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[SlimySnake]

Monster hunter wild was a cold fucking shower on expectations of Capcom's technical skills though

i think its because that monster hunter team started off as a ps vita team and never really gave a shit about graphics.

Capcom has been the one Japanese studio that has adopted to the HD era going all the way back to the PS3 when Japan started to get left behind. Lost Planet 2, RE5, street fighter 4 were stunners. This gen they've been about average but still well above Square, Team Ninja, Platinum Games, and Nintendo studios. I think RE9 and Pragmata both look pretty fucking awesome.

 

[Represent.]

Yep Capcom and KojimaProductions are quite literally the only Japanese studios putting out respectable graphics in 2026. It's quite sad to see

 

[adamsapple]

Nioh 3 a 2026 videogame ladies and gentlemen

Team Ninja's put out like 5 games in the last 3 years.

They seem to have an efficient but technically lacking development pipeline.

 

[Gonzito]

Team Ninja's put out like 5 games in the last 3 years.

They seem to have an efficient but technically lacking development pipeline.

I think it's their engine man, it just sucks. Katana engine is too dated at this point and they should invest more money into making it better and upgrade it

 

[adamsapple]

I think it's their engine man, it just sucks. Katana engine is too dated at this point and they should invest more money into making it better and upgrade it

Unreal Engine 5 not looking so bad now, huh?

 

[MrJangles]

What game is that?

 

[Gonzito]

Unreal Engine 5 not looking so bad now, huh?

In this case I would definitely prefer UE5 yes haha

 

[SlimySnake]

Eh, I'd place more of the blame at Jim Ryan, it takes time to see changes in a company at such a scale. We'll have a clearer picture if 1st party are still in this state as we go into the next generation. I've pretty much written this generation off from sony 1st party, never thought I'd be saying that.

Herman was head of first party though. Im sure Jimbo gave him a GaaS mandate but Herman went about it the wrong way. You can make GaaS without sacrificing your main studios. He had Bluepoint and Bend working on GaaS games. He didnt give Sucker Punch a bigger team or a bigger budget after they shipped a 10 million seller. He let Neil go out palling around with hollywood for five fucking years. He was in charge of GG when they decided to make Horizon 2 cross gen. He personally signed Deviation Games, the Concord Studio and Jade Raymond's new studio. And personally greenlit FOUR Horizon spinoffs.

hell, he's besties with Kojima and he never said to him that hey man, maybe upgrade your graphics a bit? Your game looks like dogshit by next gen standards. At least upgrade the rocks.

Besides, a good exec wouldve been able to convince Jimbo to let the big studios do their own thing and focus on pushing the hardware by releasing next gen only exclusives. I find it very odd that developers just blame everything on the publisher. Like come on, you dont have any say in the matter? I highly doubt the guy currently in charge of the art style in this garbage looking Horizon game had no power. He was told go make this a fortnite clone and he was like, as you say master. No, these people have more power than they think. Sony has always been extremely developer friendly, just speak up man. Say no, i am not making a God of War GaaS game. or something that looks like AI slop. You are not Nintendo, you cant get away with making kiddie looking games. Just say no. Worst case scenario, you get demoted. Take the hit.

Remember GG tech director said that they chose to be last gen because the PS4 allowed them to achieve their vision for the game. Basically admitting that they had envisioned a last gen game. Around the same time Avatar and AC Shadows were starting development and they chose next gen because their vision was much more ambitious. Santa Monica said that they wanted Ragnorak to look the same as GOW 2018 which is why they didnt bother upgrading the graphics. Kojima's tech director said there is not a big enough power gap between the PS4 and PS5 so we didnt even try. And Sucker Punch recently said they are literally risk averse.

This is on devs and herman not pushing any of these devs as the head of first party used to do. Jaffe said Sony studios were literally terrified whenever Shu came to visit those studios because he was so harsh on the games not matching the sony seal of quality. Cory said he once stormed out after playing a build of GOW 2018 he didnt like. herman just let these lazy bastards coast.

 

[SlimySnake]

Yep Capcom and KojimaProductions are quite literally the only Japanese studios putting out respectable graphics in 2026. It's quite sad to see

this kojima productions?

 

[CGNoire]

lol ever since Tekken 2 ive wanting takedowns/throw downs like that in a melee focused game. hell, im sure they let you grab a dude and throw them over your shoulder in Street Fighter 2. I dont know why its taken so long for a 3d melee game to implement something so basic in fighting games.

Warrior within had it. So did rise to honor. During ps2 it was more common.

 

[GymWolf]

What game is that?

Crimson dessert

 

[Represent.]

What game is that?

the game that makes the west and japan look like complete amateurs

 

[Alex11]

this kojima productions?

Still miles better than FF Rebirth or even FF16, which may be more polished, but it's trash at optimization and tech.

