Sony PlayStation 5 OT - Play Has No Limits, update: financial report indicates no major first-party/exclusive PS5 releases prior to end of March 2025, PS5 in "latter half" of console cycle

[Mr.Vic20]

Nice, will watch in the morning!

[imthesoldier]

I'm currently more impressed by the SSD related specs than anything else. Where it lacks in raw horsepower appears to make up in data read/write speeds. My dreams of instantaneous loading times just might be around the corner. 

[Xbob42]

You poor souls who still believe that any developer is going to utilize anything regarding "finesse" in a way that doesn't completely bork performance and still lead to weird load times or issues. Have you fools learned nothing? It doesn't matter how much power or bandwidth you give developers, they will always find a way to fuck it up spectacularly for a slightly more impressive visual package.

 

I can already see shit like that higher speed culling being shown off getting all fucked up as the drive speed fluctuates over time or something like that.

 

Ah well, in any case, good to see we all finally get to enjoy SSDs to a higher level, although instantaneous loading isn't anything close to being new, and frankly nothing I saw from that presentation seemed all that remarkable in terms of what it might offer in terms of gameplay besides maybe less bottlenecks and long elevator rides, but minimizing bottlenecks alone will hopefully keep the systems relevant (power-wise) for longer so that we don't hit the ceiling as quickly as we seem to have this gen.

[legend]

3 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

PS5 is going to be just fine with the specs shown, no pro needed right now, and I say that as someone with a very high end PC. Same goes for X box Series X. 

 

Yeah I think I'm more excited by this next gen than the start of the current.

[legend]

22 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

 It doesn't matter how much power or bandwidth you give developers, they will always find a way to fuck it up spectacularly for a slightly more impressive visual package.

 

Not true at all. Even with today's crap storage hardware some developers still managed good load systems. For example, The Witcher 3 fast traveled very quickly, and Spiderman was similarly quite smooth.

 

And hardware clearly matters. Back in the day when we had cartridges, loading was a non-issue. It's also the one advantage the N64 cartridges had over the PS1 CD: virtually non-existent loading vs terrible loading.

 

The hardware matters and developers are not actually idiots.

[Xbob42]

12 minutes ago, legend said:

 

Even with today's crap storage hardware some developers still managed good load systems.

 

The hardware matters and developers are not actually idiots.

That's the crux, innit? It's always a few shining examples in a sea of fucked up mediocrity.

Devs being idiots or not does not change the fact that performance has been on an unacceptable decline (to me, clearly the general public doesn't care, which only exacerbates the issue) overall for a while now. The few examples to the contrary do nothing but highlight the utter failure of the average dev team, or rather whoever constantly demands that games look good rather than run or load well. There's always a bigger push for a more impressive visual package over anything else. 

 

The hardware matters until its pushed beyond its limits, which is the point I'm getting at. And it does have limits, because it's hardware. Just like last gen and the gen before it. We're so far away from the golden days of the PS2 and its myriad 60 FPS games that still look visually impressive today and played absolutely perfectly. Not that everything even then was too great either. Now if a game runs at a solid 30 FPS and load times are under a minute it's lauded as a technical masterpiece.

I just can't have a rosy outlook about this when I look at the reality of the last 20-30 years of game development on consoles. How can anyone? The end-user experience is sacrificed constantly on the altar of looking just a little bit better. It's been 15 years of people saying a game struggling to hit 30 FPS "runs fine." That long ass load times are "fine." While I'm sure we'll see reduced load times, because it'd be pretty goddamn impressive to fuck that part up at least, I'm not convinced that there's going to be some massive change to anything else. Especially when the competition isn't using the same kind of approach. I smell a few Sony exclusives doing something impressive while multiplatform games just kind of release lesser Series X ports. I certainly can't imagine all third-party devs taking advantage of this in the way Sony clearly hopes.

[legend]

6 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

That's the crux, innit? It's always a few shining examples in a sea of fucked up mediocrity.

 

But not always. The point is if great developers can manage with a horrible storage system now, a great storage systems is going to make it possible for more to achieve the same, and the great developers will push it even further. It raises the bar.

 

Quote

Devs being idiots or not does not change the fact that performance has been on an unacceptable decline (to me, clearly the general public doesn't care, which only exacerbates the issue) overall for a while now. The few examples to the contrary do nothing but highlight the utter failure of the average dev team. There's always a bigger push for a more impressive visual package over anything else. 

