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[SlimySnake]

100% agree.

That stupid search for 'RayTracing' is costing Sony year after years of dev time. Not to mention most of the playstation users pick the performance mode than RT quality mode.

List of Sony first party titles that use RT
- Spiderman 2
- Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart

List of Sony First party titles that dont use RT
- Demon Souls
- Returnal
- Horizon Forbidden West
- God of War Ragnorak
- TLOU Part 1 Remake
- Astrobot
- Gran Turismo 7 (RT only in replays on base PS5)

Insomniac is literally the only one using RT, and they have been by far the most productive studio. It's not the search for RT, it was the search for GAAS which thankfully is now over. And devs can finally go back to chasing graphics and high production values that made them such a success.

 

[SJRB]

Devs like Sony will complain about ballooning dev time and costs and then release a game that has dynamic facial hair on their characters you literally only see in ultra close-up photo mode in specific lighting conditions.

Nobody is asking for this.

 

[Loomy]

Doesn't matter much when:

- RT on base PS5 sucks
- Most of the playstation users pick performance mode


Sony should focus on bringing more stable 60 fps mode, not in 'graphic fidelity' as Yoshida mention.

Yes but the problem isn't going to solve itself. It's not like they're going to come in to work one day and RT on console will be a solved problem. You have to keep implementing it with incremental improvements.

 

[Punished Miku]

If we go by this argument then Ghost of Yotei will be Sony's next visual showcase yet from the footage we've seen it looks like a moderate bump over the previous game, I doubt it'll feature any major next-gen visual features either, like RT Global Illumination or a micro-polygon rendering system like Nanite.

I expect Sony first parties to look good, but they will not rival what 3rd party studios are doing, like Ubisoft with Avatar, and AC Shadows and many other titles using things like Unreal Engine 5. Fable looks better than a lot of things we're seeing or will see on PS5. So let's stop with the whole "Sony are chasing bleeding edge visuals" nonsense, because they're clearly not and we haven't seen anything from them which has indicated as such although they're happy to prove me wrong.

This is start contrast to where they were at this point during the PS4 generation.

I dont see Intergalactic surpassing Unreal 5 in terms of facial animation. It'll look super good though, but probably more similar to TLOU2.

 

[Nankatsu]

The Hermen pushes DEI fanfic is incredibly funny when you realize that he greenlit Stellar Blade for Sony.

It was Shuhei Yoshida that played the early prototype and had PlayStation partner with Shift Up.

If someone from PlayStation deserves credit for Stellar Blade it's Shuhei, it sure as hell ain't Hulst.

 

[viveks86]

List of Sony first party titles that use RT
- Spiderman 2
- Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart

List of Sony First party titles that dont use RT
- Demon Souls
- Returnal
- Horizon Forbidden West
- God of War Ragnorak
- TLOU Part 1 Remake
- Astrobot
- Gran Turismo 7 (RT only in replays on base PS5)

Insomniac is literally the only one using RT, and they have been by far the most productive studio. It's not the search for RT, it was the search for GAAS which thankfully is now over. And devs can finally go back to chasing graphics and high production values that made them such a success.

Blaming RT for ballooning dev costs has officially become the new "GTA is turning people into mass murderers"

 

[GHG]

Quality mode normally use RT, no?

No. Most of their 1st party games actually don't have RT.

And PS5 is not quite good with RT.

Yoshida probably know that. The promisse of fusion between performance and quality was the selling point of PS5pro.

Yes, that was one of the selling points of the pro and they've mostly delivered on that front.

Ironically, most of the problems they've had this gen actually has had very little to do with them chasing graphical prowess, and rather have more to do with them chasing GAAS.

 

[SlimySnake]

Blaming raytracing for ballooning dev costs has officially become the new "GTA is turning people into mass murderers"

Funny thing is that adding ray tracing improves productivity.

Saw this in another thread just today. look at the Bake Time in days for lighting. Switching to realtime changes that to near instant.

 

[nial]

It was Shuhei Yoshida that played the early prototype and had PlayStation partner with Shift Up.

If someone from PlayStation deserves credit for Stellar Blade it's Shuhei, it sure as hell ain't Hulst.