I'm trying to finish this game and it has an issue, I don't think I've ever encountered such a thing in a video game ever.
If I play at 4K max, the game maxes my GPU Vram and freaks out. It starts to remove foliage and modifies the geometry of the assets, it's unreal.

 

[Represent.]

We already know what the mainstream reviews are going to say to tear this game down lol. You can bet that if it were made in Japan, the tone would be completely different. If Nintendo had developed it, it would be getting 12/10 scores and being called the most important game of the generation.

 

[MrJangles]

Crimson dessert

Jesus, I'm so far out of the loop. Never heard of it but the videos look amazing. It'll probably make my pc weep however.

 

[SlimySnake]

Still miles better than FF Rebirth or even FF16, which may be more polished, but it's trash at optimization and tech.

I'm trying to finish this game and it has an issue, I don't think I've ever encountered such a thing in a video game ever.
If I play at 4K max, the game maxes my GPU Vram and freaks out. It starts to remove foliage and modifies the geometry of the assets, it's unreal.

I think Forspoken had that issue. it would literally just stop loading textures on 8GB GPUs. Its a streaming issue. yes, japanese studios are really bad at this stuff. RE4 kept crashing on my PC whenever it went above 10 GB. japanese developers dont believe in texture streaming or reducing LODs gracefully without crashing to desktop. They did patch it later but made the LODs too aggressive and i was getting pop-in just walking so i just turn off ray tracing to lower the vram load.

I played FF16 on PS5 and had a pretty decent experience. It's such a beautiful looking game with a very soft CG look that gives it a next gen look that Ds2 and FF7 rebirth just never had. Or rather they only had during cutscenes. FF16 achieves that during gameplay.

i think Kojima should've at least thought about buying some better rock assets from quixel megascans. Just better geometry in general wouldve made the game look a whole lot better even if it was lacking realtime GI.

 

[March Climber]

We already know what the mainstream reviews are going to say to tear this game down lol. You can bet that if it were made in Japan, the tone would be completely different. If Nintendo had developed it, it would be getting 12/10 scores and being called the most important game of the generation.

Nah, IGN is known for a lot of stupid stuff but this specifically can't all just be put on IGN's shoulders.

Go to youtube and look up 'Crimson Desert too good to be true' and you'll see tons of video titles and thumbnails that say this from all sides of the table.

The unfortunate truth is that Pearl Abyss are fighting an uphill battle, both with gamers, jaded gamers, content creators, and media outlets, which can only be solved by making sure the game is good when it releases.

 

[Jam Dingo]

Herman was head of first party though. Im sure Jimbo gave him a GaaS mandate but Herman went about it the wrong way. You can make GaaS without sacrificing your main studios. He had Bluepoint and Bend working on GaaS games. He didnt give Sucker Punch a bigger team or a bigger budget after they shipped a 10 million seller. He let Neil go out palling around with hollywood for five fucking years. He was in charge of GG when they decided to make Horizon 2 cross gen. He personally signed Deviation Games, the Concord Studio and Jade Raymond's new studio. And personally greenlit FOUR Horizon spinoffs.

hell, he's besties with Kojima and he never said to him that hey man, maybe upgrade your graphics a bit? Your game looks like dogshit by next gen standards. At least upgrade the rocks.

Besides, a good exec wouldve been able to convince Jimbo to let the big studios do their own thing and focus on pushing the hardware by releasing next gen only exclusives. I find it very odd that developers just blame everything on the publisher. Like come on, you dont have any say in the matter? I highly doubt the guy currently in charge of the art style in this garbage looking Horizon game had no power. He was told go make this a fortnite clone and he was like, as you say master. No, these people have more power than they think. Sony has always been extremely developer friendly, just speak up man. Say no, i am not making a God of War GaaS game. or something that looks like AI slop. You are not Nintendo, you cant get away with making kiddie looking games. Just say no. Worst case scenario, you get demoted. Take the hit.

Remember GG tech director said that they chose to be last gen because the PS4 allowed them to achieve their vision for the game. Basically admitting that they had envisioned a last gen game. Around the same time Avatar and AC Shadows were starting development and they chose next gen because their vision was much more ambitious. Santa Monica said that they wanted Ragnorak to look the same as GOW 2018 which is why they didnt bother upgrading the graphics. Kojima's tech director said there is not a big enough power gap between the PS4 and PS5 so we didnt even try. And Sucker Punch recently said they are literally risk averse.

This is on devs and herman not pushing any of these devs as the head of first party used to do. Jaffe said Sony studios were literally terrified whenever Shu came to visit those studios because he was so harsh on the games not matching the sony seal of quality. Cory said he once stormed out after playing a build of GOW 2018 he didnt like. herman just let these lazy bastards coast.

