Incredible Ratchet & Clank Gameplay Demo Reveals PS5's SSD Difference (arstechnica.com) 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Ever since the hype campaigns began for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, we've gotten apparent teases of real-time next-gen gameplay, enough to convince us that these systems are adequately powerful. But the full-blown execution of what "only on PlayStation 5" can look like finally crystallized for the first time on Thursday. It came in the form of six uninterrupted minutes of live gameplay from Insomniac Games' Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which will debut on the PS5 during the console's "launch window," we learned today. Sony couldn't have rolled out a better, more convincing sense of what top-to-bottom next-gen gaming architecture can deliver than this shiny, explosive, SSD-powered sequence -- and so far, it's more stunning than anything we've seen from Xbox Series X-exclusive fare.
THe only reason why I'd get a console is ... (Score:2)
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What about simple ease of use?
I used to be a PCMR person, for years, thought consoles too expensive, and their games harder to pirate (thus raising the costs)... but as time went on, I just got sick of the compatibility issues I'd run into. Random driver issues. All too frequent upgrade cycles. Eventually I switched just because it was simpler. No need to think about closing a dozen browser tabs or if I've got a background download happening, it just works, and at a semi-standard degree of performance/graph
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you play FPS games using gamepad like its special olympics?
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I swear I don't quit anything when I go into games. I have both Firefox with 5 windows and a total of about 120 tabs open (albeit I use Tab Suspender), and Chrome with about 80 tabs (Tab Suspender again). I run terminal programs, remote desktop via X2Go, Twitch, Discord, run at 3840x2160 on a 1080ti, and fire up my game with no problem. Nowadays I tend to switch between Ark and ESO, which I run with all graphics set to ultra. I have even had instances when I run both games at the same time and switch in
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Why would you leave hundreds of browser tabs open indefinitely? To playba game of chance and let all that javascript other people put in you machine's memory do whatever it can?
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You're still leaving all those grenades there to step on next time you click a tab.
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By "spindles" I assume you're talking about spinning rust*? Have you checked SSD prices lately, because 256GB is not expensive at all.
* By "spinning rust" you may assume I'm talking about regular, old-school, mechanical hard drives.
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I think a lot of people went in this direction as they got older. A friend of mine we used to play Starcraft with hasn't had a game capable PC in ages and got an Xbox a few years ago. When it comes down to it, it works with all the games and $400 is nothing.
That said, I stuck with PC. At this point I don't really want to spend hours of my life playing games on daily basis, so I don't need a special device for this. It's more expensive (just the GTX 1070 was like $400) but I also use it for work and other ho
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>All too frequent upgrade cycles.
I take it you've never actually ran games on a modern console.
"you can't use this game because system firmware / the game needs updating, please wait for a 20GB download to finish and the console restarts"
At least with the Switch I can tell it to start the damn game anyways when there is a system update.
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exclusive titles is the entire reason to own a console (assuming no monetary restraints).
e.g., OG demon souls is only on ps3; castlevania: symphony of the night is only ps1/saturn; super mario 64 is only on the n64; etc.
emulation exists, of course, both in the PC and console spheres, but it's hardly ideal (most of the time).
anyway, this has been the oddest console gen reveal ever -- just, much about nothing. at least sony showed actual games; MS showed... a form factor.
stupefying. it's
Convenience (Score:2)
You always know the game will boot up and be playable to the end. You know that the game is tuned to have as consistent an experience as possible throughout. You don't have to worry about an OS/driver update causing an issue with the game. You have a supported system that will always be ready to play and require minimal troubleshooting if any at all and which can be serviced/replaced for a long time.
Re: Convenience (Score:1)
You always know the game will boot up and be playable to the end.
You obviously never played Rambo on 8-bit Sega. :)
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... if I needed to take it with me to places while I traveled. I just can't see console being better than PC in ANY way other than portability.
Nah PC master race still dominates: https://hackaday.com/2020/01/1... [hackaday.com]
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I just can't see console being better than PC in ANY way other than portability.
Let me name a few more for you:
* Exclusive games
* Convenience
* Bang for buck
* Lack of multiplayer cheats
* No need for Windows (although Linux gaming is progressing nicely)
Don't get me wrong. i also like PC gaming myself. Mods are where PC games absolutely rule supreme. Games are generally cheaper as well. Mouse and keyboard are just better for some game genres.
Console gaming also has its place, and it's a bit disingenuous to dismiss it out of hand
Re: THe only reason why I'd get a console is ... (Score:2)
> There is nothing worse about Windows
ayes, there is. Tracking gaming behavior, exclusively, is a limited form of tracking. Dont be obtuse.