I'm not convinced it's gotten worse. I *still* remember Perfect Dark  

 

 

Quote

The hardware matters until its pushed beyond its limits, which is the point I'm getting at. And it does have limits, because it's hardware. Just like last gen and the gen before it. We're so far away from the golden days of the PS2 and its myriad 60 FPS games that still look visually impressive today and played absolutely perfectly. Now if a game runs at a solid 30 FPS and load times are under a minute it's lauded as a technical masterpiece.

 

If the increase in RAM capacity scaled with the same increase in storage bandwidth and related optimizations, I would be inclined to agree. It didn't.

 

But I'm not sure why you're talking about frame rate. Is anyone suggesting that things like the storage will make the frame rate faster?

[Xbob42]

I generally exclude super early 3D stuff because it was hot trash all around and didn't really represent what came later, but yeah, the N64 had some real bad times.

 

I bring up FPS simply because it's my go-to about developers sacrificing user experience in the name of bells and whistles. I haven't rewatched the stream yet, and was watching it while a streamer was talking over it from time to time, but I recall one part that looked to be a more aggressive form of culling using the SSD's speed to load assets in faster, and I can just see something like that (if I didn't misunderstand what was being explained) being exploited in a way to get more visual fidelity and being pushed too far. I obviously am only speaking from a lay point of view, so I can't list a bunch of examples beyond some what-ifs that may not be representative of what's going on at all, so I try not to do that.

 

But as all you need to do is actually play the games coming out to see the issues that have cropped up time and again (how we have consistently seen high profile games with frame pacing issues is completely maddening to me), I'm at least comfortable in saying I'm always very suspicious of stuff like this, doubly so when only one company is doing it, meaning it may not even be utilized that often.

 

That said, giving one of my may-not-be-representative examples: The aggressive culling I mentioned, I could see that directly changing gameplay design to make the player turn slower if it's not quite as fast as expected, or if perhaps their scenes are filled with more assets than the speed accounts for, that kind of thing. Again, not gonna pretend to know more than I do about the specifics, but man, at least that would be better than the strengths of the hardware being completely underutilized because it's exclusive to a single platform.

Which would also be ironic, since I think hardware should be sold on the merits of the hardware, same reason you buy a Blu-Ray player or a car or something, rather than exclusive games, but then issues like this can crop up like we saw with the Cell.

[jaethos]

5 hours ago, SaysWho? said:

 

 

I'll get excited for the sound tech when it works with a surround sound system, how I play. They straight up said they would look at getting that to work sometime down the road.

[imthesoldier]

1 minute ago, heydude93 said:

The games are definitely gonna look amazing, but how many can be stored on a HDD at once is my main concern now. Some of this gens prettiest games already cost like 100GB of space. 

 

If I recall from what Cerny said though, a lot of today's games utilize a lot of duplicate assets (He used the mailbox analogy from Spiderman as his example), and other data (to help with accessing information at different points within the game's data), but with a super fast SSD, it could reduce/eliminate the need for duplicate assets, thus reducing the size of games. I'm not saying it would be the difference between 100GB, and 50GB (or maybe it could?), but it will be interesting if games actually shrink in size for next-gen because of it. 

[heydude93]

On 3/18/2020 at 9:02 PM, imthesoldier said:

 

If I recall from what Cerny said though, a lot of today's games utilize a lot of duplicate assets (He used the mailbox analogy from Spiderman as his example), and other data (to help with accessing information at different points within the game's data), but with a super fast SSD, it could reduce/eliminate the need for duplicate assets, thus reducing the size of games. I'm not saying it would be the difference between 100GB, and 50GB (or maybe it could?), but it will be interesting if games actually shrink in size for next-gen because of it. 

Possibly.  I deleted that post because I know nothing about SSD drives and went to research it a bit more.  It just seems kinda sketchy to me since storage space for games has increased a lot each console gen and most AAA games are already at least 40GB.  

[Keyser_Soze]

 

[imthesoldier]

I would imagine PS1 and PS2 emulation at the minimum would at some point be added on, if it is currently not in the lineup for legacy titles. PS3, however, I have doubts it'll be feasible even with such hardware the PS5 has. I know PS3 emulation in general has made great strides on the PC front, but is that currently enough to be feasible for next-gen hardware? 

[heydude93]

It could emulate PS1 and PS2 games easily, but don't get your hopes up that they'll be available anywhere but streaming.

 

 

[legend]

53 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

I generally exclude super early 3D stuff because it was hot trash all around and didn't really represent what came later, but yeah, the N64 had some real bad times.

 

I bring up FPS simply because it's my go-to about developers sacrificing user experience in the name of bells and whistles. I haven't rewatched the stream yet, and was watching it while a streamer was talking over it from time to time, but I recall one part that looked to be a more aggressive form of culling using the SSD's speed to load assets in faster, and I can just see something like that (if I didn't misunderstand what was being explained) being exploited in a way to get more visual fidelity and being pushed too far. I obviously am only speaking from a lay point of view, so I can't list a bunch of examples beyond some what-ifs that may not be representative of what's going on at all, so I try not to do that.