"At least upgrade the rocks"

Fucking LOL.

 

[Victhemic]

11 years.

Back in the 90s that literally would have been a single year. Not even joking.

 

[Alex11]

I think Forspoken had that issue. it would literally just stop loading textures on 8GB GPUs. Its a streaming issue. yes, japanese studios are really bad at this stuff. RE4 kept crashing on my PC whenever it went above 10 GB. japanese developers dont believe in texture streaming or reducing LODs gracefully without crashing to desktop. They did patch it later but made the LODs too aggressive and i was getting pop-in just walking so i just turn off ray tracing to lower the vram load.

It's worse in FF16 than just stop loading textures, it's like this:

https://imgsli.com/NDQ4MDkw

At 4K I turned down textures to low and no effect, in fact I turned every setting to low or off and no effect. The difference of Vram from max to low was ~120 mb.
The game looks "normal" only at 1440p when it starts going below 10gb Vram.

Never had any problem like this in any game; if I max out Vram, games usually run like ass or have an occasional crash.

I played FF16 on PS5 and had a pretty decent experience. It's such a beautiful looking game with a very soft CG look that gives it a next gen look that Ds2 and FF7 rebirth just never had. Or rather they only had during cutscenes. FF16 achieves that during gameplay.

It's beautiful, sure, but it's a barren world with no interactivity whatsoever, everything is like glued in place. Also it doesn't have a realistic art style so the game can get away with lots of shortcuts.
And the cutscenes in FF16 are heavily modified vs gameplay and some of them are even pre rendered, so that doesn't mean much.

 

[SlimySnake]

Back in the 90s that literally would have been a single year. Not even joking.

nah generations existed in the 90s. ps1 came out in 1994 and things were fairly consistent until dreamcast came out in 1999. then ps2 in march, though only in japan.

I think back in the day, the PC space was constantly evolving so it might have felt like a bigger jump. but for consoles, the generation rules still applied. they were definitely able to squeeze a lot more out of the hardware back then though. the first and last games from each developer had some decent upgrades. maybe not generational but substantial. nowadays they only make one game a generation and then phone in with a cross gen game 6 years later on new hardware.

 

[PeteBull]

What game is that?

crimson desert

 

[analog_future]

Back in the 90s that literally would have been a single year. Not even joking.

Back in the 90s adding 500 polygons to a model made it look twice as good lol

 

[CowboyLou]

Back in the 90s adding 500 polygons to a model made it look twice as good lol

Yeah and you had to buy a new PC every eighteen months.

 

[Victhemic]

nah generations existed in the 90s. ps1 came out in 1994 and things were fairly consistent until dreamcast came out in 1999. then ps2 in march, though only in japan.

I think back in the day, the PC space was constantly evolving so it might have felt like a bigger jump. but for consoles, the generation rules still applied. they were definitely able to squeeze a lot more out of the hardware back then though. the first and last games from each developer had some decent upgrades. maybe not generational but substantial. nowadays they only make one game a generation and then phone in with a cross gen game 6 years later on new hardware.

Nope. PS1 RR1 to Revolution=Good difference. RR1 to RR3=HUGE difference. RR1 to RRT4=generational difference. Similar jumps from NFS1 to NFS 4/5. More examples like this.

 

[SlimySnake]

It's beautiful, sure, but it's a barren world with no interactivity whatsoever, everything is like glued in place. Also it doesn't have a realistic art style so the game can get away with lots of shortcuts.
And the cutscenes in FF16 are heavily modified vs gameplay and some of them are even pre rendered, so that doesn't mean much.

honestly thats true for most games this gen with AC Shadows and Outlaws being the exception due to their dynamic weather systems.

The game has some great wind effects. its a shame they didnt use them as often.

To me, a lot of the game's cg look comes from them really pushing the GPU. DF said it uses FSR1 and the lower bounds can drop to 1080p at times. Rebirth and DS2 run at native 4k on the PS5. That means these guys put in 4x the GPU power into getting this game looking so good while kojima and the FF7 team just kind of phoned in a last gen game with souped up lighting and insane looking character models in cutscenes that completely disappear. i know some scenes in FF16 are pre-rendered but the gap between the pre-rendered cutscenes in FF7 Rebirth and the gameplay is insane. Especially the ending cutscene, i was like THIS IS WHAT I WANTED THE GRASSLANDS TO LOOK LIKE. The colors were so bright and vibrant. honestly the awful rebirth ending already had me upset but seeing how good that CG looked just pissed me off.

that said, i was looking into getting the pc version but im going to stay clear of it for now. i do have 16 gb of vram now but if its bugged then fuck it. shame it didnt get a pro patch and i cant really play ps5 copy anymore either because my pro doesnt have a disc drive. im sure it wouldve run closer to 1440p on the pro.

