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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen
- Thread starter ResetEraVetVIP
- Start date
GymWolf
Gold Member
Can't you just take a shower before playing?
arkhamguy123
Member
Chiefdada as always I appreciate your passion but im afraid I have to differ
Alright people, the measured take, I too saw the first hour of Spider-Man 2. And what do you know, it looks like a slightly, very slightly improved version of Miles Morales. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just like we all kinda figured from the dreadful PlayStation showcase footage and the previews a few weeks ago
You do get to see some portal technology borrowed from ratchet and clank. But frankly the opening boss is nothing more impressive than Kronos in GOW3 on the PS3. In terms of scale. And certainly isn’t FF16 level. Some parts kinda looked ugly, other parts looked good. It’s simply. Decent. I guess.
It’s not a PS5 flex. It still looks like pac man compared to the matrix demo. I’m not even convinced it looks markedly better than HFW. A PS4 cross gen game from almost 2 years ago
Alright people, the measured take, I too saw the first hour of Spider-Man 2. And what do you know, it looks like a slightly, very slightly improved version of Miles Morales. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just like we all kinda figured from the dreadful PlayStation showcase footage and the previews a few weeks ago
You do get to see some portal technology borrowed from ratchet and clank. But frankly the opening boss is nothing more impressive than Kronos in GOW3 on the PS3. In terms of scale. And certainly isn’t FF16 level. Some parts kinda looked ugly, other parts looked good. It’s simply. Decent. I guess.
It’s not a PS5 flex. It still looks like pac man compared to the matrix demo. I’m not even convinced it looks markedly better than HFW. A PS4 cross gen game from almost 2 years ago
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rofif
Can’t Git Gud
The ray-traced water
This is the performance mode caputred from a 720p stream
What I appreciate (from my understanding) is that there is no "no rt" mode, which means they just had to focus on making the game in one way wihout manual labor required to make non rt modes
nemiroff
Gold Member
Yeah, I guess we all suspected UE5 to make a somewhat uncomfortable performance impact.. I don't know specifically what's causing the apparent performance hit, but either way I, for one, am willing to sacrifice some performance for a paradigm shift like Nanite (just like I'm very happy about realtime PT experiments like in CP which will help shape the direction of future graphics). I mean, I've hated LoD pop-in so much since the first time I saw it..
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ChiefDada
Gold Member
Right, I'm saying the RT reflections on the water look great even running at 60fps.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
lol I honestly cant remember the first time i saw LOD pop-in last gen, but yes, the hate was instant. This reminds me of the first time I truly noticed shimmering in a game. Poor AA had never bothered me in the early PS3 days, but when Castleavania lords of shadow came out, it had these shimmering in distant objects that drove me nuts. I thought we had left the squiggly lines from PS1 era games with poor texture filtering when the PS2 came out, so getting these new visual artifacts after finally upgrading to the HD era drove me nuts. Thankfully switching to PC and got rid of that, but the LOD issues werent fixed on PCs because most devs simply didnt put in the effort creating better LOD systems for PC. I think RDR2 is the only game that has better draw distance and LOD settings. It's like every gen we get improvements, it comes with its own negative side effects. I was so happy to get 8gb vram and way higher quality details in the PS4 gen, and then devs started blurring out the background or introduced massive LOD pop-ins anyway.
This kind of stuff has bugged me all last gen.
Some devs got clever and added fog and used other techniques like creating hills and trees to block the view, but sometimes the illusion would fail and you would see stuff like this. Even though both SotC and GoT have some of the prettiest grass rendering up close.
My problem was that if you are porting this to PCs or PS5, you have access to a lot more GPU power. So if its a GPU hog then let us push out the draw distance of this foliage. if its a vram issue then use the dedicated vram budget to push out the foliage draw distance. But all they do is increase the pixels to native 4k or framerate to 60 fps or add some rt effects that make zero difference to this massive problem, and call it a day.
If they need nanite to fix this shit then so be it. I still noticed some pop-in in the Matrix so its not an airtight solution to the LOD pop-in problem either. I think nanite just handles the LOD adjustments more gracefully, but im not sure if it will fix tree and grass pop-in. I guess we will find out.