It's true that he played the early prototype (meeting with indie developers was part of his job!), but Shuhei Yoshida literally said that he only promoted the game internally to the actual important executives at SIE to sign it up.
Also, if someone from PlayStation deserves credit for Stellar Blade, it's the set of producers that worked on it and managed the whole project; Edward Saito, Kazuma Kizuka and JunHo Lee. Never seen an executive getting as much dickriding as Shu, it's crazy, lol.
BTW, moving the goalposts? It's still clear at the end of the day that Hulst doesn't push for "DEI", if he was a supervisor on Stellar Blade.

 

[LordBritish]

He's basically saying "make the next games less graphic intensive, so they work on every fucking system like xbox is trying to do"

 

[Melfice7]

is there a point to a next gen machine if the plan is to stick to ps4 graphics?

 

[GHG]

Nobody is asking for this.

But this is one of the games that made it out without any scheduling issues?

Meanwhile we've seen a ton of examples of games that look far worse than the horizon games which have suffered delays and 5-7 year dev times. What's silksong's excuse for example?

And what's funny about this whole sub discussion going on now, Shu isn't even specifically talking about dev times when he's making these comments. What he's referring to is expanding your audience by offering a variety of experiences, something he will be familiar with because he was responsible for curating the indie partner catalogue for the platform.

 

[Durin]

Just keep doing the big AAA games people want from Sony, drop the live-service unless someone actually has a non-trend-riding idea, and then do more mid-sized to smaller games to round out their catalog.

They have a wealth of IP they're sitting on that could work at lower budgets, and if some new IP at a lower budget hits hard then maybe that can be another AAA franchise.

 

[cinnamonandgravy]

just reconsider your approach to cutting edge drafixxx.

sony's been (1) brute-forcing it via massive dev teams for (2) cinematic/presentation purposes.

1 and 2 arent sustainable.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

If we go by this argument then Ghost of Yotei will be Sony's next visual showcase yet from the footage we've seen it looks like a moderate bump over the previous game, I doubt it'll feature any major next-gen visual features either, like RT Global Illumination or a micro-polygon rendering system like Nanite.

I think Death Stranding 2 will be released first (which uses Decima).

Nanite is an Unreal thing that has proven to be very demanding affecting the final visual output. Why do you want nanite or RT (unreal implementation) if you are limited to 30FPS or 720P or lack of gameplay due to allocating resources just to render geometry, and/or calculate rays for example.

I will tell you right now: DS2 will be the most bleeding-edge visual showcase to date

I expect Sony first parties to look good, but they will not rival what 3rd party studios are doing, like Ubisoft with Avatar, and AC Shadows and many other titles using things like Unreal Engine 5.

is the other way around...

Fable looks better than a lot of things we're seeing or will see on PS5.

Fable? oh shit. You are one of those. Check yourself:

They haven't been focusing on cutting edge graphics since the start of the PS5 generation,

Fable was announced in 2020...already got delayed and now will launch (so they say) in 2026. ....one year before Xbox´s Next Gen console...can you see the point now?

This is start contrast to where they were at this point during the PS4 generation.

that's the point.

 

[March Climber]

Devs like Sony will complain about ballooning dev time and costs and then release a game that has dynamic facial hair on their characters you literally only see in ultra close-up photo mode in specific lighting conditions.

Nobody is asking for this.

That's not true. It's just that people on GAF prefer this type of detail on a grizzled Norman Reedus.

People here have even stated that in previous threads.

 

[lughnasadh123]

Yeah, fuck all the success they've been having, let's switch that up.

 

[QLQ]

Of course it is. Quality mode runs at 30 fps. PS5 shouldn't have problem with 60 fps at all.

At least one of the main problems this generation is raytracing. The others are probably UE options like lumen and nanite. There sure suck console performance.

Devs are struggling with the middle ground. Why they need to make a quality mode and a performance mode at all? Are you saying making those options don't cost dev time/resource?

And is not like you turn RT on and the magic happen. You need to optimize to consoles.

Look, don't ignore the fact that everything in game console today can be dynamic, not only dynamic resolution.

I mean, you know there are games with NO RT costing upwards $100 million and taking 5+ years in production, right? RT is not the problem.

 

[Represent.]