Some more gifs of FF16 because my god i just love the look of this game.

 

[Jam Dingo]

For me FF 16 is both a great looking game AND yet another example of Japan's poor technical standards.

Yes, it looks good. No, it has no excuse for being THAT low in resolution while doing so.

It has no RT at all, right? Because Ass Creed Shadows is like 2x the resolution WITH fantastic RT, and honestly its non-RT elements are way beyond FF 16 too. I'm pretty sure Ubisoft could've just baked their lighting in those much more limited environments of FF 16 and retained most of that RT fidelity AND run the game at 4k30.

 

[Alex11]

honestly thats true for most games this gen with AC Shadows and Outlaws being the exception due to their dynamic weather systems.

That is true, most of the games are like show ponies.

The game has some great wind effects. its a shame they didnt use them as often.

To me, a lot of the game's cg look comes from them really pushing the GPU. DF said it uses FSR1 and the lower bounds can drop to 1080p at times. Rebirth and DS2 run at native 4k on the PS5. That means these guys put in 4x the GPU power into getting this game looking so good while kojima and the FF7 team just kind of phoned in a last gen game with souped up lighting and insane looking character models in cutscenes that completely disappear. i know some scenes in FF16 are pre-rendered but the gap between the pre-rendered cutscenes in FF7 Rebirth and the gameplay is insane. Especially the ending cutscene, i was like THIS IS WHAT I WANTED THE GRASSLANDS TO LOOK LIKE. The colors were so bright and vibrant. honestly the awful rebirth ending already had me upset but seeing how good that CG looked just pissed me off.

Don't get me wrong, I like very much the art style of FF16, I get that CG look - well, animation CG to be more precise.
But I don't know, IMO it doesn't excel at anything; textures, geometry, are just alright. Lighting is good, but I think it just has a gorgeous art style and great use of color. It has in general a very polished presentation.
Yeah, the characters look good, but again, they can look that good because they are very simplistic, sort of a mish-mash of realistic and anime.

But yeah, it looks better than FF Rebirth.

that said, i was looking into getting the pc version but im going to stay clear of it for now. i do have 16 gb of vram now but if its bugged then fuck it. shame it didnt get a pro patch and i cant really play ps5 copy anymore either because my pro doesnt have a disc drive. im sure it wouldve run closer to 1440p on the pro.

You should be good with 16gb Vram, I mean, I don't know if that's the problem, but if so, that's just a major BS and just poor optimization. I mean, let me run the game however poor it may run and just let me decide if I want or what I want to lower the graphics.

Some more gifs of FF16 because my god i just love the look of this game.

 

[Bojji]

PC version of FFXVI is very good. It's very GPU heavy (like console version) but it's also smooth and looks great, zero stutters and shit like that.

 

[SlimySnake]

That is true, most of the games are like show ponies.

Don't get me wrong, I like very much the art style of FF16, I get that CG look - well, animation CG to be more precise.
But I don't know, IMO it doesn't excel at anything; textures, geometry, are just alright. Lighting is good, but I think it just has a gorgeous art style and great use of color. It has in general a very polished presentation.
Yeah, the characters look good, but again, they can look that good because they are very simplistic, sort of a mish-mash of realistic and anime.

But yeah, it looks better than FF Rebirth.

You should be good with 16gb Vram, I mean, I don't know if that's the problem, but if so, that's just a major BS and just poor optimization. I mean, let me run the game however poor it may run and just let me decide if I want or what I want to lower the graphics.

it's definitely a game that relies a lot on its art design and overall lighting model because yeah, textures and geometry arent anything to write home about. I would just love to know how they got that look because the game is definitely very heavy even on PC so its clearly doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes even with baked GI. i hope other devs looked into whatever they did to get it looking so beautiful despite not really investing in textures and geometry. Though i will say that the materials on their clothes/armor are sublime.

I remember thinking its desert level looked like garbage but just did a back and forth comparison with ff7's desert level and its night and day. Looks so much more pleasant. Good lighting, baked or otherwise is so much more important than pushing sheer pixels.

P.S This is unrelated but the PS5 Pro version of FF7 Rebirth uses the performance mode settings which is full of LOD pop-in and other texture downgrades. I swear the japanese developers do the most retarded things sometimes. Just use the native 4k quality mode and drop it down to 1296p before upscaling using the Pro. this shouldnt be that hard. Literally every other native 4k ps5 game did this on the Pro. Common sense and Japan dont get along.

 

[SlimySnake]

PC version of FFXVI is very good. It's very GPU heavy (like console version) but it's also smooth and looks great, zero stutters and shit like that.

looks like the game is reserving 12GB on the vram and uses at least 10.2 GB at any given moment. Probably why Alex is seeing issues. IIRC, he had a 3080 like did which effectively had around 9GB of vram after windows processes.