Comment by spondylosaurus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spondylosaurus | Hacker News Reader

A few things:

- It seems like Sony chose to showcase "improvements" in games that already look pretty good, but there are other games for whom the improvement will be pretty dramatic (I've heard FFVII Remake cited as one). There may be an element there of Sony not wanting to put the worst offenders on blast by showing side-by-side of how shitty the game currently looks versus how nice it'll look on the Pro, which is interesting.

- Fully agree that unless you own a 4k TV, you probably won't give a damn. I don't and don't.

- I somewhat disagree about graphics plateauing, but I do agree that progression isn't 1:1 with hardware. I recently finished Alien: Isolation, which is an excellent game but showed its age in some areas (crappy smoke effects, uncanny facial movement even in pre-rendered cutscenes, etc). On the other hand, Metal Gear Solid V still looks amazing to me despite being just as old—and both were games that came out simultaneously on PS3 and PS4, so they're equal in that regard too. But PS5 games blow me away in areas that even the best PS4 games didn't: Horizon Forbidden West has mind-blowing water effects, parts of The Quarry (granted, many of them pre-rendered cutscenes) legitimately looked like a real movie, and Returnal is just all-around gorgeous (plus smooth as butter, to boot). Little things like non-shitty textures, objects interacting correctly, and halfway realistic hair really add up.

I think there is something like consistency to the look of a game. A game can be 20 years old and clearly be less detailed in every measurable way compared to a modern title, but still look good. Because there is nothing that makes you think "well they tried here, but it just doesn't look good". Or on the contrary, like when programmable shades were new and fancy, some games had super awesome effects in some spots that looked out of place because they seemed to have been added last minute.

Some games really made the best out of what was possible when they were made, the designers seemed to have gone back and forth until everything came together nicely. These titles are timeless.

MGSV is just a good looking game. It's one of those Yoshi's Island titles that will look good whether it's the day of release or 50 years into the future. Characters are well-designed, setpieces are pulpy and full of cold war personality, and the cinematics are all handled with that loving Kojima madness players have craved since MGS1. It really feels like a game that cost 80 million dollars to make, even though the version we all played is technically not even finished!

The real question (to me, at least) is how willing the games industry is to support total direction. I don't usually encourage one-man-band style development, but amidst all the paint-by-numbers Ubisoft titles I genuinely fear the design-by-committee releases. For games to be interesting again, we need to branch out from the current homogeneous identity of quicktime events and cinematics the length of a four course dinner. People gotta make games, again.

> People gotta make games, again

PC seems to be where more gameplay innovation occurs because the barrier to entry is much lower. I'd love to see Playstation make console development more accessible for a wider range of developers.

Here's a fun MGSV fact: the amount of time that's passed since MGSV:TPP's release is the same amount of time that separates the events of GZ and TPP :)

So is the time passed since the release of MGS2 and the time between TPP and the tanker incident :)

Oh no. That one hurts...

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