Horrible take

 

[James Sawyer Ford]

They haven't been focusing on cutting edge graphics since the start of the PS5 generation, a majority of the Playstation first party titles are using the same engines just with higher settings, and then bolting on one or two ray-tracing features (if we're lucky).

Their studios have some of the most competent engines in the business. This post is flat out nonsense

 

[roosnam1980]

wrong

 

[mayham2199]

No thanks. We already have plenty of other studios doing that. I'd rather Sony keep doing what they are doing and I can rely on third party for the rest.

 

[viveks86]

Funny thing is that adding ray tracing improves productivity.

Saw this in another thread just today. look at the Bake Time in days for lighting. Switching to realtime changes that to near instant.

Yeah the gains are pretty incredible and will only multiply with other things becoming completely dynamic, like virtualized geometry and full path tracing. And graphics isn't even the long pole in the tent anymore, even before RT. People talk as if these devs are spending 5-10 years just building polygons and textures and animating them while all the other non-graphics departments are sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

If Shu's coming from the angle that devs need to focus more on innovation in gameplay and story telling, then I agree. But hard disagree otherwise.

 

[Ryu_Joestar]

Former Sony Exec Says It's About Time For PlayStation to Reconsider Its Focus on Cutting-Edge Graphics - IGN

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has been sharing quite a few insights on the games industry since his departure from Sony. Among them, he says it might be time for Sony to reconsider its adherence to cutting-edge graphics.

www.ign.com

 

[Digital-Aftertaste]

I keep saying it and it can be free real estate if it actually happens. Use AI to bring back SLI and Crossfire functionality but better by not having to rely on each individual game having to be coded to use it. Have such a thing for consoles and you can incentivized users to buy more than one unit; end result could be true 8k gaming, plus path tracing.

 

[Loxus]

There's nothing wrong with their 5 year AAA bleeding edge graphics games. What they need is to invest in some studios that can make 2-3 year AA games to bridge the gap.

Or invest in more AAA studios.

Sony had enough time (30 years) that they should have built more AAA studios to drop 2 or 3 AAA games every year.

They should of never invested in so much GAAS either. Just do a multi-player add-on like they have been doing during the PS3 era.

 

[Tg89]

It's a nice thought but Sony has really committed to this direction. Their entire 1st party lineup is basically designed to maximize graphics and they've sacrificed the important stuff to get there.

 

[GHG]

The rest of the context in case anyone is wondering:

Yoshida: I think the biggest thing about indie games is that they allow creators to make whatever they want.

When you think of games as a business, many people are inevitably involved, and even before game development starts, many opinions from people other than game developers are included. That's how AAA finally starts. The amount of money spent, the time it takes to develop, and the risks are all large, so it's only natural for a company to say that it can't be left up to the developer alone.

The end result is something that has "few flaws." That's important. It's important that a wide range of users can enjoy it, so I don't particularly reject that.
But once that happens, all you get is the same stuff.

It's entertainment after all, so if there isn't anything different, users will get bored. The game industry as a whole has no expansion or progress.
In times like those, even if a major company would say, "This isn't going to sell," an indie company can say, "No, but I want to make it myself, so I'll make it."
Without needing to consult with anyone or get anyone's approval, something that is "made because you want to make it" becomes a huge hit when it is released.

This was true of early battle royale games and also of Minecraft (2009).
I believe that only indie developers can create new trends in the game industry and give birth to new genres.
So rather than saying "indies are important," it's more like "without indies the industry cannot develop."
That's what I think.
Personally, I just love new things.

Every year, there are new games that make you think, "There's never been anything like this before." A lot of them.
A fun game that came out last year was a Korean game called "Unsolved Cases Must Be Completed." It was made by a single creator called Somi. It's an adventure game that can be completed in 3 hours, but it's really fun.
These are things that could be done with hardware from 10 years ago, but these game design ideas didn't exist in the past. These kinds of things are still coming out more and more. Personally, I really like the fact that ideas never run out about indie games.

The whole gist is that a variety of game types (by budget) need to be made by the platform holder so that there's room for experimental ideas to shine without being bogged down by the amount of oversight that typically comes with higher budgets. And he thinks that by doing that it will enable them to also reach new audiences in the future.

