You're point about underlying tech made me want to bring up something I've found interesting. I think this gen is going to be one where artistic differences stand out more than the past couple. Nearly every dev that's outlined a next gen engine has have very similar implementations and final goals for their tech. Things like physically based rendering are going to be standard very soon.
I don't know if it will be more or less or the same as other generations, but art will always triumph. All you have to do is look as the game people are comparing Shadow Fall to, Crysis 3, to see that. There's a good few people here who greatly prefer the look of the
first Crysis over Crysis 3, simply due to the latter's art direction. Yet the latter is leaps and bound more
technologically impressive in engine capabilities, rendering, and optimisation.
Guerrilla has always had the benefit of not only very talented programmers backing the engine, but an exceptional art team making the best use of what their engines can do.
In the end though it's great to see titles like Killzone already putting out such amazing visuals day one of a console launch.
Yeah, this is what matters post. Guerrilla and others are doing great things already, this early on, and it's only going to get better.
Thats actually part if what I am saying. The three games to the eyes look in par. There is nothing one does that makes you go "wow thats more impressive than that". Art direction aside. So for all that extra computing power of high level pc cards and the difference is not really noticable. Its like watching the Sorceror demo on PS4, that made me go "wow" far more than anything on PC has. Yes its a demo, but its running on a ps4 with its silly little jaguar cpu and its 1.84tflop GPU. Have we reached a point of diminishing returns using the current way gpus have gone? Will we not see real improvement in graphics untill ray tracing or something similar?
Yeah, but you have to remember it's subjective. People were saying similar shit about games like Killzone 3 and Uncharted 2 and 3 this generation around their time of release, calling out the irrelevancy of high end, expensive PC hardware when the PS3 was doing crazy stuff on arguably "dated" technology. Yet for a lot of PC gamers attuned to what high end PC gaming looks like, Killzone 3 and Uncharted 3's lower resolution, anisotropic filtering issues, and other quirks still stood out.
You have to remember that high end PC gaming is and always be an
enthusiast market for people who can and want to see the differences, even if they're small and come at a ridiculous computation cost. You're right, a lot of people won't see the difference, but that's the way it's always been and that's largely why people are still very happy to jump on console gaming and be overwhelmed by how pretty the games are. Meanwhile in the PC camp high end users would look at something like this:
And wonder if they can transparency super sample to clean up the botchy chain fence at the top of the screen, and supersample or SGSSAA the whole image to clean up the aliased edges on specular and normal maps, as well as the rain. Then jump head first into whatever config.ini they can find and try to increase the LOD rendering resolution of every bloody asset they can. And all this at a fairly substantial computation cost.
Average Joe will barely see a difference, and when they do they probably won't give a shit. But the enthusiasts do see the difference and care enough about it to throw hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars to make the necessary changes. That is, after all, what makes them enthusiasts (and insane).