Six minutes is supposed to be impressive? (Score:2)
The average PUBG round I play is 20-30 minutes.
Yes, PS5 has oodles more CPU & IO perf than last gen consoles, so the video is plenty pretty, but I don't see what I'm supposed to be impressed by. Game developers have been coming up with different tricks for years to make transitioning between areas more and more seamless. Sometimes it's progressive loading, or quick portals to other areas which are not currently visible, I'm thinking old Quake engine teleports, though Portal & Bioshock Infinite had t
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> What's impressive is that access to NAND flash is about as fast (imperceptibly) as RAM
This is something personal computer users discovered over a decade ago when SSDs were becoming cost effective for consumer grade computing... welcome to the future, console users?
=Smidge=
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I like to claim PC masterrace status here, but the big problem about our masterrace is that we aren't all clones of the perfectly sculpted male / female form. PC hardware is capable of this, but the wide variance in the PC platform makes this kind of feature almost impossible to develop, unless you want to cut off a large portion of your userbase or effectively design two games in one.
I anticipate the only games which will make use of this will be PS5 exclusive titles. Otherwise developers are potentially s
Re:Six minutes is supposed to be impressive? (Score:4, Informative)
What's impressive is that access to NAND flash is about as fast (imperceptibly) as RAM; at least from the perspective of loading textures and other game assets. From the developers perspective, storage and RAM can be treated like one level cache in that regard.
Developers can do that on the PC, providing they completely ignore many potential users. That has always been the issue here. There's nothing magic about the PS5's SSD. It's an NVMe SSD that does inter-device transfers without the CPU throwing it in RAM first.
What unique feature the PS5 provides is a standard hardware platform to develop against and software APIs to easily transfer data in this way. If you're developing a PS5 exclusive it means you have a known standard hardware configuration that you can make work. But if your title is not a PS5 exclusive, then what? Do you develop two different scenes, one providing transition areas (like crawling through gaps or walking down hallways)? Do you throw a loading screen in the middle of the gameplay? Or do you just show the middle finger to the majority of potential customers out there?
Unlike say a quality or resolution slider, this is not something you can easily code one way or the other. It is very much a similar discussion to NVIDIA's RTX "developers no longer need to worry about lighting"... errr yes they do, because not everyone has RTX capable GPUs so developers *do* need to do traditional lighting and additionally provide an RTX alternative.
Re: Six minutes is supposed to be impressive? (Score:2)
"Developers can do that on the PC"
They _could_ and there's the fundamental difference between console gaming and PC gaming.
PC games _could_ support analog movement, but most of the time we get hard up/down/left/right if the controller even works.
A uniform platform, plus incentives from the makers increases adoption of hardware features. In PC world, sure you could do all kinds of fancy stuff, and we used to have fancy force feedback flightsticks with hat switches, twisting axis, and throttles and games tha
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They _could_ and there's the fundamental difference between console gaming and PC gaming.
I get the feeling you read the first 7 words of my post and completely ignored the rest since most of your post is just a regurgitation of what I wrote except for .... :
and we used to have fancy force feedback flightsticks with hat switches, twisting axis, and throttles and games that used them, but things have degraded to mouse and keyboard over twenty years with the occasional Xbox controller support.
Sorry but I heavily disagree. Maybe your tastes of games have degraded. Special support hardware requires suitable software. I'm not going to play a FPS, RTS or RPG game on a flight stick. I do however play Elite Dangerous on a Flight stick with twisting axis and throttles and LOTs of buttons for various functionality. I do play F1 2020 on m
gameplay vs. graphics (Score:4, Insightful)
Very fancy graphics. Looks very nice. And yet, in every generation, Nintendo proves over and over again that it's about the game play, not the graphics (unless you are of the "no blood, guts, and sex = it's for kiddos" variety). I'm all for good graphics, but the vast majority of developers put too much emphasis on pretty and not enough on interesting game play mechanics. This Ratchet & Clank demo looks very pretty, but it's clear they built the gameplay mechanics (the portals) with the sole intention of showing off the PS5's fast loading times. That looks cool in a tech demo, but when it comes down to it, I fear it would add way too little to the actual gameplay. It's a backwards way of designing games, IMHO.
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The last time I played Ratchet & Clank was in the PS2 era, but the gameplay compared favorably to anything Nintendo had at the time, and it was the freshest thing to happen to platformers in that era.