There's no better example of this BTW than what Steam currently is, even though they don't make any games of their own.

 

[QLQ]

I dont see Intergalactic surpassing Unreal 5 in terms of facial animation. It'll look super good though, but probably more similar to TLOU2.

What does the engine have to do with having great facial animation? It depends on the artists. Last of Us 2 still has one of the best facial animations to date and was made for PS4 using a Naughty Dog engine. Horizon FW has insane facial animations using Decima engine, so does Death Stranding. Then look at Avowed.on UE5...does it have better facial animation than those games? Of course not.

 

[Horseganador]

With Playstation you don't have to choose, you have good gameplay, top graphics and GOTY candidates every year.

 

[Bitstream]

Personally I think :

It's About Time For PlayStation to Reconsider Actually Remaking Bloodborne

 

[Clear]

The "wall"'s been hit already.

I think its best to understand the difference between "Big" Detail and "Small" detail. We're already way past the point where creating "Big"detail is a non-issue. Most games don't need to be that big or that deep. So instead effort is getting poured into smaller, more superficial details that aren't really impactful on the experience, just make it visually richer.

The problem is that adding this micro-detail is extremely expensive computationally because its applied *on top* of all the big detail.

This is why we have constant complaints about graphics going backwards these days. All that computation is being spent on stuff like skin shaders and small sub-surface details that really aren't valuable because they are out of the scope of how players interface with game-worlds.

 

[onQ123]

The Great Reset

 

[Rat Rage]

He's right but good luck. They've created a monster in their own userbase and their expectations.

This is very true.

 

[Edder1]

What bleeding edge graphics? Lol. All I've been seeing this gen are cross gen looking abominations.

 

[mayham2199]

Devs like Sony will complain about ballooning dev time and costs and then release a game that has dynamic facial hair on their characters you literally only see in ultra close-up photo mode in specific lighting conditions.

Nobody is asking for this.

To be fair it doesn't help when the new CEO comes to your studio and ask why it cost so much more money to make Spiderman 2 vs 1 and you don't have an answer for that.

 

[TheRedRiders]

I think Death Stranding 2 will be released first (which uses Decima).

Hardly a first party title and Kojima has his own team of very talented programmers and engineers who overhauled Decima for DS1 and made some big upgrades the Directors Cut like the water tessellation system.

Nanite is an Unreal thing that has proven to be very demanding affecting the final visual output. Why do you want nanite or RT (unreal implementation) if you are limited to 30FPS or 720P or lack of gameplay due to allocating resources just to render geometry, and/or calculate rays for example.

You can leverage next-gen rendering systems without tanking the performance, look at Assassins's Creed Shadows which uses RTGI, and Mesh Shaders to render the triangles and runs at an acceptable resolution, granted it's 30 FPS but this is a console not a PC. The same can be said for games like Avatar.

I don't know where you are getting this idea that you have to chase either visuals or gameplay, if you know how next-gen rendering systems work then you'd know that a feature like RTGI will save on developer time and resources as they don't have to bake in all the lighting into the environment, this is especially the case when you have different times of day or seasons.

Then there's Mesh and Primitive Shaders, when used correctly you can create a system similar to Nanite and developers don't have to waste time authoring LOD's or worry about polygon counts.

I will tell you right now: DS2 will be the most bleeding-edge visual showcase to date

It's already impressive from what we've seen, but it won't be the best looking game of the year let alone the generation, GTA 6 looks very promising.

I have little interest in replying to your other stuff as it seems like pointless conjecture.

 

[Metnut]

Why should Sony change anything? PS5 is selling better than PS4 ( which was a smash hit) and most of their big games
review great and sell 5-10 million.

The biggest mistake they made was pushing too much to live service and burning some of their studios out while doing so. Rising development costs is an obvious issue but they'll have to combat that somehow.

 

[Thief1987]

pointless conjecture

Perfect description of your verbal diarrhea btw

 

[reinking]

I'm really sick of all these former Sony execs decrying their own legacy and the fanbase's preference. If Shuhei and Layden had such bright ideas about this, why didn't they do it while they were there?

