@BlueOcean Oh, I agree TLOU Part II clearly isn't next-gen. It's designed with modern tech in mind. But advanced lighting doesn't matter if it doesn't affect the visual presentation dramatically. TLOU Part II looks incredible. It LOOKS like what I'd expect a next-gen game to look like. Is most of that smoke and mirrors? Sure. But I don't think that takes away from the achievement.
People don't care about what technologies are powering Halo. They just want a new game on their $600 Xbox Series X to look gorgeous, and, regardless of what it has going for it, it's a very 'blah' looking game. I've heard people give the excuse that it's an open world title, but open world games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Ghost of Tsushima, and Horizon Zero Dawn are gorgeous as well.
@NEStalgia Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for stale franchises like Halo and Star Fox to mix things up? I don't care how good the texture quality is: if you're designing games with the aesthetics of an original Xbox game, they're not going to shine on more powerful hardware.
My point is that I think addressing ray-tracing, texture quality, etc. is only going to have a limited impact on this series.
@Dezzy Now I see what you mean . Yes, if you have a game with small rooms, it could work but I still think that dynamic works much better because static lighting has too many inconsistencies and doesn't interact with the models and moving objects.
@NEStalgia Nah. Death Stranding doesn't look like a last gen game to me. At first sight the environments can be quite empty or even bland. But they are incredibly detailed. The draw distance is incredibly, and the level of far distance rendering is great as well, as are the ground textures. It's just not the ''here's a pretty forest'' type of game.
Tsushima is the complete opposite actually. Looks great on screenshots, but if you're looking close, you can see the seams and tell how it's falling apart. Not trying to knock the game, but it lacks a lot of the small details that some other games have. Clipping, collision problems like characters walking an inch or two off the ground, etc.
Both are valid approaches for a game, it just depend what they focus on.
@Dezzy@BlueOcean Static lighting vs dynamic lighting completely depends on what the game is trying to achieve. Open world games can benefit from dynamic lighting, but if there's no active day-night cycle, static lighting can save a lot of memory. It requires a lot more work as well, but it can make scenes look better. Like, there's no point in the next 3D Mario game having dynamic lighting for example. It probably looks a lot better without it too.
@Ralizah Yes and so does Uncharted 4 because Naughty Dog can do impressive visuals but they're not alone as Crystal Dynamics, Playground and The Coalition do as well. I don't think that Halo Infinite looks bad and I'm not even a Halo fan. Texture quality is actually good, it's the current lighting that makes them look flat. I wish people watched the video I posted! 343 Industries still have some work ahead and the they admitted that. Art style? Yes, it can be divisive.
@NEStalgia That and also that it's much easier to have Spider-Man ready for launch which is ironically a PS4 semi-sequel with half the content. Sony is rushing a game to sell PS5 later this year while Microsoft is probably rushing the new Xbox so it has a chance against PS5.
It depends what people notice though really. If someone doesn't notice the difference between 2 effects, and one is a lot cheaper to run (therefore leaving resources for other things), I think you'd have to say the cheaper one is better.
It's not even necessarily just small rooms. Xenoblade X used prebaked directional lighting and shadows on its landscapes, (in a game that had a day/night cycle) and I guarantee almost no-one noticed the difference. They just did a great job of hiding it. It was probably necessary to get a game like that running on the Wii U!
@BlueOcean I actually watched that video. I watch most of DF's videos. What I found funny is that the ray-tracing really didn't do much for the image quality of Metro Exodus in their comparison shots. And I'm not expecting a similarly dramatic shift in Halo's look, either.
@Ralizah I've said over on PureXBox a few times (yes, I go there, no I won't touch PushSquare with a 300ft pole, even if it's been sterilized in pure hydrochloric acid first...) that I don't understand pushing Halo as a system seller. I see it as a very "B" franchise, but a fan favorite. "A better Killzone" in a sense (even though Killzone is the Gears clone.) I think it was a mistake to try to make it the "Mario" of the console, and I think MS truly overestimates the market power of the Halo brand in 2020.
All that being said, I saw the presentation for Infinite....honest to goodness gameplay, not brief trailers....and I was impressed with the game. It just looks fun. Pure arcade action. Sort of Halo: Combat Evolved: Zero. A remake in a way of the first game with modern design, which is what the first worked hard to create before doing so was really possible. The first game was ruined by the Flood. It was a cool story element, but a terrible gameplay element that broke the great rock-paper-scissors gameplay that made early game combat so tight. I could see that demo looping on a cabinet in an arcade in my head. You could say late 90's arcades isn't what next gen is about. But you could also say Dreamcasts shouldn't be selling for god-money on eBay, yet they do.