 

But as all you need to do is actually play the games coming out to see the issues that have cropped up time and again (how we have consistently seen high profile games with frame pacing issues is completely maddening to me), I'm at least comfortable in saying I'm always very suspicious of stuff like this, doubly so when only one company is doing it, meaning it may not even be utilized that often.

 

That said, giving one of my may-not-be-representative examples: The aggressive culling I mentioned, I could see that directly changing gameplay design to make the player turn slower if it's not quite as fast as expected, or if perhaps their scenes are filled with more assets than the speed accounts for, that kind of thing. Again, not gonna pretend to know more than I do about the specifics, but man, at least that would be better than the strengths of the hardware being completely underutilized because it's exclusive to a single platform.

Which would also be ironic, since I think hardware should be sold on the merits of the hardware, same reason you buy a Blu-Ray player or a car or something, rather than exclusive games, but then issues like this can crop up like we saw with the Cell.

 

 

This is a very different beast than FPS. Developers target low FPS because most of the public doesn't actually care that much about low frame rate (unfortunately) and there is a very direct relationship between increasing IQ at the cost of frame rate on an indefinite scale, so developers target the most popular trade off.

 

There's not an indefinite scale of trade off in this case, because the RAM is only so big and it didn't grow in capacity anywhere close to the growth in storage speed.

 

On top of all that, SSDs like this simply make developers lives easier because there is less work to do the normal thing. No need to worry about replicating data, keeping things in continuous chunks, optimizing against variance in loading times from seeking, etc.

 

What we're talking about here is both increasing theoretical performance and decreasing development complexity. Those two things rarely go hand in hand, but it does here which makes it one of the clearest wins; far more than almost any other technological improvement. There is good reason to be excited about this.

[Paperclyp]

God those BC rumors were vastly overstated then. That sucks, I kinda was looking forward to it. 

[HardAct]

Well hell,

    This is going to he my final console generation. Even though my wife literally laughed out loud when I said that, I feel it in my bones. They both sound great but, will not be day one purchased by me. I'm excited, but I'll be a PC gamer for the most part along side these two beauties. Finally getting 4k / 60fps as the standard is the most exciting thing for me. 

    Can't wait to own these two new game boxes!

[Remarkableriots]

1 hour ago, HardAct said:

Well hell,

    This is going to he my final console generation. Even though my wife literally laughed out loud when I said that, I feel it in my bones. They both sound great, and will be day bbn one purchased by me. So I'm excited, but I'll be a pc gamer for the most part along side these two beauties. Finally getting 4k / 60fps as the standard is the most exciting thing for me. 

    Can't wait to own these two new game boxes!

How you going to avoid PS 9 when it's in you? 

[Mr.Vic20]

I'll stop buying consoles when I can get all of their exclusives on PC. I'm buying console hardware for access, not the hardware itself typically. With Game Pass MS is giving me exactly what I want, while not cutting the people who can't afford a high end PC out of the picture. I think that's the best solution. Seeing Sony's approach to PS5's architecture tells me they don't quite see it that way! 

[SaysWho?]

7 hours ago, legend said:

 

 

This is a very different beast than FPS. Developers target low FPS because most of the public doesn't actually care that much about low frame rate (unfortunately) and there is a very direct relationship between increasing IQ at the cost of frame rate on an indefinite scale, so developers target the most popular trade off.

 

There's not an indefinite scale of trade off in this case, because the RAM is only so big and it didn't grow in capacity anywhere close to the growth in storage speed.

 

On top of all that, SSDs like this simply make developers lives easier because there is less work to do the normal thing. No need to worry about replicating data, keeping things in continuous chunks, optimizing against variance in loading times from seeking, etc.

 

What we're talking about here is both increasing theoretical performance and decreasing development complexity. Those two things rarely go hand in hand, but it does here which makes it one of the clearest wins; far more than almost any other technological improvement. There is good reason to be excited about this.

 

In addition to this, I feel most games targeting 30fps have been vastly more consistent this generation than last. Compare the Uncharted games to Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy; besides the final chapter of Lost Legacy, these games were far more consistent beauties than their PS3 counterparts at the time despite the size/complexities of the set pieces. Horizon Zero Dawn doesn't seem like a game that could have ran as seamlessly as it did had it been released last gen. 

[SaysWho?]