Furthermore, GTFO. We've already slowed down a lot when it comes to graphics tech, despite paying premiums for devices like the PS5 Pro, and no reasonable version of next gen hardware is going to be PS2 levels of cheap EVER AGAIN. Games will likely be 80 bucks on launch, and price drops, particularly for Sony first party games, are not happening nearly as quickly or as low.

Games industry is a luxury of luxuries. Pay your workers an average of six figures not including benefits, spend 6-7 years on a project, and have all the fame and accolades you get from that whilst charging 70 bucks. DO NOT ask me to lower my standards or spend my time on peewee bullshit. If you're not ambitious, gtfo

I agree. Dance with the one that brought you. That is not to say ignore optimization for performance but I would not back off of bringing some of the best tech to achieve the best in graphics (for a console you PC nerds).

 

[Danjin44]

Strong art direction beats out raw graphical power every time.

 

[BennyBlanco]

Schedule 1 got 400k+ CCUs looking like this.

Shu is right and you don't need 400M budget games to be successful. I do think it's smart licensing out their old AA IPs that they're not gonna use themselves.

 

[Memati187]

I don't even remember when I was in awe for a games graphics. It been so long, nothing feels really next gen.

 

[Magic Carpet]

A 1080P handheld in the works? Get Lenovo to rebadge the Legion Go.

 

[GHG]

Schedule 1 got 400k+ CCUs looking like this.

Shu is right and you don't need 400M budget games to be successful. I do think it's smart licensing out their old AA IPs that they're not gonna use themselves.

Yep he 100% alluded to this:

Yoshida: As video games have expanded, the scale of AAA titles has continued to grow. Nowadays, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make a single game.
When that happens, publishers (who invest in the game) also bet on "what sells."

As a result, what sells are sequels or works in the same genre. Moreover, since it is not possible to make many of these in a year, the number of titles has been reduced, and it has become the case that they are made once every few years.
In that case, the gap will be filled by games distributed entirely digitally. The importance of indie games is increasing year by year.
In that sense, the scale of indie games is also getting bigger.

While there are still games that are made by one person and become big hits, there are also games made by 50 people or so. They are properly funded and self-published as an independent company... The indie game market has come to cover everything from individual creators to AA-class creators, and the sales scale of AA-class games has become quite large.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

He's right but good luck. They've created a monster in their own userbase and their expectations.

Except that their userbase will happily buy games like Monster Hunter Wilds and Astrobot by the tens of millions.

There is no monster.

Sony has always produced a plethora of different types of games, and their userbase has been built up boasting the broadest range of tastes for different gaming experiences. So I partially disagree with Shu here.

 

[hinch7]

He's right. Lets be honest most people are happy enough with the fidelity we've gotten since the PS4 era. We need more games and more originality from PS. Something that is sorely lacking this generation if we discount the failed venture into live service games.

Granted there can be some studios like ND always go all in. We should also see other larger studios concentrate more on game mechanics and gameplay first and then presentation. That's why Capcom, From Soft, Nintendo are as successful as they are. Because they focus on the things that actually matter. And why people come back and buy and play video games in the first place. No one but a select few care for peach fuzz on someones face or if the light or shadow casts in a right way.

 

[viveks86]

And what's funny about this whole sub discussion going on now, Shu isn't even specifically talking about dev times when he's making these comments. What he's referring to is expanding your audience by offering a variety of experiences, something he will be familiar with because he was responsible for curating the indie partner catalogue for the platform.

Yeah. The context is lost if people don't read the whole article. He really is talking about capturing an even larger audience and has nothing to do with dev cost.

 

[Javi97]

Although I agree that the graphics should not be the priority, there is no reason why you should stop pushing to have good graphics. You just have to make sure that you want your game to be good and then focus on the technical section.

 

[Fbh]

I do think big publishers will eventually have to reach some "end goal" in terms of production values. Constantly increasing dev time and cost will soon stop making sense if the games don't increase their sales numbers accordingly. Spending $400 million on your Ps6 games and not actually selling substantially more units than your $250 million PS4/5 games just means you are making less money.

Also just personally I think if Sony stops focusing on graphics they'll have to improve their design. Many of their games rely too much on expensive production values, take that away and I can see them not being nearly as popular anymore.