Maybe it's the Nintendo philosophy in me talking, or maybe it's just because it's the only game from all the conferences short of Rogue Squadron that showcased much honest gameplay, but a fun arcade action game loop tops "super amazing next gen graphics."
The art style works against it in a way....but at the same time I don't think it needs reinvention. The "world" of Halo has a certain look. If it were to be made into a comic strip, would we expect it would look much different? I think there's some very conflicting expectations with gamers. Should "next gen" Halo, Starfox whatever look like the best Halo look it can look like? Or should it redefine what Halo looks like simply to meet industry generated expectations of what "next gen" is supposed to look like?
You've said you prefer most indie games to most AAA games. Clearly you're not graphics driven, so you understand all that. But the problem is, what is it the market is demanding here? Great games? Justification to buy an expensive box? And if the latter.....that's the whole point of the XBox strategy, they're not trying to make you justify the box, they're just offering different boxes and services to play the games on. They trying to make you buy games or access passes to games regardless of what box you play it on. It's Sony that wants you to justify the box. Are we really at the point of consumerism where even at the start of the Second Great Depression any fan with enough cash is rejecting the notion of "here's a great game you can play on any level of hardware" in exchange for "we want you to make us feel like we're missing something if we don't run the treadmill of latest & greatest?" "We want to be abused and shamed into buying whatever new MacGuffin you put under our nose!"
Or do people just want a tech demo to puff their chests out with and say "see, hundreds of dollars bought me the BEST, and I have the screenshots to show on Instagram to prove it!"
I'm not anti-Sony or anti-MS but this whole Halo-Gate (heh heh) has my head spinning with just what gamers want and how depraved the market is. I'm not upset with Sony or Microsoft. I'm upset with gamers' twisted idea of what they want.
@NEStalgia You're upset, I just get tired about all this, sometimes. And I fully agree with all your sentiments in this regard. I came away from the showcase feeling pretty satisfied about how the new generation of Xbox is shaping up, but all that all but instantly evaporated like snow under the sun when I entered the various comments sections a mere couple of hours later, leaving me with several questions, such as: "did I just watch a completely different showcase?", "what the hell were they expecting?" and/or "how realistic are people's expectations concerning ACTUAL next gen hardware vs what they think it should be?".
People that were expecting to be wowed/blown away, were always going to be disappointed, because we're never ever going to see another jump like going from SD to HD, so it's still about diminishing returns, meaning it's about subtlety and details, which is what the full use of things like HDR, ray tracing and/or dynamic lighting is going to give us. (I say "full use" because we obviously already have HDR this generation, as well as dynamic lighting).
Sometimes, it annoys me to no end that people don't see or understand that, also because it ruins my personal sentiments. It's like those people that ruin the mood at parties, only focusing on what was wrong with something or on what they DIDN'T get, instead of looking at the upside of things.
And besides all that, I also feel that none of us are able to truly judge the Series X until we see it in person, seeing as we still have to take YouTube's horrible compression algorithm into account. Even with 4K streams/uploads, you're looking at a minimum of between 7 and 12 percent overall quality loss from the original raw video material. In full HD, it can even go up to as high as 20 percent, so it's not fully representative of what we're actually going to get, only marginally indicative at best. That is also why it's really not the best idea to draw final conclusions from only having watched indirect and/or uploaded footage.
But then again: that's only my two cents, so yeah...
Especially if it's an early build of a game with a certain aesthetic that is considered dated now.... Eh, I'm still going to try the ones that interest me
This bit is interesting. Maybe fan uproar of "we want to be sold expensive things because rich boys want their toys" has changed some XBox plans for the worse:
Ugh. I'm starting to hate gamers as much as I hate the general population.
Also @Ralizah, apparently Avowed is set in the Pillars of Eternity universe, which I hadn't realized. So it's AAA-budget PoE 3D. That alone is something to be excited for. And more and more I'm thinking I'll play it on xCloud. Huzzah for streaming!
@NEStalgia I think what people aren't considering is release date. Forza Motorsport, Avowed, Everwild, Hellblade 2 and State of Decay 3 are probably releasing 2022 onwards. Maybe Forza is Holiday 2021 if the 4 year licensing situation applies to Forza Motorsport 7 but apart from that I'm expecting the others to be 2022/2023.
