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Another Upscaled Console Game: Battlefield Hardline 225

jones_supa writes Video game developer Visceral Games has confirmed the actual resolution that the coming Battlefield Hardline will run on when it is launched on the Xbox One and on the PlayStation 4. An official message from the Twitter account of the studio explains that gamers will get a 720p resolution on the Microsoft console and Sony platform gamers will get the game running in 900p. 60 frames per second is promised for both consoles, but many fans are still expressing their disappointment that neither of the two versions will be able to properly deliver the native 1080p resolution of the consoles. When development started, Visceral Games and publisher Electronic Arts said they were aiming to use the power of the modern consoles to push the game engine as far as it would go, but they clearly couldn't fit that target without cutting corners. This is similar to what happened with Titanfall, which renders into an 1408x792 framebuffer on Xbox One.
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Another Upscaled Console Game: Battlefield Hardline

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  • Another FPS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09, 2015 @01:25AM (#49213129)

    Perhaps if they pushed the boundaries in other ways, other than graphics? Like Story? Idea? Gameplay?
    Sorry but I'm sick of these endless FPS! And the graphics alone aren't going to hold a jaded player.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      You're asking a industry that been pushed into graphics for 20+ years to do something they just can't into anymore.

    • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      it's really because they have focus groups of old moms who keep telling them that the blurred+film grained + shitted all over with post effects looks better than a sharp 1080p picture.

      that's really the gist of things and why they don't do 1080p. it would have been real easy for them to limit things to so that they could have that.

    • Re:Another FPS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by captjc ( 453680 ) on Monday March 09, 2015 @05:46AM (#49213743)

      Then don't play it. It isn't like there aren't thousands of other games in dozens of other genres to play.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Perhaps if they pushed the boundaries in other ways, other than graphics? Like Story? Idea? Gameplay?
      Sorry but I'm sick of these endless FPS! And the graphics alone aren't going to hold a jaded player.

      Why? There's a rather large group of players who care nought for crap like that. They just want to get the game, and go frag their friends 27 hours a day. There's a large contingent of players who will do just that, which is why games like that sell billions of dollars on the first day.

      And to be honest, it's a

  • I guess they think it's 2006 and with pride at work gloat their $389 dollar machine can still kill my $1600 pc. It's starting to piss me off and I have proof now. Even a $399 netbook has more gpu power than a ps4

    • by Xest ( 935314 )

      Right, but more people are buying console games, just as more people bought iPhones compared to much more powerful Samsung phones, what does that tell you?

      I'll give you a hint: people don't care about power, they care about things like ease of use and polish.

      I don't even like Sony or Apple and I can tell you this. It's not rocket science that raw underlying power isn't everything to the consumer. More often they just want something that's quick and easy to use and reliable. As much as I love Android it's no

      • no one wants a big buzzing PC in their living room

        You say this as if the first PS3 and the first Xbox 360 weren't likewise louder than my laptop PC.

        that takes a bit of time to boot up

        The last instant-on console was the Nintendo 64. Every console since then has included system software that takes longer to start than my laptop takes to come out of suspend and pop up the password box.

        typically requires navigation with a mouse and keyboard and so forth

        The Steam client in Big Picture mode can be navigated with a USB gamepad. Beyond that, if you can text, you can use a Lenovo N5901 Bluetooth handheld keyboard with trackball [dx.com].

        platformers tend to be awful on PCs

        Where does that leave people who want

        • by Xest ( 935314 )

          I agree things have changed, but the earlier 360 models were really the exception, everything else since has been pretty quiet compared to the cooling required in a decent gaming PC.

          "The last instant-on console was the Nintendo 64. Every console since then has included system software that takes longer to start than my laptop takes to come out of suspend and pop up the password box."

          Not really true, instant-on mode on the Xbox One is instant-on and the Wii U is quick to boot.

          "The Steam client in Big Picture

          • If only I had mod points...

          • instant-on mode on the Xbox One is instant-on

            Thank you for clarifying that resume time is now comparable. So neither platform "takes a bit of time to boot up" anymore.