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ChiefDada
Gold Member
Oh wow VERY HARD DISAGREE. I will say the interior cutscenes looked underwhelming to me. Not bad, but underwhelming considering it's PS5 only. But the city rendering and lighting in particular is outstanding.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
There is a noticeable upgrade in visual fidelity over Spiderman remastered or Miles. It's hard to see because they failed to upgrade their building assets which make up 90% of the levels, but the lighting, reflections and post processing seems to be a noticeable upgrade.
I didnt watch the opening boss fight, but those gifs look better to me than FF16 overall. The setpieces might still be more epic in FF16, but the overall lighting quality seems to be a whole better. And this is coming from someone who loved the lighting in several FF16 levels.
I think the original E3 demo just had a very poor lighting model, this bizarre dusk time browish UE3 look that made the game look worse than it is. Yes, the asset quality is still last gen, but you can see the improvements now that footage of other lighting conditions are released. Whether or not its next gen is probably up for debate, but I think they are getting very close to the HZD to HFW and Uncharted 1 to uncharted 2 caliber leap. Big improvement over GOW2018 to Ragnorak and Spiderman to Miles.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Both spiderman games start off at their lowest speeds so if you are judging from the initial first hour or footage, they will be at their slowest. IIRC, spiderman let you upgrade your speed by 2x in the skill trees. im guessing they will do the same with spiderman 2.
And I believe you are talking about this gif? Yes, its not as fast, but its hard to say because in the ssd demo, you were at street level where as in the demo you are flying above the buildings so harder to show sense of speed. From what I can tell, miles flew over around 5 city blocks where as in the ssd demo, the camera travels 10 city blocks.
Kikorin
Member
From these gif it looks good, not mind-blowing or a generational leap, but still pretty dense.
One thing that bother me of Insomniac Spiderman games (but pretty much every open world Spiderman ever made) tho is that the web swinging seems like "animation based" and not phisically based like it give the impression to be in Spiderman 2. I don't know how it worked back then, but that feeling was too good and unmatched IMHO.
One thing that bother me of Insomniac Spiderman games (but pretty much every open world Spiderman ever made) tho is that the web swinging seems like "animation based" and not phisically based like it give the impression to be in Spiderman 2. I don't know how it worked back then, but that feeling was too good and unmatched IMHO.
arkhamguy123
Member
If MM is GOW2018, SP2 is GOWR
The big thing is the lighting and post processing. Which still isn’t mind blowing great. Just better. I’d say GOWR’s chief improvements where those 2 exact things as well. I’d suspect with this little pattern it’s probably the easiest thing to upgrade for your iterative DLC esque sequel
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nemiroff
Gold Member
That takes me back.. did you ever play Turok on the N64..? It was so bad it was funny, even back then.
Interestingly enough the draw-in in Wipeout on the PS1 didn't bother me. It was noticeable, but it was fine (despite my exaggeration in my previous post, lol) because it was well done (still easily visible of course) for its time.
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Yes this is the gif I am talking about. Look how fast the camera is flying. Honestly I don’t remember upgrading your traversal speeds at all, but if this is the slowest then I am happy. But still I would have loved traversal speeds to be close to that demo, that woulda been insane.Both spiderman games start off at their lowest speeds so if you are judging from the initial first hour or footage, they will be at their slowest. IIRC, spiderman let you upgrade your speed by 2x in the skill trees. im guessing they will do the same with spiderman 2.
And I believe you are talking about this gif? Yes, its not as fast, but its hard to say because in the ssd demo, you were at street level where as in the demo you are flying above the buildings so harder to show sense of speed. From what I can tell, miles flew over around 5 city blocks where as in the ssd demo, the camera travels 10 city blocks.
That’s hilarious. But wait there is something as swing steering assist? Was this always there? If so, then I had been living under a rock. Or is this new to Spidey 2?
GooseMan69
Member
Unity looks a full generation ahead of Mirage….wtf Ubi.
DanielG165
Member
I will definitely be turning that off the second I get the game lol. I want all of the control possible here.
