They can’t. It’s too sweet of a deal when there is an already existing fanbase ready to give them their money for much less work and risk than building a totally new game.
Why? You have to login to Xbox for Xbox published games. You have to login into blizzard to play Diablo or overwatch fron steam, you have to log into EA launching from steam or Microsoft.
So why does a PSN account make you “untrusting”? You just want to cheat on those games or what?
Sony has stopped releasing games on GoG ever since they required login to the PSN. For example, you can buy God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn on GoG, but you can’t buy Ragnarok or Forbidden West.
They lifted the requirement a few weeks ago, but the games still have not been released on GoG, and at this point it’s doubtful they will.
I buy games on epic. I have never purchased a game or have installed gog. Idk get a boner over denuvo removal as denuvo doesn’t effect the games I play
Even if I wanted to cheat in some old God of War games (I don’t), so what? Who does that hurt?
What I don’t trust, for good reason, is that that server will always be there to authenticate my game. Allegedly it requires talking to their server at first install, and that works now in the year 2025, but who’s to say it will be there in 2035?
Splinter Cell: Blacklist came out in 2013. A friend of mine bought it this past winter sale. The UPlay launcher that existed when that game came out has now been renamed and reworked, and the launcher that comes up when he tries to play it asks him for a product key that he was not provided (there is a function for this in the Steam overlay, and we checked, and it was not available for this game). Now I’m sure that he could eventually get it working if he had the patience to wait through Ubisoft support, but A) he shouldn’t have to, and B) what if Ubisoft goes out of business in the next couple of years? That’s not an unlikely scenario at this point, and all the online requirement did was introduce an additional point of failure in the thing that he paid money for. I’m old enough and have been playing games long enough to see these points of failure rear their heads plenty of times now.
The login requirement for the likes of Diablo 3 and 4 are exactly why I’m not buying Diablo 3 and 4. Honestly, even Steam’s DRM, which isn’t present on every game and usually works seamlessly, has still caused some friction for me lately, and every time it annoys me, I get that much closer to only buying games on GOG. The threat of these games getting an online requirement patched in after the fact is enough to make me rather emulate them than deal with that nonsense, if I was so inclined. If they put their games on GOG, I don’t have to trust them, because it’s impossible for them to do that to me.
Oh my god, do you think this is some kind of hypocrisy? If I have internet now and download a GOG game’s installer to my hard drive now, I have it forever, even if I’m in a place without internet access like on a train. Even if GOG goes out of business. Even if Sony goes out of business. Even if the internet ceases to exist. When Blizzard turns the lights off on Diablo 4, that game is gone due to no fault of your own.
The history of sony data breaches. Also nobody wants any of those other accounts either, and diablo and overwatch look boring and manipulative as fuck and not everyone plays those. I haven’t touched an ea game since nhl 98 on snes. I wanted to play horizon, god of war, and spiderman and there is no justification for enforcing log in for any of those.
They lifted it on four games but omitted some others, which isn’t great, and they’ve shown a willingness to patch this in after the fact, so I still don’t trust them. EA did the same thing with the likes of Jedi: Fallen Order and such, so they’re on the same shit list.
I’m with you most of the time, but at least in this case the games are older and they’re still releasing fantastic new installments in the series. (looking at you gta trilogy or whatever that hzd Remaster is)
Making brand new content costs a ton of money, and Sony clearly made colossal missteps in regards to that recently. With this, they’re hoping for what’s essentially free cash
I think the worry is that pushing out so many remasters depletes resources that could be used to make other games.
Not actually sure if that’s true, tbh. I think remasters are often handled by different companies/studios/teams rather than the teams working on all new projects. Although if Sony is tight on cash, funding both teams at once could prove really difficult.
Odd take in this context. The last game in this trilogy was released almost 20 years ago—if they're not gonna remaster this, what are remasters for exactly?
The improvement levels are the same amount they used to be. It’s just that adding 100mhz to a 100mhz processor doubles your performance, adding 100mhz to a modern processor adds little in comparison as a for instance.