            [Modding] sounds like an incredibly small market - effectively you're bringing a statistical outlier into a discussion about general cases.

            I disagree that only "an incredibly small market" want to mod games. Consider GoldenEye 007 and Half-Life, both ground-breaking first-person shooters of the late 1990s. GoldenEye was for console, and Half-Life was for PC. If Half-Life were a console exclusive when first introduced, well adapted to the console environment the way GoldenEye was, would there have even been a Counter-Strike?

            • by Xest ( 935314 )

              "I disagree that only "an incredibly small market" want to mod games."

              You're changing the discussion now though, there's a difference between modding in general and modding platformers. Modding FPS on the PC works well because FPS games on the PC work well. That doesn't change the fact that platformers on the PC don't typically work well however.

              "would there have even been a Counter-Strike?"

              Probably yes, because CounterStrike was just an evolution of Action Quake and Special Forces Quake.

              "Locked-down tablet

              • You're changing the discussion now though, there's a difference between modding in general and modding platformers.

                Consider the following statement, derived from the present status quo: "Platformers, fighting games, and platform fighters ought not to be moddable, and startup developers ought not to have the ability to develop original games in these genres." Do you agree? If so, why?

                That's a laptop with a keyboard, not a tablet. I don't really know what your point is here.

                My point is that I was disappointed that tablets killed the 10 inch size of laptops when 10 inch was my optimal size.

                Again, it's entirely about the best tool for the job

                In principle, I agree that one ought to use the best tool for the job. In practice, overlapping requirements appear to exclu

          • I agree things have changed, but the earlier 360 models were really the exception, everything else since has been pretty quiet compared to the cooling required in a decent gaming PC.

            I believe you overestimate the noise created by a properly set up PC cooling system. My PC is pretty high up the ladder with an i7-4790K and SLI GTX970s, but it's also incredibly quiet most of the time. It is capable of getting loud if I turn all the fans up to maximum manually, but that never happens in actual use because it's not capable of getting hot enough to need it. Even running a GPU burn-in test and Prime95 simultaneously, pulling 730 watts from the wall, the GPU fans never exceed 1000 RPM and t

        • My XBOne can boot faster than my gaming PC most of the time (PC is booting off SSD). So I don't get the complaint. I don't have a PS4 yet so I can't attest to it's boot time.

      • no one wants a big buzzing PC in their living room that takes a bit of time to boot up, typically requires navigation with a mouse and keyboard and so forth when they can just chuck a console under the TV,

        still have the fan noise and spinning-disc buzzing, wait longer for it to boot, and still have to navigate menus, but with an inferior (for that particular task) input device.

        A console gamer just fixed that for you.

  • by khchung ( 462899 ) on Monday March 09, 2015 @01:39AM (#49213165) Journal

    As a BF4 player, I would rather they focus on gameplay related issues (rubberbanding, etc), rather than spending a huge effort on getting the last 180 pixels on the screen.

    Sure, it's nice to have 1080p resolution, but it's worthless if the game isn't fun. If the game is fun at 900px, who cares about that last 180px.

    • by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday March 09, 2015 @03:02AM (#49213335)

      I agree. The focus on resolution seems ridiculously overblown. It doesn't help that the press breathlessly reports on it every time it happens. Faux outrage makes for lots of page views, I guess. It's pretty damn clear the current generation of consoles are far too underpowered to render a complex scene in high resolution, so we shouldn't be surprised at this anymore. The developers probably looked at how much rendering detail would be lost to try to boost it to full resolution, and decided it wasn't worth the tradeoff.

      From TFA:

      some of the worst fears of the community are becoming reality.

      720p is really what they fear most? Not bugs, crappy frame rate, day-one DLC, broken matchmaking, overloaded servers, or cookie-cutter gameplay? Really?