Alex11
Member
LOL, they heard people want a more traditional AC, so they went full on, even for graphics and animation.
Jesus, like you said, Unity looks the most recent, the difference is insane.
ChiefDada
Gold Member
It's a new slider for SM2. You can now have physics based swinging and success is dependent on skills. My guess is many people will turn it off/reduce slider and quickly realize they're not as good as they thought they were. Insomniac talked about it in a GDC talk.
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It's a new slider for SM2. You can now have physics based swinging and success is dependent on skills. My guess is many people will turn it off/reduce slider and quickly realize they're not as good as they thought they were. Insomniac talked about it in a GDC talk.
Wow this is amazing man. Manual steering all the way. This is a very welcome addition. Boy, is it gonna be hilarious at first tryna steer them webs. Physics based swinging all the way!
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
This is what happens when the cancel culture and hate bandwagons put a perfectly good studio out of business. AC Unity was one of the first games to get 'cancelled' by youtubers and twitter outrage squads who jumped on the buggy nature of the game. Completely ignoring all the next gen things it was doing at the time. I dont think Ubisoft ever gave this studio another game. The game was directed by Steven Spielberg's son. Or maybe he was one of the leads, i cant quite remember. but its obvious that the game had way more ambition and craft than other AC games that came after. Syndicate was well received and that studio went on to make a very mediocre AC Odyssey. Meanwhile this fantastic studio that had released AC Brotherhood was basically turned into a support studio helping out the Black Flag and Odyssey teams churn out some very mediocre titles.
I think gamers just reward mediocrity over ambition. We see this time and time again. They want safe, formulaic sequels and rush to shit on anything remotely ambitious just because it has bugs. Bugs that we all know will get fixed in weeks. This is happening this year as well. I wont name names but the meme culture dunkey, angry joe, and crowbcat started is now in full effect trashing developers who actually bothered to make something different.
Johnny Concrete
Member
I don’t think it is what they want, but it is what they get. Designed by committee. Games without vision, forgettable experiences, just making a quick buck because it has the right marketing attached to it.
I have no idea what happened here, but yea, this is weird and bad. I doubt they even do face mocap anymore , looks more like procedural animation based on audio samples.
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Lmao, as they should, weren't you calling for people to be more angry against companies for shit like Forza's? Or does that only extent to visual issues as far as you're concerned and damn everything else?
Anyway, Unity is among the top Ubisoft and AC series sellers at 10m regardless so yeah, it was never cancelled. But clearly making a shittier game is not exactly a fitting response to being cancelled for a shit albeit an occasionally beautiful one.
Clearly folks should jump on the mess that is Mirage as well (even if it's essentially a budget game clearly the cut scene shown there has a bug without lip sync at all for example, but miraculously they couldn't find bugs to show in Unity) rather than let companies off for fear of being called part of cancel culture or because there's some shiny looking part of the game or whatever it is you promote doing here.
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arkhamguy123
Member
That’s what it is. Gaming lost vision. You poach any game from PS360 almost and there’s a creator or creators with a vision. Like a good film. Halo. Assassins Creed 1-4. Batman Arkham. Mass Effect. Bioshock. The Last of Us. GTA4. Splinter Cell Conviction. Red Dead Redemption. Uncharted. Demon Souls. Resistance. Killzone. Gears of War.
You can just go on and on and on. The only games that were visionless were sports games and COD. Now every game trades at the same level of artistry as COD and Sports games. Even though I think Spider-Man 2 is lazy DLC that fails to capture the power of my $500 console. I’ll give insomniac some points for even having an iota of a tangible vision for their superhero game. Their games always feel a bit like games from the good old days pre say 2019 when I feel like the Fortnite GaaS corporate hold had truly gripped our industry.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Well, this is the first game by a studio that was previously just on support duty. its a small game by AC standards. So i bet the budget was small too. no wonder it shows in cutscenes.