"Blood and guts vs. Gameplay" is a false dichotomy, although I understand it being a tempting argument to make at a certain point in your life, since 15-year-old boys seem to absolutely flip for it, and they are the target market. I've spent the last few days playing Bioshock (a decade late I know) and Wast
Holy shit are you wrong (Score:3)
it's about the game play, not the graphics
What you are missing is that the Ratchet & Clank series has had as good control as even the top tier Nintendo games. It's not just graphics but really imaginative stories and especially weapons, with super excellent controls that are just as fun to play over and over again as any Mario game. Also traditionally they have been great at level design, and know what to offer for repeat plays that make it super fun to replay.
it's clear they built the gameplay mech
Re: gameplay vs. graphics (Score:3)
I'm of the "kawaii toys" == "for kiddos" crowd.
Also, I am interested in other topics than Mario, Mario and Mario over and over again because we replaced creativity with "i.p." to steal even more money from victims. Call me when there's games about grown-up topics. About things that are actually interesting to a grown-up person. With normal non-porno-ized sex and nudity and erotic scenes in them.
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Gran Turismo may be the more interesting game. GT Sport is a lot of fun, even if the penalty system is a complete joke. The demo they showed off had some nice graphics but at least with that series you always know that the simulation part will be top notch as well.
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If it means lowering the resolution to 720p or (shock!) even 240p (think Amiga lowres 320x240), then that to me would be more than a worthy sacrifice. Faithful lighting has an intrigue all of its own and does much more to suspend disbeli
Dammit now I want a PS5 (Score:2)
That said I think consoles are starting to hit the upper limit on graphic fidelity in high motion games like this. My eyes just can't track the extra detail. I'm pretty old though
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There is literally no need, computers have all the hardware necessary to achieve this performance and have since NVMe was released. PCIe 4.0 especially has a ludicrous amount of spare capacity to communicate directly with GPUs. Inter-device transfers without the CPU have been possible since PCIe first rolled out. It just doesn't get used in games to transfer from SSDs to GPUs (but is actively used in other areas like with dedicated video coding hardware).
The PC problem is what do you develop for? You make a
Weapons hud (Score:1)
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It's a mistake to use the hud to change weapons while pausing the game
I think in past games you could also just cycle weapons without bringing up the HUD. But in practice, whatever they did worked really well because I loved every installment of that series and they had essentially the same mechanism. The control scheme they use has been highly dialed in at this point .
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I tend to use the number keys along the top row. 1 for melee, 2 for pistol, 3 for shotgun, 4 for rifle, etc.
Combine it with Musk's neural link... (Score:1)
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Wow that's cool but... (Score:2)
it's Sony right? The same company that made CDs with an auto run script that fucked with the user's OS without permission and installed a rootkit on Joe Sixpack's new computer? Or the Sony that sells users media and the rights to use it, but provides the media non-standard only able to be read by devices they sell?
Either way.. fuck Sony..
Re: Wow that's cool but... (Score:2)
The point is that they did not fuckin change, and never will, except to become more evil and abusive, because that is the result of the equation of "we let them" and "for-profit".
I mean DRM, locked platforms and imaginary property crime schemes already make them, de-facto, legalized thieving organized crime.
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''Surely Sony have done something evil since then you can complain about?''
Not complaining, stating fact. Since then, they've not produced any product worthy of my money [other than to scalp quickly at 3x my purchase price]. I considered it [and still do] socially acceptable behavior.
Maybe the context will help those that don't remember or don't know, how the cancel culture had been implemented for years before social media washed the brains of the masses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Wow that's cool but... (Score:2)
Worst was when the US class action suit was decided in favour of the consumers (no! Customers!) and the judge decided that the 10 (?) USD penalty per user could be paid out (at the discretion of Sony) in Sony Music downloads...
Sometimes, it's not just the lawyers who win...
It's just graphics. (Score:2)
I stopped being excited about that, a long time ago, when game studios became 47 graphical designers, 2 coders, 1/2 game designers and 1/2 story writers.
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For comparative purposes, the excellent game Cupman won several major awards and was created by...
1 designer
1 artist
1 writer
1 composer
4 programers
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Sorry, meant Cuphead
Diminishing returns (Score:2)
Yes, it's pretty. Is it prettier than what we already had? I don't think I agree with that. I'm sure they can do amazing things what that fast SSD, but I just don't see from this demo why I should invest in it.
Incredible how? (Score:1)
Technica up yer Ars (Score:3)
sorry should I be impressed (Score:2)
at these obviously scaled soft edged xbox 360 graphics? congrats sony you figured out a blur filter
What are you looking at? (Score:2)
I'm sorry but this is not impressive at all.
AI seems incredibly dumb. Box explosions are generic. There's so many particle effects going on it's hard to see what's actually happening. The environment looks nice but when you strip away the pretty background you're left with very rudimentary level design. I'm a huge fan of the series and this is... meh.