      • What it should have said was:

        some of the worst fears of the developers are becoming reality.

        i.e., that they can't market their game as "1080p!" even though most people probably wouldn't notice if they were playing a decent game at 720p instead of 1080p. It's not like it makes your eyes bleed. Sure, 1080p looks sharper, but if I'm after pretty pictures I'll watch a movie. I play games to play a decent game, whether it runs at 1080p, 720p, 480p, or 224p.

        • You should see it more in terms of power. Let me provide you with a car analogy:
          1080p is like 1080hp and 200p is like 200hp.

          Now do you understand why resolution is so important?! POWERRRR!
          An Xbox game with 720hp is obviously inferior to a Playstation game with 900hp!

          On a serious note: in an FPS, the difference between 320x200 and 1920x1080 does make for a difference in the ability to play the game (remember going back to Quake in 320x200 after having played GLQuake?). The same can be said for interface-heav

        • The only time I ever noticed resolution as a factor was back in the old days when I'd take my PC around to a mates house for lan games and he had this ridiculously high res (Like, oh probably 1024, it was the old days) to my shitty 800 , and seemed to be able to get headshots sniping from a distance when I couldn't bloody see him as more than a pixel or two.

          Buuut I don't even take my xbox360 online so...

          • by Cederic ( 9623 )

            Yeah, I used to turn off all the prettiness to get smooth framerates at higher resolutions on Unreal Tournament exactly for those easier headshots.

            Sorry, those more precise headshots. You had to move the mouse across more pixels to get to them, it must've been harder. I was crippling myself really.

      • by Xest ( 935314 )

        Well yeah, but you have to bear in mind that no actual console gamer fears 720p at all. The only people who claim they fear that are people who still haven't gotten over the fact that AAA attention was primarily switched to consoles about 10 years ago now and think that by spreading such falsehoods the AAA world will suddenly jump up and switch their allegiance to PC and only PC making it the one true master race gaming platform.

        It wont though of course, because those devs will just go where the money and p

        • The only people who claim they fear that are people who still haven't gotten over the fact that AAA attention was primarily switched to consoles about 10 years ago now and think that by spreading such falsehoods the AAA world will suddenly jump up and switch their allegiance to PC and only PC making it the one true master race gaming platform.

          And haven't you noticed that it's the European game sites that run articles like these? Whether Eurogamer and their PC vs console comparisons, or Romania based Softpedia with this one. Europe has always been more PC partisan, partly because of all the @#$@# pirates in eastern Europe. They really don't "understand" "why consoles exist"

          I once communicated with a Hungarian online. We talked a bit about gaming. He was a fervent PC Master race sort of guy. He said consoles were for rich kids and said the games

          • by Xest ( 935314 )

            Honestly, I'm from the UK myself but I try not to listen to the gaming media. I've been aware for many many years now how the gaming media is effectively a protection racket. I've seen great games get poor reviews because they didn't pay their protection money and vice versa. Mostly where I've encountered this attitude is here in the comments section of Slashdot. I was late to even hear about the whole Gamergate thing for exactly this reason. When it filtered through to me on the media I do pay attention to

      • The focus on resolution seems ridiculously overblown.

        We don't buy 1080p consoles and displays to have graphics muddied up by scaling.

        • by Xest ( 935314 )

          We don't buy 1080p consoles full stop. We just buy consoles.

          The fact they can do 1080p in theory is neither here nor there, last gen could do 1080p in theory but struggled in practice. This gen can do 4k in theory, but will struggle in practice.

          There's a lot of things consoles can theoretically do but suck at in practice, it seems silly to get caught up on one more so than another.

          I personally prefer gameplay over graphics, and if this game is notably fun then I couldn't care what it looks like. I remember

          • We don't buy 1080p consoles full stop. We just buy consoles.

            Disingenuous, since you know what I meant, and proved that full well in the next sentence.

            I personally prefer gameplay over graphics,

            It's not all about you.

            Assassins Creed Unity was full of bugs, regularly crashed, and ran like shit, but hey at least it was pretty and ran at 1080p right? No, I'd much rather they'd just dropped it to 720p

            I'd much rather they fixed the bugs and I could play at 1080p. The hardware's capabilities are known before the game hits the street, they decide how to tune it, it's their decision. They increase poly counts too much to hit their resolution targets and then act surprised.