I just think gamers and critics alike just reward the wrong games. Go look at AC Unity's metacritic score vs Odyssey and AC Valhalla. 72 vs mid 80s. I saw the same thing with GT Sports vs Forza 7. 75 vs 87 even though GT Sports revolutionized the console online racing scene. When Destiny came out, it got a 76 on metacritic. Everyone from dunkey to all major media outlets trashed it. Yet, tt changed online multiplayer forever.
Now all games have the same luck as Destiny and GT Sports. Some just bomb and never recover. Studios are shut down or repurposed. IPs are left to die. DriveClub was one such game. Anyone who dares to be different, ambitious and stumbles on the way is ostracized while mediocrity is rewarded with high metacritic scores. Cant meme a formulaic basic game that doesnt push any fancy new features and thus ships bug free, now can you?
Cyberpunk was trashed 3 years ago and is now a media and gamer darling. the same water physics and NPCs that were memed 3 years ago are now being used to show how bad starfield is. Forza is being memed because of its AI mishaps. I see everyone mocking Lords of the Fallen in the review thread because of some performance issues. No one seems to be in the mood to look at these things objectively anymore. No one wants to admit that these games are flawed, yes, but are also doing next gen only things other games are simply not doing. The devs took a risk and made the game on UE5 when other bigger devs churned out last gen games on dated last gen engines. But nope, everyone just wants to make memes and laugh. And thats ok, its fun, but you reap what you sow. The message to devs is loud and clear: Be unambitious, keep churning out sequels, keep releasing last gen games on last gen engines, dont take any risks with new engines, new systems, new AI, or physics, just do the same thing but more polished and you will get a high 80s metacritic from critics and no memes from gamers.
GooseMan69
Member
For real man. Unity got way too much hate at the time. It was buggy but that’s because it was swinging for the fences. Compare it to AC3 or even Black Flag. Monumental leap.
I agree the outrage YouTube channels suck. It’s fine to be critical of games but these people are just straight up grifting.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Spiderman 2 is a weird one. On one hand, it feels formulaic and samey like CoD, but its also so far ahead of CoD in terms of visuals, storytelling and for a lack of a better word, 'heart', that its hard to lump them in with sports and cod sequels. I do agree that insomniac needs to go above and beyond when so few studios are making AAA games nowadays.
I was watching the Halo trailers this afternoon. Gave me chills and i am not a halo fan. Gaming had that edge back then. Devs were like I am going to go and create the best fucking game i can. Not the LONGEST game i can. You mentioned the cream of the crop of the PS360 era, but I thought Sony studios did a great job in the PS4 era pushing the bar. GOW, Horizon, uncharted 4 (at times), GT Sports, Spiderman, Days Gone, Death Stranding, TLOU2 were all ambitious, unique and visionary. The real problem was MS completely fumbling the ball last gen, and third parties chasing the Destiny and fortnite money. Now Sony is doing the same thing and MS has dropped the ball with several next gen exclusives so it feels like there is no one stepping up.
I think this is why we do need to praise flawed games like starfield, forza, ff16, and lords of the fallen. Just trashing everything gets us more safe sequels. Bethesda is making Elder Scrolls 6 next, CD project is making Witcher 4 next, how much innovation can we really get from these long running franchises? Eventually you will hit a wall like AC mirage. Ive always had a soft spot for broken messes like AC Unity, mass effect adromeda, metal gear survive, anthem and days gone. It's funny, you go back and look at Halo 3 and it looks like a PS2 game at times. But we all had common sense back then and realized that the visauls came at the expense of some the largest tank and air battles in a game TO THIS DAY. if Mass Effect 1 came out today running at 15 fps like it did back in the day with all those bugs, it would be memed to death and ME2 wouldve never come out.
Dont forget the hit job on Death Stranding. When it came out everyone from dunkey to critics who LIKED the game were dunking on it. It all but killed its initial sales momentum. Then it ended up winning GOTY from critics and gamers alike. Again, i was like i get it, the game is absolutely not for everyone and has issues, but even if you hated it, can we at least admire the ambition and risk taken by sony and kojima? i am a 100% sure that sony didnt greenlight the sequel right away in 2019 because of those poor initial sales.
Lumpyoatmeal
Member
Question to everyone, do retail games look like this?