1 minute ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I'll stop buying consoles when I can get all of their exclusives on PC. I'm buying console hardware for access, not the hardware itself typically. With Game Pass MS is giving me exactly what I want, while not cutting the people who can't afford a high end PC out of the picture. I think that's the best solution. Seeing Sony's approach to PS5's architecture tells me they don't quite see it that way! 

 

I dunno; Shinobi on Reset (pretty reliable insider) said people would get excited to see the price once all the details have emerged. I don't think that means it's like the PS3 which was technically a good deal for the 599 US Dollars but required people to get 17.3 jobs.

[Keyser_Soze]

13 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I'll stop buying consoles

[Mr.Vic20]

7 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

 

I dunno; Shinobi on Reset (pretty reliable insider) said people would get excited to see the price once all the details have emerged. I don't think that means it's like the PS3 which was technically a good deal for the 599 US Dollars but required people to get 17.3 jobs.

I see that how I've phrased my comment can be easily misconstrued. What I mean is that the Architecture is sufficiently unique that if Sony wanted to port their exclusives to PC, it would take a few years for most PC gamer's hardware to match what would be needed to make that happen, due to the high level of customized focus on system bus/through put. I think the price of the PS5 will be fairly reasonable. Sorry for the confusing wording.  

[SaysWho?]

Just now, Mr.Vic20 said:

I see that how I've phrased my comment can be easily misconstrued. What I mean is that the Architecture is sufficiently unique that if Sony wanted to port their exclusives to PC, it would take a few years for most PC gamer's hardware to match what would be needed to make that happen, due to the high level of customized focus on system bus/through put. I think the price of the PS5 will be fairly reasonable. Sorry for the confusing wording.  

 

I'm gonna have to think about whether or not to forgive you.

 

Or maybe let @Keyser_Soze be the judge of whether I should.  

[Mr.Vic20]

Just now, Keyser_Soze said:

I feel like we need to institute a policy around here of no "Cruze bys" before breakfast! 

[Keyser_Soze]

4 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

Or maybe let @Keyser_Soze be the judge of whether I should.  

[Mr.Vic20]

3 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Whelp, this was unexpected, but there is naught to do but to comply with the will of the people! I love you all! 

 

[SaysWho?]

2 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Whelp, this was unexpected, but there is naught to do but to comply with the will of the people! I love you all! 

 

 

Too late.

 

[Mr.Vic20]

[Brian]

Spiderman 2 rumors say it will be revealed this summer and release 2021. If true, a great game to reveal next to the PS5 hardware showcase. 
 

Reddit

 

Spoiler

Holiday 2021 release date, probably September like PS4 Spiderman was.

Reveal this Summer.

 

No online co op. Completely single player.

 

Queens and Brooklyn. Will feature new gameplay mechanics to facilitate the low building traversal.

 

Set during Winter. Set approx 5-6 months after the first game. Peter is still mourning Aunt May and constantly reminds himself of what happened. MJ and him live together but she is away for the entire first act of the story.

 

Oscorp is attempting to Clone certain DNA to build a super soldier. Goes wrong. New villains spawn from this.

Harry Osborn will become Venom but it's a unique take on the character my source said.

 

Carnage and Mysterio are in the game.

Eddie Brock is in the game and a major character.

 

Miles is playable in sections of the game. They're still unsure wheather to let the player free roam as him but it isn't being thrown out completely just yet.

 

Think of Arkham Knight's system where you could switch to the other Bat family characters in certain situations. Same thing here. Not very original but it is fun.

 

A new "Web-Chain" mechanic is how my contact named it. You can basically chain together web "zips" so when you reach a point, he immediately zips to the next and so on.

 

Web swinging overhauled. They've gone all out on the animation tech this time, so we won't see the same animation as much, more variety, not only are they bringing the animations from PS4 over for the swing releases, they're adding MANY MANY MANY more. They have like 2 animators devoted completely and solely to the web release animations throughout the entire development cycle.

There will be three swing modes. Realistic, Arcade and Hybrid. (Naming still not final). Realistic is very Spider-Man 2-esque in that it's just pure physics. Arcade is a little "fake" assistance. and hybrid is a merge of the two, basically PS4's swinging.

 

[SaysWho?]

2 minutes ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

Spiderman 2 rumors say it will be revealed this summer and release 2021. If true, a great game to reveal next to the PS5. 
 

Reddit

 

  Hide contents

Holiday 2021 release date, probably September like PS4 Spiderman was.

Reveal this Summer.

 

No online co op. Completely single player.

 

Queens and Brooklyn. Will feature new gameplay mechanics to facilitate the low building traversal.