            That way I wouldn't have wasted ã40 on a turd.

            You could also have just not made your purchasing decision until after it was demonstrated whether it would be a good one. I d

            • by Xest ( 935314 )

              "Disingenuous, since you know what I meant, and proved that full well in the next sentence."

              Not really, my point was that there's no obligation that because a console can do something, that it should do something for every game. I agree that this generation should be more capable of hitting 1080p on more occasions than last gen, but I don't agree that it should be expected as a given. I couldn't give a toss if something like Minecraft is only 720p if it means I get better draw distances and bigger worlds fo

              • by tepples ( 727027 )

                it's clear that even track record doesn't mean anything anymore in the games industry.

                Having a track record at least gives your startup studio the opportunity to become a licensed developer of console games.

  • by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Monday March 09, 2015 @04:25AM (#49213513) Journal

    There was some Nielsen market-research data published recently on why current-generation console owners had published the console they had. For PS4 owners, the answer was "better resolution", for Xbox One owners it was "brand" and for the Wii-U it was "fun-factor". There's been a lot written about this data since it was published.

    But what I suspect is that it tells us very little about either the consoles themselves. Rather, it tells us a lot about the self-image of the people who buy them. So the PS4 fans are the ones who want to be able to point at the bigger numbers. The Xbox-One fans are the ones who honestly do care about brand (and given this is US survey data, "buy American" is probably a big part of it). And Wii-U fans have a strange obsession that they have some kind of monopoly on fun. Watch the fanboy-wars on any gaming forum of your choice (and they are more vicious this generation than I've ever seen them before) and you will find that each of those stereotypes holds up remarkably well.

    And does resolution actually matter hugely? I'm unconvinced. If I want technical perfection (and sometimes I do), I'm playing on a PC anyway. Some of my favourite console games of the last generation were a technical mess.

    I would argue that framerate matters more for certain genres. For anything requiring fast reactions and/or fine control, such as a shooter, high-end driving game or fighting game, a steady 60fps translates into a huge increase in responsiveness.

    I think it's generally accepted now that in performance terms, the new console hardware has disappointed; promises of 1080p x 60fps haven't materialised. Given the constraints of a fixed hardware platform, I'd rather developers drop resolution or image quality in return for a higher/steadier framerate.

    • And does resolution actually matter hugely? I'm unconvinced. If I want technical perfection (and sometimes I do), I'm playing on a PC anyway.

      Yes, and there you can have proper resolution, and see that it does matter a great deal. Native resolution is clearer.

    • by ezdiy ( 2717051 )
      Amateur LAN party organiser (>50 players) with anecdotal sample here.

      Does resolution matter?

      It depends. When the game demands it, ie frantic action shooter, like q3a or cs and even the slower ones like arma/cod/battlefield, most players will sacrifice visual details and/or resolution till they get smooth 45-60 FPS.

      Conversely games not that epilepsy-inducing (RTS and anything slower than that up to casual gaming), 30fps is often enough and the rest of GPU power can be spent on finer details.

    • Yes it matters, Dark Souls 1 on the PC is locked at 1024x720 at 30 FPS upscaled to the resolution you specify at the settings menu, a modder made a patch to configure that. Going from that to 1080p at 60FPS made it COMPLETELY ANOTHER GAME, a much better one in fact.

    • I bought a PS4 because the next generation of games I want to play are going to start coming out on them. Even if it's multiplatform, I'd rather have the PS4 versions because they do actually look nicer, because eventually there won't be PS3 versions.

      So put me down for "higher resolution" but also put a big asterisk there because I know my PS3 is about to become obsolete soon.

  • by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Monday March 09, 2015 @04:50AM (#49213591) Homepage

    I think all this resolution talk is just nonsense, if nobody told the gamers what the actual resolution was, they wouldn't care...
    Just play the freaking game, and care about the gameplay, because the graphics will look good enough (it's still a major improvement over the previous generation consoles)..