GooseMan69
Member
Don’t get me started on Death Stranding. I hated watching people like dunkey and penguinz0 intentionally play the game like idiots to make it look bad. Then a bunch of people who clearly never played it jumped on the hate bandwagon. I’m so glad I ignored all that noise and got it at release. Ended up being one of my favorite PS4 games.
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
That killed me inside. Death Stranding is incredible. not without it's own fault but it's like people wanting a comedy, launching a horror movie and then complaining. Yea it's not fucking call of duty.
but to be honest... I felt similar attacks on tlou2, obviously forspoken and even Hogwarts to some degree. I would say Immortals too but no... that game just got ignored. It's too bland looking to make people even hate it lol.
ChiefDada
Gold Member
Don't
I dunno maybe for above average + cutscenes but I thought this thread hated chromatic aberration??? Where is this from?
Question to everyone, do retail games look like this?
I dunno maybe for above average + cutscenes but I thought this thread hated chromatic aberration??? Where is this from?
Insane Metal
Member
UE4 tech demo. Or was it UE3?
Grildon Tundy
Gold Member
I was going to defend Mirage, saying that the Unity scene was a story cutscene and Mirage's was a random NPC quest-giver interaction back-and-forth, but, nope--those are actually like-for-like comparisons.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
that was infuriating to me too.
im sure you can find cherrypicked screenshots that come close. overall though, the asset and modeling quality is too advanced for last gen. Horizon's cauldron sections were the best last gen.Question to everyone, do retail games look like this?
Starfield comes close at times in terms of asset quality. But it doesnt get there either.
Cyberpunk might be the closest in terms of lighting, but asset quality in cyberpunk isnt its strongest suit.
IIRC, that infiltrator demo can be installed and run your pc. ive seen people with 3080s running it in realtime 60 fps.
Lumpyoatmeal
Member
This is the Infiltrator demo that was published in 2013 by Epic Games.
Mind you this demo ran on a GTX 680. You're still expecting retail games to have Matrix quality on a PS5 and the Xbox series?that was infuriating to me too.
im sure you can find cherrypicked screenshots that come close. overall though, the asset and modeling quality is too advanced for last gen. Horizon's cauldron sections were the best last gen.
Starfield comes close at times in terms of asset quality. But it doesnt get there either.
Cyberpunk might be the closest in terms of lighting, but asset quality in cyberpunk isnt its strongest suit.
IIRC, that infiltrator demo can be installed and run your pc. ive seen people with 3080s running it in realtime 60 fps.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
that was what a 2.8 tflops nvidia GPU? Running this at 1080p 30 fps right? I know back in the day nvidia tflops were much more powerful than the amd tflops but we are probably looking at a similar 4 tflops GCN1 gpu running this at 1080p 30 fps.
I mean sure, why not. If anything, this should be proof that devs are still making games for 1.8 tflops PS4. Just a couple of extra tflops and you could get games looking like this.
Remember the unity forest demo? it ran on a ps4 pro. we dont have any games looking this good. this unreal engine storm demo also ran on a 970 which was 3.5 tflops and around 2x more powerful than the ps4.
I think a lot of this is due to the native 4k 60 fps nonsense from devs. if they settle for 1080p 30 fps they can probably get close to this. two of those horizon screenshots are from the first game. made with 1.8 tflops. with 2x more power, why couldnt they come close to the infiltrator demo? its not my fault that they chose to limit themselves native 4k 30 fps on a ps5 only burning shores.
Slothbeing1209
Member
It's because of the camera. You have a Fps view make everything looks faster than a camera placed far behind character. Maybe the game still slower but not too much.
I have no vendetta, I am against false hype and false marketing. All the SSD marketing has so far failed to amount to anything this gen. Infact all the ported PS5 games have ran faster on PC than on the PS5.
False hype allow studios like Ubisoft to get away with shit-tier work (Mirage) when a 10 year old game looks/plays/is better in every way.
As you can see from the cut-scene comparison.
Look I watched 3 hours of 1080P Gameplay of Spiderman 2 (and I can't anymore so I can actually play it).