 

Set during Winter. Set approx 5-6 months after the first game. Peter is still mourning Aunt May and constantly reminds himself of what happened. MJ and him live together but she is away for the entire first act of the story.

 

Oscorp is attempting to Clone certain DNA to build a super soldier. Goes wrong. New villains spawn from this.

Harry Osborn will become Venom but it's a unique take on the character my source said.

 

Carnage and Mysterio are in the game.

Eddie Brock is in the game and a major character.

 

Miles is playable in sections of the game. They're still unsure wheather to let the player free roam as him but it isn't being thrown out completely just yet.

 

Think of Arkham Knight's system where you could switch to the other Bat family characters in certain situations. Same thing here. Not very original but it is fun.

 

A new "Web-Chain" mechanic is how my contact named it. You can basically chain together web "zips" so when you reach a point, he immediately zips to the next and so on.

 

Web swinging overhauled. They've gone all out on the animation tech this time, so we won't see the same animation as much, more variety, not only are they bringing the animations from PS4 over for the swing releases, they're adding MANY MANY MANY more. They have like 2 animators devoted completely and solely to the web release animations throughout the entire development cycle.

There will be three swing modes. Realistic, Arcade and Hybrid. (Naming still not final). Realistic is very Spider-Man 2-esque in that it's just pure physics. Arcade is a little "fake" assistance. and hybrid is a merge of the two, basically PS4's swinging.

 

 

I've no idea how reliable the source is, but I know one of Kinda Funny's hosts said Spidey 2 is coming way sooner than we'd think (it was some episode from the second half of 2019, I forget which). So it wouldn't surprise me regardless if this is a 2021 game.

[SaysWho?]

 

 

Some developer reactions.

 

Developer on Reset:

 

"What John is saying sounds pretty right to me! I don't want to down play GPU power, but I promise everybody that you will be absolutely blown away by visuals on both consoles. However, the SSDs are the big difference when coming into this gen. We're not talking about "load times" in the classic sense. That's an antiquated way of thinking about data coming from your hard drive. For the last 10+ years we've been streaming worlds on the fly. The problem is that our assets are absolutely huge now, as are our draw distances, and our hard drives can't keep up. It means that as you move through the world we're trying to detect and even predict what assets need loading. Tons of constraints get put into place due to this streaming speed.

 

An ultra fast drive like the one in PS5 means you could be load in the highest level LOD asset for your models way further than you could before and make worlds any way you want without worry of it streaming in fast enough. The PS5 drive is so fast I imagine you could load up entire neighborhoods in a city with all of their maps at super high resolution in a blink of an eye. It's exciting. People don't realize that this will also affect visuals in a big way. If we can stream in bigger worlds and stream in the highest detail texture maps available, it will just look so much better.

 

I think the Xbox drive is also good! The PS5 drive is just "dream level" architecture though."

 

 

 

 

[best3444]

I haven't read or followed this thread. Can someone answer this... Which console will be more powerful?

[JPDunks4]

Not being a very tech savy person, everything yesterday was really overkill for me. Didn't understand 99% of it.  

 

I wish they had some tech demo's of what they meant in regards to what the SSD will actually do to deliver an improved experience, kind of similar to that Spiderman demo that was captures via cellphone months ago.  I kind of understand what they mean in regards to improving game design, but until I actually see it shown in real time, and compare it to what a game without those capabilities would have to do to work around the slower speeds, it just doesn't mean much to me yet. 

 

I understand the presentation was meant for Developers though, but as soon as they realized it was going to be a Youtube video type reveal, they should have adapted the way it was presented.

 

I am a sucker for good game audio, and feel its generally not given enough focus or attention compared to graphics.  Obviously a lot of the audio stuff went over my head, but to see such a focus on it is exciting once they can actually kind of show and prove the difference all those technical words mean in delivering a better experience in the real world. 

 

I don't own a ton of old PS4 games, but the sense that Backwards Compatibility still felt like it was such an afterthought is kinda disappointing.  MS is already showing that a lot of Xbox One games will probably be playable at higher resolutions, like native 4k for games that weren't ever designed to do 4k, and that essentially entire catalog of games will be playable right away.  Sony is working on maybe getting 100 games playable day one?  I've seen rumors the entire PS4 will play Day 1, but only 100 will get the "Boost".  I couldn't really find any real clarification on that, and Sony's blog sounds like it's just gonna be around 100 day one, with more coming over time.  Kind of like when BC was first introduced on XB1.

[Mr.Vic20]

3 minutes ago, best3444 said:

I haven't read or followed this thread. Can someone answer this... Which console will be more powerful?

With 1st party titles, Sony will likely have the edge, but for most 3rd party titles they will likely be virtually identical and both will look amazing!