Well, that’s what Moore’s Law was for. The processing power does increase massively over each generation. It’s just that at this point better graphics are less noticeable. There is not much difference to the eye between 100.000 and a million or more polygons.
We’ve basically reached the top. Graphics fidelity is just down to what the artists do with it.
Go watch a high budget animated movie (think Pixar or Disney) and come back when real time rendered graphics look like that.
Yea games look good, but real time rendering is still not as good as pre rendered (and likely will never be). Modern games are rife with clipping, and fakery.
If you watch the horizon forbidden West intro scene (as an example), and look at the details, how hair falls on characters shoulders, how clothing moves in relation to bodies, etc, and compare it to something like inside out 2, it’s a world of difference.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
Not really, because pre renders are often optimized to only look good from one side. If you try to make a 3D model out of it and render that in real time in the game world, it might look ugly or weird from another angle.
Any given frame is just looking at something from one side though, this is the case for video games as well and it’s part of the reason why real time rendering is so much slower. It’s an art and game direction challenge to make things look good however you want to not a technical limitation (in the sense of, you can make a video game look like a Pixar movie does today, it’s just going to render at days per frame instead of frames per second)
There isn’t really a conceptual difference between rendering a frame with the intent to save it and later play it back, and rendering a frame with the intent to display it as soon as it’s ready and dispose of it.
Toy story 1 took days to render a single frame, now it could be rendered on a single home GPU at 24 fps no problem, which would be real time rendering.
To clarify my first paragraph. The challenge is not that it is impossible to render a video game with movie like graphics it’s that the level of effort is higher because you don’t have the optimizations, and so art direction needs to account for that.
As far as considering unexpected behaviors, that is technically only a concern in psuedo-nondeterministic environments (e.g. dynamic physics rendering) where the complexity and amount of potential outcomes is very high and hard to account for. This is a related issue but not really the same one, and it is effectively solved with more horsepower, the same as rendering.
I think the point you were making is that potentially, artistic choices that are deliberately made can’t always be done in real time, which I could agree with. Something like ‘oh this characters hair looks weird the way it falls, let’s try it again and tweak this or that.’ That is awarded by the benefit of trial and error, and can only be replicated real time by more robust physics systems.
Ultimately the medium is different, and while they are both technically deterministic, something like a game has potential for unwanted side effects. However, psuedo-nondeterminism isn’t a prerequisite for a game. The example that comes to mind are real time rendered cutscenes. They aren’t fundamentally different from a movie in that regard, and most oddities in them are the result of bugs in the rendering engine rather than technical impossibilities. Similar bugs exist in 3d animation software, it’s just that Hollywood movies have the budget and attention to detail to fix them, or the luxury to try again.
I’ll end with, if we have the Pixar server farm sufficient hardware, there is nothing that says they couldn’t render Luca or whatever in real time or even faster than real time.
Has anyone ever really noticed how samey everything looks right now? It’s a bit hard to explain, because it’s not the aesthetics of any kind of art style used, but the tech employed and how it’s employed. Remember how a lot of early 3D in film just looked like it was plastic? It’s like that, but with a wider variety of materials than plastic. Yet every modern game kinda looks like it’s made using toys.
Like, 20 years from now I think it would be possible to look at any give game that is contemporary right now and be able to tell by how it looks when it was made. The way PS1 era games have a certain quality to them that marks when they were made, or how games of the early 2000’s are denoted by their use of browns and grays.
Oh yeah this isn’t a complaint, because I think it looks good. It’s just I notice it, and it probably is from almost everything being made on UE5 these days. However, I think MGSV was one of the first games to have this particular look to it, and that’s on its own in-house engine (FOX Engine). It could just be how the lighting and shadowing are done. Those two things are getting so close to photorealism that it’s the texturing and modeling work that puts things (usually human characters) into the uncanny valley. A scene of a forest can look so real… And then you put a person walking through it and the illusion is lost. lol
It’s everyone using UE-based mocap tools that cause the hyperrealistic-yet-puffy faces, is what I suspect he’s talking about, along with the same photogrammetry tools/libraries.
