This was the level i saw in the leaks that i said I liked 2 weeks ago.
Turns out you like the same level. So atleast you know i'm not hating when i say that even with this.
The gap between AW2 and SM2 is a universe apart.
The thing about AW2 is that playing it on Ultra with Path tracing. As you play your brain glitches constantly as you think what you are seeing is actually real life or cgi.
So you're walking and you have this split second glitch like..
"wait is this real life.... oh no its still the game".
"what is this pre-rendered cgi...oh no its still the game"
And this is happening subconsciously so its not like I'm controlling or trying to convince myself.
For SM2 the whole thing looks gamey. Everything about it looks gamey. The lighting look gamey. The shadows and lack-of look gamey. The assets look gamey. The characters look gamey. So even when things look good like this level, they still look "gamey good".
Brain glitches where you actually think something looks real is not not even close to happening.
This is happening all the time while i'm playing AW2 on Ultra.
I have ray tracing off because I honestly didnt see a big difference with rt on in the forest. im sure it adds rt reflections in the city but the forest had zero difference. the game's lighting is simply sublime on either mode. Indeed, it has the cg pre-rendered look that fools your brain into thinking you are watching a movie instead of playing it.
Hopefully, now you realize what I was talking about in terms of lighting in Alan Wake 2 making it look better than the very first UE5 demo. Again, that demo looked gamey in ways the matrix does not, and alan wake 2 while looking more gamey than the matrix, looks simply better than the first ue5 demo.
Lol no, having 25 enemies at the same visual fidelity of last gen IS NOT NEXT GEN.
crazy animation which is exactly the same fidelity as the previous game IS NOT NEXT GEN.
"no performance issues" IS NOT NEXT GEN
Agreed on the last two. First one though, I think qualifies for next gen simply because they couldnt do that before in their engine on the base PS4. Honestly, there were a couple of times in the game where the game keeps throwing enemies at you and i was like wtf i dont remember the last one being this hectic. it deserves praise tbh. Animations is another area where they've disappointed me. I was expecting motion matching from Sony first party games going forward and nope, didnt even try. And im so done with people using performance issues as something bad. ALL ambitious games of their times had performance issues. SOTC, MGS3, Mass Effect, Bioshock, it means they pushed it above what the console was capable of. Not wasting pixels on targeting native 4k.
Actually no, a huge chunk of spiderman's mission take place in a corridor/room. For example peter's apartment, another example the peter/harry high school the flash back. There's no open world rendering happening. So no pound for pound AW2 beats SM2 by an entire universe.
I wouldnt say a huge chunk but streaming and especially ssd streaming on PS5 has solved the whole open world games cant look as good as linear corridor games conundrum. Matrix, Horizon fw, Rdr2 back in the day had no issues looking good while being open world. spiderman just doesnt aim for highs achieved by even ratchet. Modeling work is extremely inconsistent in new indoor areas and consistently last gen outdoors.
Again, ratchet destroys this game in terms of lighting, asset quality and modeling.
Cerny said that PS4 games needed somewhere around 20 seconds of game data in vram at all times in case the player changed their minds and decided to go in a different direction in open world games. The PS5 ssd and IO fixes that. He then showed off the spiderman ssd demo that completely fixed the need to have that much data in vram at all times. They used it for faster speeds but didnt bother upgrading their asset quality. Nanite has also fixed the issue with LOD transitions by letting the engine gracefully handle it and removing the need for artists to create dozens of multiple LOD assets. Simply inexcusable.
