Unreal Engine won’t have a monopoly of sorts on its new tech in UE5. Lumen is a form of SDFGI which is available open source (and part of the Godot Engine as well), and IIRC it is already used in some capacity in Media Molecule’s Dreams engine on PS4. Nanite again is virtualized geometry, not something that Epic has sole proprietary access to. Of course that’s not the entire story, but it’s just that they might have a specific way of doing these things, with an additional benefit of needing to expose all of these to the public, because it’s a public IDE, unlike all these in-house studios who don’t need to care about those things. Several tech innovations in computer graphics have actually come from in-house studios and open source papers. I think DICE was the first to implement robust SSR, Disney invented Physically Based Rendering (PBR) and open sourced it, it’s now industry standard way of doing materials and rendering, Pixar is also constantly contributing in revolutionizing CG pipelines, like their Universal Scene Description (USD), etc.
Don’t really think Naughty Dog, SSM, Insomniac, Guerrilla and the like will have trouble updating their pipelines to accommodate for all these tech innovations that will become standard in the coming years. Sony’s in-house divisions for computer graphics R&D is certainly cutting edge in several aspects and will not have any problem keeping up imo. This isn’t to fault Epic/Unreal and their innovations, but they’re not gonna be magically super ahead of the rest of the industry, no matter how much middleware they buy and integrate into their tech. It’s however gonna be increasingly easier for AAA to consider using it for their big projects, which is what we’re seeing. But it will not sweep the entire industry, where decades old established pipelines at these big studios will suddenly get thrown out in favor of UE5. Remember when Epic showcased some cell-based world streaming tech as something new and exciting coming to UE5, and Josh Sawyer on twitter said Bethesda’s Creation Engine had that ages ago. I think Sony’s studios will be fine lmao.
Some great points but it’s hard to ignore that not every Sony studio is “fine”. Polyphony Digital might struggle to keep up. Also it’s clear some developers are struggling during Covid and falling behind. God of War trailer didn’t meet expectations. Also what is it like to be working for Sony right now? They give unrealistic release dates, some studios are notorious for crunch, and now Sony is forcing trailers out that are less than impressive. Will there be eventual blowback from repeatedly throwing your developers under the bus like that?
God of War might not come out until Fall 2022. Pretty sure by then the PS5 version of God of War will look better anyway.
And you’re right about PD. But those jokers haven’t been relevant for 15 years. Literally spent 100 years making GT5..then released 6 as a PS3 only game and an absolutely awful Sports spin off for PS4. Meanwhile MS have been reinventing the Driving Genre with amazing Horizon titles.
I feel bad for PD though. Theyre a Japanese developer now living under the Umbrella of Westernised Sony which seemingly doesn’t give two shits about JPN games anymore. Certainly not 1st party ones. Just ones they can moneyhat.
The sad thing is that Santa Monica deserves better than those toxic comments from the PS fanbase, SSM made a great game with GoW 2018 and it is the only 1st party studio that is still focused on very good gameplay mechanics. Jimbo raised expectations to a ridiculous degree with his “we believe in generations” BS and now the studios (and hopefully not the games) pay the price. Hopefully all those who bitch about Ragnarok’s graphics are a vocal minority and the game will do good sales wise because SSM and Cory deserve the success.
Excluding Forza Horizon 5, I agree simply because we haven’t seen gameplay yet for anything from Microsoft’s first party studios. It remains to be seen if it stays that way once gameplay gets revealed and we see how the games will look when we’re actually playing them.
God of War Ragnarok, Horizon II: Forbidden West and Forza Horizon 5 all look amazing. All three are 10/10 in visuals. Don’t see the issue with any of the three.
Yep, Horizon 5 is cross gen and open world racer and is a huge upgrade over the previous game and looks next gen. GOW looks like a simple res boost and a few better textures.
Sony and Sony fans did this to themselves by trying to dunk on Xbox with the cross gen crap when it turned out Sony was going to do cross gen longer than Xbox.
If sony and Sony fans would clam down and stop putting their foot in their mouth this kind of backlash would not happen.
Tbf, GOW 2018 already looked like one of the best looking games of the entire generation that actually ran on an outdated at release 2013 jaguar CPU. Also, it’s obviously not true that Ragnarok just looks like a Res boost lmao. Again, comparing FH5 to God of War is rather uncharitable when both are crossgen while being completely different games with different goals and pipelines. Wasn’t this understood when Halo Infinite was being compared to other “better looking” games? On the other hand, comparing GT7 to FH5? Completely valid, although even more than valid because FH5 looks better being an open world game than a track racer that can afford to look several times better yet doesn’t, all while both are cross-gen.
Horizon 4 also looked REALLY good and is one of the top looking titles for last gen but it’s sequel Horizon 5 so far looks like a major jump in graphics while also being cross gen, at the same time GOW does not look to be a huge jump.
This would not be an issue if Sony and Sony fans did not constantly put their foot in their mouth trying to dunk on Xbox.
The lesson here is Sony and Sony fans need to back down and stop putting things out their in the name of console wars that end up coming back to bite them in the ass.
Sure, I didn’t mean as they would be the only ones using it, but rather that they will have a headstart.
HB2 is already in development since 2018ish using that tech, for some of the Sony studios (say Santa Monica) they will need to finish first Gow2 next year or even 2023 and only then their next project will be switching to a new pipeline.
Those games aren’t really comparable though. There’s a reason why racers are usually graphical showcases. A game like GoW has different challenges than a Forza game.
Comparing exclusives that have different engines, priorities, budgets, roadblocks, etc is largely pointless.
The original does look pretty good on the PS5 so I’m sure this one will too. Still, just imagine if the “we believe in generations” people let this and HFW be PS5 only. They could be showing us true next gen experiences. But when everyone will hug your nuts no matter what you do and all your third person action games in various settings sell 10+ million units there’s no reason to do that.
I’m waiting for an answer as to what people think GoW should look and play like if it was PS5 only
If these games were PS5 only and came out next year. They’d literally look like they would have being on PS5 anyway. So not sure how cancelling a perfectly working version with 120m userbase achieves anything. Except please the graphic whores I guess.
Now if the PS4 versions looked awful and ran like shit. People might have a point.
They are waiting for the Holy SSD that will save us from the last gen restrictions of the mechanical drives. Honestly I believe that not on of those that believe in all that hyperbole know what they are even talking about or know what to expect from Sony’s 1st parties both design and visual wise.
Understandably Cerny hyped the strongest points of the PS5 but to a ridiculous degree so there is a chance that this will bite their studios in the ass in the long run because of the sky high expectations.
Hi there! I hear you about the limitations of cross-generational game design. It can be disappointing when newer games don’t seem to push the boundaries or evolve significantly from their predecessors.