crispy4000

I'd agree with that with how tech has progressed today. Back when XB2 and BoTW came out, I would have paid an extra $50-100 for the Switch if it could just run them at a solid 1080p30 docked.

Then yes, those games use it well with what they're aiming for.

You could probably add the Xenoblade Chronicles remake to that with the effort that was put in. I'm not that impressed by Nintendo's Switch output after its stellar first year or so, especially after consolidating their teams to work on a single platform. ...But it's not bad either. Just wish we could have seen Metroid Prime 4 by now.

Poor framerate, resolution and vsync issues are probably at the top. Loading times are somewhere closer to glitches, pop-in and large install sizes. Unless we're talking Sonic 2006 or something where it's totally inexcusable. What's 'it'? Don't think I've singled out those games as doing anything poorly.

The only place I'm truly concerned with the PS5/XSX's 'power' is their RT capability. We'll see how far they can be stretched. But this has mostly been about how dev's are using the new consoles, not their spec sheet. I don't think people care about loading times to the degree the marketing push suggests. It would be nice if 60fps performance modes stick around on these consoles. I like that its a system level option on the PS5. We'll see what happens after the cross-gen period or a mid-gen console release.

Miles Morales is what I hope the standard to be for cross-gen titles, or remasters of last-gen ones. It targets both generations perfectly, scales to both, yet is still on the forefront of next-gen visual features. If more games did what it does, I might be more interested in upgrading sooner. Not as excited as ground-up next-gen stuff, but it's still a positive. On the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Cyperpunk that can't get a patch ready. The current gen consoles can't really handle it. But there's a question if the PS5/XSX can either if they dip too much into the RT well. In a perfect world, that game would have a been ready in time. Control with RT as well. Honestly, that would have been enough for me to see those two games turn out well on consoles. We might get to see that soon with Control. I've already admitted I was wrong about BF4 and that I forgot about Crysis 3. What more do you want?

You're right that Crysis 3 looks good. I'll give you that. Guarantee you weren't counting resolution and frames when that Ryse demo trailer first dropped though. And I think Killzone trailer was the most effective showcase of what next-gen scope could be at the time. Giving an impression of what next-gen can mean shouldn't be about pixel counts and frame rates IMO. I think it's frustrating how much of a focus that's been. There's a reason why the UE5 demo got people excited even though it was a reconstructed 1440p30. What can I say, DICE deserves some props. They had to cut the player count down, from what I remember, but its still impressive to me. Maybe wait until I respond next time?

Just for kicks, here was another 'next-gen moment' I remember from the start of the previous gen. I never actually played the game, but dang, it actually made it into the final product. Highly scripted, obviously. But you could be in that building.

Instead of just laughing it off, why not give some examples. What PC games at the time do you think looked more next-gen than those two demos? Witcher 2? GTAV? I'll just quote Duderino, since it summarizes my thoughts: "There has been less attempts at passing off target renders as gameplay, but also fewer demonstrations, even if smoke and mirrors, of what next gen enables devs to accomplish."

Probably should stop assuming then. I thought that Killzone: Shadowfall demo looked better than anything made for the prior gen. PC or console. Same with Ryse.

I'll quote you on the rest in a moment. But I want to clarify that even without a PC with a SSD, load times this gen never bothered me, largely due to the pause and resume rest feature in the PS4. Getting a PC SSD wasn't a 'fucking finally' moment for me either, because it lacked pause and resume. I bought the SSD mainly for performance gains in open world titles. For starters. I thought Ryse looked great too. Battlefield V's demo, even though that ended up being bullshotty too, I think? With loading times. And as I've tried to clarify, I simply don't care that much about them. Why would I be super excited? I've played many cartridge games with zippy loading before, I know the difference. I could get by with just pause and resume just fine. PC is much of the same boat as the new consoles otherwise. We have Cyperpunk and Control pushing things a bit further, perhaps, even though they're still cross-gen in some ways. Beyond that, it's the same multiplatform future. PC has its own issues. We haven't seen NVIDIA's GPU-SSD tech in action to compare with the consoles. We haven't seen AMD's upscaling algorithm, for those planning on going Team Red. Or their GPU-SSD answer, if they have (or need) one.