Honestly the biggest thing missing in general lighting is usually rough specular reflections and small scale global illumination, which are very hard to do consistently without raytracing (or huge light bakes)
Activision has a good technique for baking static light maps with rough specular reflections. It’s fairly efficient, however it’s still a lot of data. Their recent games have been in the 100-200 gb range apparently. I’m sure light bakes make up a good portion of that. It’s also not dynamic of course.
So, what I’m saying is, raytracing will help with this, hardware will advance, and everyone will get more realistic looking games hopefully.
Games look samey because Game Studios don’t have ideas anymore. They just try to sell 20 h of playtime - that is essentially empty. It’s literally just a bunch of materials and “common techniques” squashed into a sellable product. In the early times of gaming, people had ideas before they had techniques to implement them. Nowadays, we have techniques and think the ideas are unimportant. It’s uninspired and uninspiring. That’s why.
Well I play a lot of Street Fighter and I think I’ve perfected a real winner of a control method; but it’d also be good for Minecraft so I can try and fuck a creeper
Horizon Zero Dawn was a stunning game, I did pretty much the same
I’m kinda annoyed bc my 2 BFFs JUST got PlayStations like for Xmas. I’ve been on PS4+PS5 for a long while now and played both Horizons for free. I really wanted to tell them to give Zero Dawn a whirl just to show what the PS5 could do with it… but for full price? Eh… I’ll leave that up to them.
Excellent post! Any time I see one of these from you I’m going to upvote and comment just in case it gets it onto more screens.
I still haven’t tried the steam deck, but it seems like such an awesome system. I won’t be in the market for one any time soon but maybe by the time I am, there will be a Deck 2.
I’m waiting in a affordable VR setup that can let me run around at home without hitting a wall. Solutions exist but they as expensive as a car and I don’t have that kind of money lying around.
If anyone can optimize Disney’s omni directional walking pad, we’ll be there. I’d give it 3 decades if it goes that way. I’ve heard it’s not like real walking. It feels very slippery. All that being said, you don’t have to wrap yourself in a harness and fight friction to simulate walking like other walking pads. It also seems simple enough, hardware wise, that it could be recreated using preexisting parts/ 3d printing. I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen a DIY project yet.
VR definitely feels like the next 2D->3D paradigm shift, with similar challenges. except it hasn’t taken off like 3D did IMO for 2 reasons:
1. VR presents unique ergonomic challenges.
Like 3D, VR significantly increased graphics processing requirements and presented several gameplay design challenges. A lot of the early solutions were awkward, and felt more like proof-of-concepts than actual games. However, 3D graphics can be controlled (more or less) by the same human interface devices as 2D, so there weren’t many ergonomic/accessibility problems to solve. Interfacing VR with the human body requires a lot of rather clunky equipment, which presents all kinds of challenges like nausea, fatigue, glasses, face/head size/shape, etc.
2. The video game industry was significantly more mature when (modern) VR entered the scene.
Video games were still a relatively young industry when games jumped to 3D, so there was much more risk tolerance and experimentation even in the “AAA” space. When VR took off in 2016, studios were much bigger and had a lot more money involved. This usually results in risk aversion. Why risk losing millions on developing a AAA VR game that a small percentage of gamers even have the hardware for when we can spend half (and make 10x) on just making a proven sequel? Instead large game publishers all dipped their toes in with tech demos, half-assed ports, and then gave up when they didn’t sell that well (Valve, as usual, being the exception).
I honestly don’t believe the complaints you hear about hardware costs and processing power are the primary reasons, because many gaming tech, including 3D, had the same exact problem in the early stages. Enthusiasts bought the early stuff anyway because it was groundbreaking, and eventually costs come down and economies of scale kick in.
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