I don't want to say this because these recent spiderman games are my favorite game.
But i have to. Its just Miles Morale Remastered.
So many things are literally carbon copied.
Even the first mission: I'm like wait i think I have jumped through this same building and over these same desks that fell in the same way to dodge some rockets before. Why are they reusing everything in the same exact way?
It makes zero sense. Its literally the same game with minimal visual update.
Also all time of day other than daytime looks bad (which has been pointed out) and the streets looked empty. Its insane. This is supposed to be NYC.
The first fight reminds me of HFW and HFW realistic sand battles blows it out of the water.
Just compare the sand material rendering in both games.
See even you see it too!
Interior is the easiest way to compare visual fidelity (especially lighting and shadows) and the easiest place to point out improvements. And you barely see any. That shows you they just cranked the quality settings for the lighting up a notch. They didn't actually fundamentally alter their lighting system. If your metal didn't look like metal before and everything looked like plastic. Cranking the quality setting of your lighting system won't change that. It will only make things look better.
To showcase what I mean, in 4.1 this was the best you could do in UE for open world visual fidelity with their
Skylight and Directional Light tech. No matter how much you cranked the settings.
Then in 4.8 they completely overhauled their lighting added Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, Dynamic Height Field GI and Dynamic Distance Field GI. It led to this (and Days Gone), but again no matter how much you crank the settings you just end up with a better version of this.
Then in 5.0 they completely overhauled their lighting AGAIN with lumen and now we have this (and matrix demo)
The point is, there are obvious generation difference in all three videos.
But it needed a complete overhaul for it. SM2 however is not a complete lighting overhaul. And the change in textures (them using grungier texture) and different building material types (more opaque colored glass buildings like dark green/blue and silver) are deceiving people to think there's some huge lighting upgrade. Even
SlimySnake
now believes that.But if that was the case, the interiors would look way better. What's actually true is that they bumped up their bake settings of their lighting system which is why the interiors look similar.
A huge leap in lighting is always seen in interior spaces, even if the interior is made up of simple objects or minecraft.
I will give them one thing, they moved away from skyboxes which i noticed and a very needed change that added abit more realism.
However they still don't use volumetric rendering on their fog/smoke? (Not sure)
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Lumpyoatmeal
Member
It's not a performance problem though, we've had the hardware to do Infiltrator quality for 10 years now on the PC. In that span of 10 years no developer has stepped up to meet and/or exceed that bar.
Feel Like I'm On 42
Member
I have no vendetta, I am against false hype and false marketing. All the SSD marketing has so far failed to amount to anything this gen. Infact all the ported PS5 games have ran faster on PC than on the PS5.
False hype allow studios like Ubisoft to get away with shit-tier work (Mirage) when a 10 year old game looks/plays/is better in every way.
As you can see from the cut-scene comparison.
Look I watched 3 hours of 1080P Gameplay of Spiderman 2 (and I can't anymore so I can actually play it).
I don't want to say this because these recent spiderman games are my favorite game.
But i have to. Its just Miles Morale Remastered.
So many things are literally carbon copied.
Even the first mission: I'm like wait i think I have jumped through this same building and over these same desks that fell in the same way to dodge some rockets before. Why are they reusing everything in the same exact way?
It makes zero sense. Its literally the same game with minimal visual update.
Also all time of day other than daytime looks bad (which has been pointed out) and the streets looked empty. Its insane. This is supposed to be NYC.
The first fight reminds me of HFW and HFW realistic sand battles blows it out of the water.
Just compare the sand material rendering in both games.
See even you see it too!
Interior is the easiest way to compare visual fidelity (especially lighting and shadows) and the easiest place to point out improvements. And you barely see any. That shows you they just cranked the quality settings for the lighting up a notch. They didn't actually fundamentally alter their lighting system. If your metal didn't look like metal before and everything looked like plastic. Cranking the quality setting of your lighting system won't change that. It will only make things look better.
To showcase what I mean, in 4.1 this was the best you could do in UE for open world visual fidelity with their
Skylight and Directional Light tech. No matter how much you cranked the settings.