As I've said multiple times now, reduced loading screen times aren't a big deal to me. I'm much more excited about what other opportunities the next-gen SSD tech opens up elsewhere in game visuals and design. We haven't seen enough developers show us that. That's been my point from the beginning. If loading times are a big deal to you, then we just have a difference of opinion.

Two different topics here you're trying to merge together. I'm not going there. I've already said loading times matter very little to me personally. Just to mention it, loading speed advancements aren't as crucial from a convenance angle as rest mode features have been to me. Maybe if I was forced to sit through loading times every time I fired up a PS4 game I'd feel differently. I kind of miss it on the PC, but the SSD has made up for that to some degree.

That's a nice summary of my thoughts in here. Thanks. Read the first sentence of Duderino's post above.

PC SSDs got us closer to the dream of getting back to the fast loading times in older games (and most Nintendo handhelds). The PS5/XBX took us the rest of the way. It's as simple as that. Mileage will vary on how exciting each of those steps are to you personally. That's the way I see it.

You said that these consoles had the biggest improvement in loading since the 2D era. That's a bad statement not only because of the N64 and Nintendo handhelds with 3D cartridge games, but because SSDs were also a jump on PC. These consoles are just the next step in an evolution. A dramatic one, sure, I'll give you that. But the next step of what SSDs on PC started.

Really, we shouldn't. It is a bit more inspiring than "here's a cinematic trailer target render of something we'll later announce as cross-gen." As deciving as the prior gen's promo material was, there was more of an attempt to show us what devs were working towards. I still don't like it, to be clear. It shouldn't be applauded. We agree on that. Devs are just walking on eggshells now. I think the tech is probably underbaked at this point, as everyone's trying to figure out what they can do with RT, the SSDs, etc. So cinematic trailers without any pretension of gameplay are safe. Just not that indicative of what is next-gen, IMO. I'm saying that faster loading times aren't that big of a deal to me. It's the least exciting thing about the new consoles for me. I'd be perfectly fine if loading times didn't get any faster than my PC's SSD. You can take that or leave it. What else the faster drives can be used to enable excites me much more. Even if it's a bit too theoretical at this point.

Watch these trailers at the cued up times. There was absolutely an attempt to pass off the above as gameplay. It only came to light later these were target renders trying to imitate what the gameplay would look like. It was deceptive, and it's good we're past that. But they did succeed at getting us excited about the future of what devs thought they could do on these machines. I'd say some games later in the gen got there, or at least very close to it. I don't believe the PS5/XSX hardware itself was rushed. Rather, I think the majority of the industry wasn't ready to give us their vision of what next-gen would mean, or could be. Cross-gen has never been as large of a focus as now, and I believe it's partly because of that. Like Xbob brought up, I've had an SSD in my PC for quite a while now. So I've enjoyed that half step to the PS5/XSX's loading improvements. So I get why faster loading is better. But it's not anything I'll say 'finally' to.

Gamersyde's 4K encodes, Digital Foundry, etc. It's not like you need to 'drive' the games to have a good idea how they look anymore. Much better than it used to be. I'm losing you in the reductiveness here. Have I commented on "backwards compatibility upscaling?" What's that even mean? Ratchet is one of the exceptions, at least in how it shows the speed of streaming in assets. Hellblade's trailer was closer to the types of presentations we saw last gen, just no pretension of showing what gameplay would look like (compared to say, Witcher 3's bullshot presentation).

There was a ton of target trailers. People were over the moons how amazing Witcher 3, Deep Down, FFXV and Watch Dogs looked until we found out they would be downgraded or were target renders. Some of the some of the skepticism came from the specs. More specifically Sony and MS not giving Epic what they were asking for with UE5. Still, you had games being shown that were demonstrating the power of these machines pretty decisively from launch without hubris. Its the opposite to what’s happening now. There’s very few target gameplay trailers or tech demos trying to fool anyone what is gameplay. Instead, we get cinematics for projects that are (later) confirmed to be cross-gen. I’d rather not be bullshitted, but this feels like the opposite. There hasn’t been much ambition to take charge and show us that next-gen vision these consoles enable. That presentation Cerny gave about designing Jak II with the constraints of console loading and being set free by the SSD is almost laughable now. Because of how many devs are designing games like that now? Not anything that will be cross-gen, which is almost everything.

