They’ve had this system in Overwatch for months now and that’s still a toxic hellpit. Now I don’t think that the majority of gamers are actually awful. If they were games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which is unrelentingly gay (despite the “go woke, go broke crowd”), wouldn’t get overwhelmingly positive steam reviews. But I do think the execs in charge of Overwatch and COD believe that the toxic people are a bigger group than they are and don’t want to lose them as revenue streams.
So… what happened here? The publishing director at Larian said that they “must launch with feature parity” and that they would be unable to remove the splitscreen for series S. Then Phil Spencer says “No, that’s not a thing. You can totally do it.” But only after a big delay has already caused some media buzz around one of, if not the, biggest game launches of the year. And now they can remove the splitscreen from series s.
So was it a misunderstanding on Larian’s part? Or did they themselves not want to launch without feature parity? I don’t see a world where they wanted to delay launching the product so late behind the other platforms.
Or is Phil Spencer being disingenuous by claiming a requirement to the devs, but then walking it back in public spaces?
It’s probably not that much faster than or efficient than traditional rasterization, but ray-tracing gets exponentially more expensive to absolutely completely fill in the scene. For the RT scenario it actually does make sense. Even rendering out frames and animations in blender you don’t let the renderer go on forever. At some point it’s more effective to let it stop and denoise it. The earlier you can get away with doing that the better.
I feel like the revelation to gaming studios is not that people like a good product, it’s that Larian was allowed to make one without investors demanding it be the shittiest thing since shit sandwiches.