Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad we're seeing utilisation at the 66% level. That extra power is going to be mighty useful for VR. It's going to be really interesting to see what Microsoft reveal there.

I have an Xbox One and a Switch. Personally, I love this combination and Scorpio could be a great upgrade depending on the VR story. While I do miss out on some PS4 games I'd love to play, I don't have enough hours to play the games I already have.

The ideological gap between Switch and the rest of the industry is widening. No doubt the Switch is a cheaper platform to develop for (4K assets are a huge burden) but is that enough of a drawcard? Likewise, are consoles like Scorpio and PS4 Pro becoming too difficult and expensive to develop for, unless you are a AAA studio? The bar gets set so high that smaller studios will find it harder and harder to keep up. I can easily foresee a future where the Switch has an amazing selection of first party, Nintendo games and a killer catalogue of indies, whereas Xbox and PS4 own the third-party, AAA market.

Actually it feels like the trend you are starting to see is that AAA studios can't even keep up (aka Mass Effect Andromeda, and other recent high profile releases). The graphics burden just seems too high that everything else suffers.

But it's not all bad. I feel like, especially on the PC, smaller indie studios have been flourishing and some of the best games in recent times are not AAA nor graphical powerhouses.

> Actually it feels like the trend you are starting to see is that AAA studios can't even keep up (aka Mass Effect Andromeda, and other recent high profile releases). The graphics burden just seems too high that everything else suffers.

The problem with Andromeda was animations, not AAA graphical fidelity. I don't think many people are unhappy with the current level of flashy effects, we're mostly just looking at higher resolution assets (which likely exist already).

Animations are a big part of graphical fidelity. Games with lower-detail character models relied more on your mind to fill in the details as characters spoke or made facial expressions (I still remember an incredible scene in 2001's Anachronox where a character slowly smiles, conveyed with the motion of three vertices), but when you have a near-photorealistic rendering of a human face, the animation has to be up to standard. This is every bit a drain on art budgets as the modeling and textures.

Wouldn't then be desirable to avoid showing human faces up close and, instead, explore other ways of telling stories that better match both budget and technical resources?

Insisting on showing a character in great detail when the costs of doing so far outweigh the benefit is unwise.

If your game is a third person shooter which is a sequel to third person shooting franchise you can't really do that.

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