  • This is why for any game I'm actually into I always prefer to play on PC. I've had every Battlefield series game for PC, 1942, Vietnam, 2, 2142, 3, 4. Including all Exp/DLC's except for 4 when they switched to Season Pass style releases. Likewise, most good RTS's are only released for PC, ala Starcraft II, and most of the Command and Conquer series.
  • I'm so fucking sick of it, I'm SO SICK OF IT.

    If you want 1080p ALL the time and 60fps ALL the time then buy a goddamned PC.
    Consoles are not the be all and end all of power, the new consoles are not ultra beast powerhouses, they are affordable gaming boxes, which are surprisingly powerful for the cost.

    I can't believe I once identified as a PC gamer who loved insulting peasant console people. Now that I'm older, I just want to play some games, I really dont' give a damn.
    60fps MANDATORY or QQ!!! :( :( Nope

    • Tell that to my coworkers who rub it in your face how the ps4 is God?

      In 2007 it was a loss leader with advanced technology but today it has an atom like cpu.

      I hope the pc is prime for a comeback as this shows

    • I find it slightly disappointing that AAA studios couldn't be bothered to get the job done right just so they could meet some arbitrary ship deadline.

      Still, I agree. I think anyone who's having a full on rage hardon for this should really rethink their life choices.

    • by Nyder ( 754090 )

      I'm so fucking sick of it, I'm SO SICK OF IT.

      If you want 1080p ALL the time and 60fps ALL the time then buy a goddamned PC.
      Consoles are not the be all and end all of power, the new consoles are not ultra beast powerhouses, they are affordable gaming boxes, which are surprisingly powerful for the cost.

      I can't believe I once identified as a PC gamer who loved insulting peasant console people. Now that I'm older, I just want to play some games, I really dont' give a damn.
      60fps MANDATORY or QQ!!! :( :( Nope! - only 60fps mandatory games, 2D fighting, racing, online fps high intensity twitch shooters.
      You wanna demand 60fps minimum in my single player storyline focused games? Nope. Shut up. Stop whining, stop badgering developers. Go to NeoGAF and cry with the rest of them.

      Look, this isn't reddit, and this isn't the pcmasterrace, so while you are claiming you aren't about that, you use the "peasant" which tells me you actually do believe you are a pcmasterrace. Only peeps in that sub called console users "peasants".

  • So they create a console that is a computer and a year or two in, it's too slow because they didn't travel into the future and grab a GPU fast enough to keep up with PCs. What else is new? Welcome to desktops vs consoles. The next 5 years are going to be a joke for consoles.
    • by Nyder ( 754090 )

      So they create a console that is a computer and a year or two in, it's too slow because they didn't travel into the future and grab a GPU fast enough to keep up with PCs. What else is new? Welcome to desktops vs consoles. The next 5 years are going to be a joke for consoles.

      Or we are going to get another 5 years of lame PC ports and GPU's that never reach there full potential unless you go with 3 4k monitors.

  • Where t is the time for a problem size of 1
    speed = (t(n^m))/hardware_speedup

    A bit of algebra and we get...
    ((speed*hardware_speedup)/t)^(1/m) = n

    That is, for, say, an order n^2 algorithm your speedup from hardware on a similar sized problem gets thrown under a big-ol square root. Such that, if your code sucks, "...aiming to use the power of the modern consoles to push the game engine as far as it would go" won't get you nearly as far as you would hope.

  • A lower resolution with AA enable in some respects is better than a higher resolution with no AA, specifically the jagged corners.

  • We've got 4k TVs now. We had them when the current gen of consoles launched, and yet those consoles, which they want us to believe are high-end machines, only output 1080p; except that they don't even do that because in this, the age of 3840×2160, the best they can give us is 1600x900. I mean, hell, my nearly decade old Xbox 360 and 8 year old PS3 can belt out 1080p@30 for a large number of games. True, many titles on those systems suffer the same "not quite 1080p" issues, but really, did the new gener

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