Well, since they were still working on Outer Wilds & now on Grounded, I guess we'd better not expect Avowed too quickly, so that one makes sense .... We'll see about the others, though
@DarthNocturnal Obsidian, when they were the bulk of Black Isle, ran circles around Bethesda and TES. The death of BI and Bioware is what gave TES the chance to rise up around the time of Morrowind. You're right, it's sort of their shot against TES, while Outer Worlds is their shot against "Fake Fallout" from the originators, but it's a bit deper than that, especially now knowing it's set in the PoE world.
It's a really convoluted history going on. You have to go back with Obsidian and inExile back as one as Black Isle/Interplay. BI were the kings of D&D based games, and therefore the CRPG at large. Wizardry aside, that was the root of the CRPG (and thus the JRPG as well.)
So in the day there was (also available on Switch and XBox) Baldur's Gate, BG2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, NwN2, IwD2, (all using the D&D Forgotten Realms license.) There was also the one hit wonder Planescape: Torment, beloved but abandoned, using the D&D: Planescape license.
D&D was getting very expensive to license. Black Isle (inExile + Obisdian, today) was responsible for IwD, Fallout, Fallout 2, Planescape Torment. Bioware worked with Black Isle on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. Bioware gets all the credit but the made the engine all these games were based on. The scenario writing and design was more a product of Black Isle (Obsidian + inExcile) than it was Bioware.
Bioware moved on to try one more run at a D&D license with Neverwinter Nights. Then they created Dragon Age to be a license-free replacement for D&D: Forgotten Realms moving forward (they actually did NwN in conjunction with working on DA, which they started working in, presumably with Black Isle before Interplay fell apart and they went to Atari, then to MS, then to EA.
Obsidian as we now know them "cleaned up" the mess of NwN with a much more traditional NwN2, and also did Icewind Dale 2. From there they also dropped the D&D licenses and created Pillars of Eternity as a license-free replacement for D&D (with a bit of Planescape mixed in.) Meanwhile inExile created Torment: Tides of Numenera to pick up the Planescape games without licensing D&D.
So we now have 3 companies and 3 "new" IPs that were all created to avoid the licensing fees and combat restrictions of D&D licences they all shared while they were comprising (or in Bioware's case, collaborating with) Black Isle. Bioware/Dragon Age, inExile/Torment-Numenera, Obsidian/Pillars of Eternity, all replacing the D&D games of the Black Isle days they all worked in (Plus Obsidian/Outer Worlds to replace Fallout that got sold out from under them to Bethesda, their former inferior rival....)
Avowed is, apparently, PoE. Which means this is basically "The AAA Baldur's Gate 3D open world game" that never was. Or "Dragon Age: Origins if it had been made by the good scenario writers that made Baldur's Gate great rather than the crummy scenario designers that made the engine and gameplay systems" Being "the other half" of the BG creators, technically speaking, Avowed is more a competitor to Dragon Age, it's sister-spinoff, than to TES.
It's really confusing, because we have a 25 year history across multiple companies splitting in multiple directions all creating their own IPs to avoid royalty payments while trying to recreate the same 4 games they worked on together, more or less in the 90's and '00s.
@Grumblevolcano Maybe....if so it cements the idea that XSeX is rushed and really shouldn't be launching now, it would have been better one-upping Sony in a year or two. XSeX-SeX coming 2024? Still, it seems like more than that. The websites listed X1, and now they're removing the X1 moniker after the fan backlash as though retargeting it. What you say almost connotes they have no more 1st party games coming than Halo and Grounded in the next 2 years, which contradicts their 1st party release every 5 months statement.
Well, since I liked at least the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate, etc, @NEStalgia ... & Pillars of Eternity! Although I like the Dragon Age games, as well I'll certainly keep my eye on Avowed
You know, all this bitching about Halo Infinite (and I don't mean on Nintendo Life) just makes me want to play the game a lot more, for the sake of giving it the chance it deserves and I'm not even a huge Halo fan 🤣.
@NEStalgia Hey, did you pressed "ignore" on me? I agreeing with you on the points you made, but no positive reaction? I don't know how to communicate with you...
Okay, I know, that was a REALLY bad impression of a certain NLife member, but I just couldn't help myself, since I did agree with you...
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