Then in 4.8 they completely overhauled their lighting added Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, Dynamic Height Field GI and Dynamic Distance Field GI. It led to this (and Days Gone), but again no matter how much you crank the settings you just end up with a better version of this.
Then in 5.0 they completely overhauled their lighting AGAIN with lumen and now we have this (and matrix demo)
The point is, there are obvious generation difference in all three videos.
But it needed a complete overhaul for it. SM2 however is not a complete lighting overhaul. And the change in textures (them using grungier texture) and different building material types (more opaque colored glass buildings like dark green/blue and silver) are deceiving people to think there's some huge lighting upgrade. Even
But if that was the case, the interiors would look way better. What's actually true is that they bumped up their bake settings of their lighting system which is why the interiors look similar.
A huge leap in lighting is always seen in interior spaces, even if the interior is made up of simple objects or minecraft.
I will give them one thing, they moved away from skyboxes which i noticed and a very needed change that added abit more realism.
However they still don't use volumetric rendering on their fog/smoke? (Not sure)
What you just described there with Spiderman 2 being basically a copy of Miles Morales ...that is the defining change we've seen almost all AAA devs doing this gen. It's as if there has been an industry wide shift were they're all jumping on the bandwagon and no longer making games for the ground up for the hardware anymore. Ironically, these con artists of the industry love to say that their new game "is made from the ground up" which is nothing but a lie. When you have Sony and Microsoft leading the pack of re-packaging games and assets well of course the other publishers are doing the same.
Is this because Covid? Perhaps that was the spark. They all realize that it's in everyone's best interest (except gamers) to save on budget and cash in. It's like an unspoken code. They see how gamers standards are at all time low and so they're just running with it.
This explains everything really- how we get a new next gen Forza that's so disappointing, Spiderman 2 barely a step over Miles Morales, Last of Us 1 Remake, GoW Ragnarok, AC Mirage (fuck me they really did regress 2 generations on character models and animation), and also why there's nary a hint of anything truly impressive even slated to come out in '24. Look at the asset reuse with Zelda Tears of the Kingdom! Yeah, $70.
Record breaking profits so this won't change anytime soon either. This has been a very damaging last 3 years to the state that gaming used to be in compared to now. Microsoft with sub services and Sony going multiplatform while lowering their graphical standards.
arkhamguy123
Member
THANK YOOOOU
God I thought it was over that even slimysnake has been broken by dogshit next gen standards but now I have someone who also sees the light
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
eh. Developers never make games just for PCs. last gen PC games were held back by a 1.3 tflops x1 gpu and a 1.8 tflops ps4 gpu. they targeted 900p for x1 and 1080p for the PS4. the rest of it was just used for 60 fps and higher settings. there was never crysis style built from the ground up game on pc. even cyberpunk wasted all the extra horsepower chasing Ray tracing instead of upping asset quality we see in the infiltrator screenshot.
arkhamguy123
Member
Even call of duty with their pipeline can’t keep up.
It’s just too hard and too much time to make a game that looks next gen I guess
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
I wanted to pick up immortals but the gameplay just looked too bland. I am now going to skip all 3 UE5 engine games after stanning for the Matrix demo for the last 3 years. lol I think its great that these B and C tier devs are able to get UE5 games out but we need the A tier devs to take full advantage of it.
I don't believe the traversal speed is primarily because of technical or hardware reasons, too fast and they make the world feel really small and possibly screw up the set piece moments. If the first can handle this i'm sure insomniac could have pushed the boat out further if they wanted.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
I have no vendetta, I am against false hype and false marketing. All the SSD marketing has so far failed to amount to anything this gen. Infact all the ported PS5 games have ran faster on PC than on the PS5.
False hype allow studios like Ubisoft to get away with shit-tier work (Mirage) when a 10 year old game looks/plays/is better in every way.
As you can see from the cut-scene comparison.
Look I watched 3 hours of 1080P Gameplay of Spiderman 2 (and I can't anymore so I can actually play it).
I don't want to say this because these recent spiderman games are my favorite game.
But i have to. Its just Miles Morale Remastered.
