

The Jaguar-based CPUs were a real ball-and-chain on current gen titles. Going Zen next generation will be a real godsend as far as stuff like physics, density and AI; I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up doing more to make next gen "feel like next gen" than the visuals alone.

The big AAA Sony exclusives (Uncharted 4, Horizon Zero Dawn, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War etc.) did meet and even surpass my expectations for this generation. Each time one is released (and very soon there will be Spider-Man) I am in graphical heaven, the always included photomodes (one of the greatest addition of this generation) are the icing on the cake.

All I see is shiny graphics and same old gameplay, even worse than last gen was. We don't even get 60fps in all games. So meh.

Graphics did exceed my expectations, at least on PC. With ultra high resolution textures like in Rise of the Tomb Raider, magnificently crafted world's in Uncharted 4 and great improvements on antialiasing with TXAA (or other similar working technologies) it really is a great gen.

In regards to scale I didn't expect much. Actually 'the bigger the better's doesn't work for me. Gothic 2 still has one of the most believable worlds ever created and the small scale definitely works in its favor. A world like Gothic's on a scale of The Witcher 3 would be impossible. Seeing that would exceeded my expectations like a skyrocket. But I haven't expected that.

Density could be better. I remember Hitman and Kane & Lynch with so many characters on one screen. But as soon as you try it on a bigger scale, like AC Units did it, fps drop to shit, especially on console. Hardware, or technology, isn't quite there yet; no wonder they reduced the density in Syndicate. So, yeah, it could have been better and I expected a bit more.

Software on PC gets better and better, especially in regards of Steam, and keeping your PC up to date with ever decreasing need for tinkering. Console OS, in regards of PS4 gets better, slowly, and there is still much room.

A.I. is most of the time quite believable for me. There were no huge steps and it still feels gamey, but I didn't expect much in that regards.

Peripherals is quite disappointing. PlayStation VR has an abysmal resolution and image quality; the performance isn't simply there. But it's okay for me, because I'm not interested in it either, and it also give me some kind of sickness. I like my games as I like my games: on a 2D panel with a gamepad (I couldn't bear to finish Skyward Sword because of its controls, for instance).

The Logitech G29 racing wheel was a joke. Old technology in a new packages with less hardware that is too expensive. 300 EUR plus another 60 bucks for the h-shifter that was included in previous models. I still stick to the TM300 that is in every way superior except for its plastic pedals.

The Xbox Elite controller is a nice piece of hardware, but mostly because it's buttons on the back. My issues with shooters on console is that I need the right thumb to turn the camera and also need to activate stuff, reload, jump, pick up items and the like, completely disturbing the flow of the gameplay in first person shooters. Unfortunately it's way to expensive for someone like me that doesn't need it's other features. In the end, I keep playing most of the shooters on PC.

In regards of peripherals it could be a lot better, but then again I didn't expect much because the recent ones are fine for most of the players anyways.

Overall, I'm not overly enthusiastic about this gen but definitely satisfied.

I agree with you OP. I think a lot of the problem has been the focus on visuals and not concepts. 360/PS3 > Xbone/PS4 was a pretty massive jump, but so much was focused on what the games could achieve visually. I think it comes from the legacy of the PS2 gen jump to the 360 one. People remember it for the amazing shift in graphical detail, but people forget how much more powerful the 320 or PS3 was compared to the previous. We saw some real changes in scope and scale, but everyone got caught up with the visuals. That's the biggest difference in this gen to last. The Visual upgrade.

That to me, turned out to be the biggest issue with this Gen. Most of the games themselves outside of visuals could probably have been achieved on the last Gen hardware, which is disappointing because the last gen went on for almost a decade, you'd assume they'd have something more. Instead there was a lot of focus on what can graphically be achieved. You would have thought the industry would have learnt its lesson with the Wii.

I hope that when the next Gen comes, they'll have figured this out. The real worry for me is that someone will try to go all in on VR and while we are decades ahead from the last serious attempts, shit aint good enough yet,

Diminishing returns, development costs. and the silicon wall are hitting me hard. Even on PC, evolution of graphics are slowing to a crawl.

I also hoped that we'd see more meaningful physics in games, and even on PC that's not the case.

I mean the games are fine, but I don't think games are evolving lately, apart from VR.

VR on PC is amazing and brings true innovation, but quality titles are trickling out.

Also I'd kill for more linear, adventurous FPS. I want something like Unreal or Metroid Prime.

Your scale, density, and AI complaints mostly come down to the god awful CPUs that are in these consoles SoundCheck . Next gen should be much better in that area.

Bumb!

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