At least the senseless pursuit of more pixels ends at 4K… right? right??
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haha
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oh no 
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I’ll admit when I went to the non-IMAX movies for the first time in over a year I was surprised at how bad the Sony 4K projector looked but for screens under 20 ft. I think it’s OK
(I know I was watching a 2K master shh)
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imo the real takeaway from this interview is nintendo grappling with the growing pains of large-scale production demanded by next-gen consoles, which I believe is something the japanese gaming industry took much harder than how things went in the west, and nintendo coped by keeping its consoles lower-spec’d than the industry standard and innovating in other areas. by now there’s a fairly standard AAA production model that makes stuff like smash ultimate feasible, but I still have a hunch that nintendo might struggle with today’s 4K/60fps mega-blockbusters. and that’s probably a good thing, for them, because it means they still care about the issues raised in this interview.
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it’s certainly a speedbump
it was set as a target in…what, 2016? Earlier? And even a 3090 can’t sit comfortably at 4k. A huge investment in reconstruction techniques over the past decade have gotten us to the point where a 1080p image can look near as high-quality as native 4k. While resolution targets have remained static (unreachable), quality-per-pixel has gone way, way up. And I think that 4k will continue to be the target for the next 5-10 years. By the time 8k TVs are a thing (gosh I’m glad that stalled out a few years ago), you’ll probably support it by upscaling a native 4k image and being happy with those results; native 8k is at least 15 years away and may never be worthwhile next to the quality of upscalers.
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This is the thing! 60 FPS is more about the scope/scale of the game engine and simulation. It takes more work than the same game at a lower target, but it doesn’t require more assets. Nintendo is excellent about shipping 60 FPS games with the exception of BotW which had a shaky 30 FPS target for obvious reasons.
I hope the huge leap in the new console’s CPUs makes it easier to target smooth performance or at least the option, but I assume there are other reasons for “Quality Mode” like marketing. It was painful to see Halo Infinite put through the ringer last year when all I could think was dang open world and smooth.
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Now it really is a torture scene. My immersion is through the roof 
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Huh, I’m thinking about whether 60fps targets require more or less people and I can’t really come to an answer…I’ve always seen it approached as, ‘this will create much, much more work’ but if you’re structured for it, do you scale down your asset production? I think only at the margins, it’s mostly something that requires significantly more engineering and a tight watch over content checked in.
It’s definitely the new CPUs that are enabling 60fps on new consoles; people have all this CPU headroom and scaling rendering is trivial.
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For sale: DualShock 3, triangle button destroyed with massage gun
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I’d wonder about Platinum and EAD specifically as studios set up to near-exclusively ship at those targets with noticeably different asset quality.
Trying to be conscious that I’m speaking as a layperson and not over-specifying, so thanks for checking me
No, it’s an interesting question and I’m not confident in my answer.
I think it falls apart on our metaphor of ‘5 years behind’ because that’s not really how it works. When Platinum is making Bayonetta 3 on 5-year-old tech and targeting 60fps they’re not hyper-efficient at target old models, they’re still making high-poly source assets and downscaling them - but they have to be extra-careful to be within budget. They’re still using cutting-edge rendering techniques, but they have to be extra-careful to cut corners and find efficiencies to get it to run with a fraction of the calculation.
Choice of genre matters a lot – Nintendo and partners avoid AAA open-world omni-genre because it’s a sucking black hole of assets. Part of what surprised me about Breath of the Wild is that Nintendo actually went for it! and made an absolute ton of assets. But they also flipped the resource load – much, much higher investment on level/challenge design, with the shrines and Korok games and craft behind each area of the world; Breath of the Wild has got to be much more expensive per square meter than the algorithmic Assassin’s Creed.
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this was actually the Wii U, where they publicly stated that the transition to doing HD assets led to a lot of game delays and an increased reliance on outside and satelite studios for mainline games (Bamco were thanked in the MK8 credits and made Smash 4, Koei Tecmo did Hyrule Warriors which was parlayed into FE spinoff and mainline games, nevermind they might technically co-own the Fatal Frame IP, Monolithsoft is seemingly split between “Xenosaga team” and “asset team”)
I find the comments from Miyamoto ironic considering every time I see Pikmin 3 get brought up, the first thing people do is gush over the good looking food in that game
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yeah, I just meant how it’s still a challenge for modern, bleeding edge consoles to hit 4k and 60fps at the same time. it’s increasingly common to expose a configuration option to favor one or the other.
I think it was a mistake to advertise the PS4 Pro/XB1X as “4K” to begin… 1440p is a far more reasonable increment from 1080p and the obsession with “native” framebuffers on the part of consumers (from early PS4/XB1 days when e.g. Titanfall shipped at ~800p) means worse performance with negligible quality benefit.
Big fan of the Xbox Series S conceptually
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They got lucky and hit right when upsampling techniques got much, much better; PS4 Pro’s checkerboarding allowed it to convincingly create a nice image at 4k from 1440p or lower frames, and was a much smarter approach than the Xbox One X’s brute-force and marketing around ‘native 4k’. I think a smaller proportion of Xbox Series X games are native 4k just because they’re spending that budget better.
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it’s funny seeing Miyamoto’s comments on Tekken because the idea that it only needs five characters paints his as a mechanical maximalist
I was out on a walk recently and the port-mortem stuff that came out about Splatoon popped into my head. part of this was Miyamoto looking at the game and seeing that the team had a mechanically sound and engaging design but seeing the idea of rabbits playing paintball and ninja-hiding on the ground with sheets and going “hey this is cool but what your presenting doesn’t mesh with the game you’ve made”
seeing these comments and remembering this makes me think he’s very much interested in a concept that grabs you and follows through; he mentions in that quote about being too caught up on the details or having a hollow framework but it seems he’s just as loathe to have a beautifully decorated room with no walls at all
part of me wants to say he’s approaching the idea of a game as a cohesive whole and not just a mass of systems that are fun to poke but the more cynical part takes over and realizes, especially with growing importance as an elder statesman producer within the company, that he recognizes that it be a complete product is just as important as being a good game
for some reason I was thinking about this w/r/t the idea of licensed games; for some reason Aladdin had popped into my head and I began thinking about how I always found it a little ridiculous that in the Genesis game, Aladdin had a sword. like, mechanically, that makes sense, the character needs a way to defend themselves. but it never really made sense to me, even as a kid, in terms of fiction that Aladdin would be running around with a sword and slashing guards up (an element made even more incongruous by the fact that Disney themselves did animation on that game). the desire for a game is there but there wasn’t a ton of consideration for it as a overall product
i think this is why licensed games died out. as time went on, we demanded more that a game represent its license because we had the means to realize it, but more and more companies realized that the fiction doesn’t lend itself to interesting design or the design doesn’t complement the fiction (the latter is probably a huge sticking point in today’s landscape)
I don’t know why my mind wandered to any of this but it feels good to spill it out
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now who’s going to play Black Clover with me
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that being said, those are an absolute embarrassment so good riddance even if i’m big on preservation.
the new remasters look like they might not actually be the worst thing ever (particularly for the NES games), if not necessarily ideal for the SNES ones in particular.
it does look like they’re uh, trying, i guess? i’m kind of interested to see more i suppose:
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the 8k tv will be for crt royale on a pcsx2 core in retroarch
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