So many things are literally carbon copied.
Even the first mission: I'm like wait i think I have jumped through this same building and over these same desks that fell in the same way to dodge some rockets before. Why are they reusing everything in the same exact way?
It makes zero sense. Its literally the same game with minimal visual update.
Also all time of day other than daytime looks bad (which has been pointed out) and the streets looked empty. Its insane. This is supposed to be NYC.
The first fight reminds me of HFW and HFW realistic sand battles blows it out of the water.
Just compare the sand material rendering in both games.
See even you see it too!
Interior is the easiest way to compare visual fidelity (especially lighting and shadows) and the easiest place to point out improvements. And you barely see any. That shows you they just cranked the quality settings for the lighting up a notch. They didn't actually fundamentally alter their lighting system. If your metal didn't look like metal before and everything looked like plastic. Cranking the quality setting of your lighting system won't change that. It will only make things look better.
To showcase what I mean, in 4.1 this was the best you could do in UE for open world visual fidelity with their
Skylight and Directional Light tech. No matter how much you cranked the settings.
Then in 4.8 they completely overhauled their lighting added Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, Dynamic Height Field GI and Dynamic Distance Field GI. It led to this (and Days Gone), but again no matter how much you crank the settings you just end up with a better version of this.
Then in 5.0 they completely overhauled their lighting AGAIN with lumen and now we have this (and matrix demo)
The point is, there are obvious generation difference in all three videos.
But it needed a complete overhaul for it. SM2 however is not a complete lighting overhaul. And the change in textures (them using grungier texture) and different building material types (more opaque colored glass buildings like dark green/blue and silver) are deceiving people to think there's some huge lighting upgrade. Even
But if that was the case, the interiors would look way better. What's actually true is that they bumped up their bake settings of their lighting system which is why the interiors look similar.
A huge leap in lighting is always seen in interior spaces, even if the interior is made up of simple objects or minecraft.
I will give them one thing, they moved away from skyboxes which i noticed and a very needed change that added abit more realism.
However they still don't use volumetric rendering on their fog/smoke? (Not sure)
See I dont agree that you need a complete engine overhaul like going from UE4 to UE5 to get better lighting. There are plenty of UE4 demos that have better lighting than the kite demo and the other video you posted. UE4 Rebirth demo and the Australia demo have far better lighting than anything we have seen in UE5 titles.
I think what UE5 brings is dynamic GI. Stuff that they took out of UE4 back in the day. However, baked lighting in UE4 can produce some stunning results. And its not just UE4, you can look at TLOU2, Cyberpunk, AC Unity, and HFW to see just how much better they can look compared to spiderman 2 and other UE5 games released so far.
what you need is some different shaders, a different art style, some different color tones or whatever the cinematographer orders, and you can make the same engine produce two wildly different looking games.
I highly doubt these guys threw away everything and started from scratch. they just put in more work upgrading their tech and look of the game than Insomniac has done. Insomniac did that once before with Sunset. Sunset to Spiderman is a massive leap within the same generation, same engine. Kojima and GG were making games using the same engine at the same time making changes to the code base simultaneously and both games have entirely different look. One was aiming for photorealism while the other is a bit more colorful, almost cartoony and hyperrealistic. kojima made DS in just 3 years. Doubt he did an entire engine overhaul in 3 years while making the full game with just 85 people. He just made some changes to the colors, cinematography, contrast, and was able to get a completely different looking game.
Another good example is Batman Arkham Knight. Its running on UE3 and looks better than most UE5 games lol. Baked lighting using literally PS3 era tech. Just pushed to the max to get the best results possible. Just look at the screenshot of the Infiltrator demo. No UE5 game has come close so far let alone UE4. Tech isnt everything. you need artists to make full use of them.
With all that said, I agree that spiderman 2 isnt a complete graphics/lighting overhaul. I said its a noticeable difference from previous games and well, it is. Not generational, but noticeable. If they werent targeting native 4k with RT or 60 fps at a high resolution like 1440p with RT on top, it wouldve definitely looked more like the rebirth demo or the infiltrator demo.