Nope. Neither has convinced me they’re worth the money yet at this point. I don’t care that much for the cross-gen performance gains, which this far is their bread and butter. As for hands on... Covid. Nothing too much at launch outside of Ryse and Killzone Shadowfall. The difference was even more in the announced-for-later games showcasing the potential. Games like Final Fantasy XV, Quantum Break, Mad Max, Uncharted 4, Arkham Knight, etc. Even stuff that ended up being bullshotty fake gameplay like Watch Dogs, Witcher 3 and Deep Down. There was more effort spent convincing us these consoles were a real generational step up. There’s absolutely no reason why these consoles couldn’t be as much about fidelity as they are performance gains. At launch or otherwise. It sells them short if not. New generations have never been about one or the other, but both / and. And I don't think the hardware itself is an exception this time. So yes, I believe there’s been shortcomings in communicating that. Both in the messaging and in the games shown. As an aside, NDAs for gameplay footage dropped later than ever before a console launch. Even the cross-gen comparisons were taboo to show for the longest time. The silver lining is that there's a lot more unknowns about these console's capabilities than the last gen close after launch. That's both a positive and negative.

Shorter menu loading times are the least interesting thing about these consoles to me. There's a lot of promise to the SSDs outside of that, just not many material examples. As for the UE5 demo, it never felt like the industry as a whole was waiting on UE4 to tap into the PS4/XBO's hardware like this. Devs can't even fiddle around with UE5 yet. We don't know how it runs on PC/Series X. We don't know how it scales to open world stuff. Answers should be coming soon at least. It would be a huge step if it delivers as promised. Spider-man MM and the remaster just makes me question what the future will be with RT this gen. RT should be a big graphical evolution - I wouldn't consider it insignificant or a slow advance. But if we're essentially looking at ~1600p60 reconstructed for a last gen remaster with just RT reflections, it raises more questions about what honest-to-goodness current gen games will target with RT. Or how many straight up won't, because of the performance hit. And of course, no next-generation upscaling algorithm at launch. Shouldn't Sony have been on the forefront of that after the PS4 Pro? Wasn't Microsoft experimenting with it? Why is AMD still not showing their tech yet? So your guess is good as mine what eventually materializes and if it's all that good. It's a complete unknown outside of being promised eventually. Astro is the big exception to all this. I'm glad it's proving the controller is legit.

This is the first time a next-gen launch for me that hasn't felt like I know where the hardware is going. We haven't seen enough of that from the launch games. We haven't seen enough of that from future games. Moreover, we're seeing that raytracing is a performance hog in games designed to work cross-gen. We haven't seen enough of what the SSDs will add, especially considering that Unreal Engine 5 is still not ready. And a next gen upscaling solution is just a dangling promise at this point. I get that launch games can't prove everything, and I wouldn't expect them to. But I believe the hardware manufactures should be attempting to illustrate the why next-gen in a more substantive way than they have this far. If for nothing else than to stick it to their competition. The industry will go on and these consoles will sell regardless, but it's especially disappointing when it appears they're getting us used to dull upgrade cycles, where the hardware matters for more than how it's used. It was excusable for the Pro/X1X launches, but it shouldn't have been here. Going off only what I’ve seen rather than expect, it’s the PS5 controller that’s really what’s pushing the envelope at this point.

Did Demon’s Souls feel rushed to you? It sounds more like an excuse to me. Sony’s 1st party line-up was good enough for them this time, I’ll say. The issue is the rest of the industry. It’s lost interest in making showpieces for new hardware anywhere close to their launches. Dampens the hype. Outside of Remedy and the mythical Cyperpunk patch, the industry at large is probably a year behind Ratchet. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Its more that devs haven’t had the time to build next-gen exclusives. Dark Souls was pretty much it for 2020. If these consoles came a year later and super resolution was ready, I think we would have seen a very substantial next-gen jump in visuals as opposed to X1X/PSPro 2.0 at current. These consoles can do more than that, we know. So it’s more just me wishing that they didn’t lean so hard into cross-gen as the appeal.