Yeah, the mood I get from Microsoft vs. Sony on this front is that Microsoft is pretty excited about backwards compatibility, and Sony is sort of doing it begrudgingly for parity’s sake.
I haven’t looked into it enough to know if that produces an actual measurable difference in the end product, though. It certainly does set a tone.
How can they rerelease Bloodborne as a remaster if they update the original version for free?
I get that they’re not a software company but imagine the goodwill if they just shipped a fucking PS2 emulator.
I’m not sure Sony understands goodwill as a concept that could actually affect their bottom-line.
i’m no fancy big city lawyer, but would a game as dependant on timing as bloodborne need a whole bunch of reworking if you were to increase the framerate?
like, isn’t that the reason it’s locked at 30 in the first place, because any instability would mess things up?
japanese developers tended to code the logic into the framerate until very recently which makes simple frame interpolation for animation purposes harder but luckily 30 is a linear multiple of a lot of other framerates you might want to vsync to
unfortunately there are probably parts of the engine that are much less efficient than others meaning you can’t necessarily just target 60 on hardware that’s 2x as powerful
Except in Bloodborne’s case, we know it could be unlocked and brute forced up.
idk, but is selling the remastered version 70.5 HD+4k GotY, wait, GotD actually a viable business-case?
last ten years or so I’ve bought just a handful of titles more than once, rest of them for bargain-price levels, i. e. <20 bucks. The exceptions are SotC, PS3/PS4 version, FFCC, PrjCars2 and Katamari on Steam which was >20 in the beginning iirc?
guess the HD remaster nomiker tacked onto something doesn’t get my blood flowing, i’m getting old, huh.
Unfortunately I still think yes, because 1) it doesn’t take much effort 2) it has a great margins and 3) the opportunity cost gets better, not worse, by comparing it to updating an old game for free that they aren’t getting much revenue from anymore.
I hope you’re excited for when Sony gives Bluepoint the reins to make Bloodborne 2.
There could be a couple of bugs if you increased framerate (as we saw in PC DkS1), but generally speaking the main reason for 30fps locks is that in the absence of FreeSync, a clean fraction of 60fps looks better than a higher framerate in between 30 and 50.
For example, if you have 31fps, then what that means is that each second, you have 28 frames separated by 32ms delays, and a series of 3 frames somewhere in there separated by 16ms delays. You end up with erratic transitions between smoothness and stutter, which is more disorienting than an even, movielike pace.
I mean maybe I’m naive but if the original demon’s souls played on ps5 without enhancements beyond like framerate and resolution, I doubt that would dampen sales for the remaster, which is looking to be totally different
well, it might affects sales of the remaster here but we’re outliers.
Yeah but does corporate think that is the question.
but doesn’t bloodborne run at some weird 28.5 fps framerate that makes this stuttering extremely distracting if you’re looking for it?
like I thought the story was that bloodborne was just pushed out the door before they could fix that
It has frame pacing issues, meaning that if you count the number of frames in the second, it still comes out to 30, but it isn’t consistently on every second frame when targeting a 60 fps display
I think they evaluate it through a risk framework:
If they do nothing, they spend no money and can predict future sales of remakes/remasters based on past performance. That seems to be working, so they plow ahead.
If they do something, they invest money in patching old stuff and might damage the prospects for re-monetizing old content. In exchange, they get a speculative ‘platform value’ bonus that’s hard for them to measure.
Microsoft made the choice to go all-in on backwards compatibility only because, having divested themselves of their studios, the Xbox team that took control in 2015 found themselves with money but no content pipeline for years. Putting that into backwards compatibility was a shovel-ready project that got them some positive news cycles while they waited years to have exclusives again. And indeed, now they’re launching a console with…no games, so backwards compatibility is one of the only stories they’ve got.
It was strategically similar to Sony’s courting of indie developers at PS4 launch – they had money to spend and their big studios couldn’t deliver for another two years, so they put money into indie exclusives to fill the gap. Once their internal studios hit their stride, the indie funding dried up.
They really should just lock their comments section.
Spiderman Remastered is getting a goofy faux Kamen Rider costume but there’s still no sign of Japanese Spiderman.
I think Sony’s stated excuse for where their indie initiatives disappeared to was all that effort went into courting devs for PSVR. Is that plausible?
It’s a reasonable excuse and a similar strategy – they funded content, but at a level that could only support <$5m projects, so, indies. It’s not what we were told in the year or two of gap between them looking at console indie funding and starting up VR funding. If they hadn’t had a new hardware ecosystem, they would still have closed their indie funding pool – I think their strategy for PS5, where they feel much more comfortable about their software lineup compared to Microsoft, speaks to that.
