>>11543 >It's a shame, I would have really enjoyed an AC set in Victorian London, bounding around with metal claws with people screaming about Spring-Heeled Jack.
Did this go right over our heads lads, because this trailer came out in May. It's awful and hilarious.
Are they systematically working their way around historical settings to gain popularity with that audience? This seems a lot like "Sorry about you chaps being the baddies in that other one. Here, have a game where you're the main ones in it."
As though reviews are worth the paper they are written on these days either?
Personally I find it's much more effective to just blindly assume a game is shit. You've at least an 80% success rate right off the bat that way. Anything that people tell you isn't shit, give it a cheeky pirate first- It's morally the same as borrowing it off your mate back in the day.
>>20912 >As though reviews are worth the paper they are written on these days either?
They are to me. Or at least there are certain reviewers whose tastes I know to align quite strongly with my own whose opinions could sway me.
As far as I know, Watchdogs was intended to be AC3 and be the end of the trilogy set in modern times, etc. They scrapped that idea, and turned it into a new IP. It went through "development hell" as a result which is rumoured to be the reason it was so poorly put together.
I don't think Ubisoft really know where they are taking this series now, it's just a cash cow they milk every year like EA's Fifa games.
>>20916 >I don't think Ubisoft really know where they are taking this series now, it's just a cash cow they milk every year like EA's Fifa games.
I don't think they've really known since Revelations.
The sheer number of titles has rendered it kind of like a monkey/typewriter situation, though, where they can still put out excellent games even if the series overall has zero coherent direction. Or maybe IV was just a fluke. I guess we'll see.
I don't know for sure, but I don't think that game was made by Ubisoft Montreal. I think it was made by some Chinese code farmers in between hacking the NSA for gloru of PRC.
There was an internal memo that got leaked, I think I'm not 100% on this, where it appeared that there was some pretty severe internal bumsoreness about AC4 getting better reviews than Unity and not only looking just as good, but running better on a bigger map and it didn't come out of their studio.
That game, allegedly, embarrassed Ubi Montreal quite a bit so whether or not they have the foresight to swallow their pride and learn from where IV went right and Unity went wrong only time will tell.
Ubi Montreal's track record in recent years has me leaning toward fluke, though.
>>20918 I don't think that's terribly likely. Development of the AC games has been split between multiple studios going back as far as AC II, and Montreal have taken the lead in all of the main entries, until being taken off lead duties quite publicly last year (the first sign that Unity was perhaps not going so well). I don't see why there would be any benefit to pretending that one studio was doing the legwork, when it was secretly a secondary studio all along.
Quebec are taking the lead on Syndicate, and they were the ones behind Freedom Cry, which I was very impressed with, so I'm reserving judgement at this point.
A thorough search hasn't highlighted any source that mentions this, except unverifiable forum posts on places like neogaf.
On reflection, maybe I'm confusing things as it is far more likely, if there was internal strife, that it was about Rogue getting better reviews than Unity rather than IV, as they released at the same time.
A lad posted a pretty good info-graphic from one of the old PC gaming magazines here once about review scores and how they work, as well as navigating the wording they use in the article to read between the lines.
I can't remember the name of the mag, or find the image on Google. It's old though, which give you an idea of how long "paid reviews" have been going on.
It wasn't really prophetic, it's just nothing's really changed much. Also it would be a mistake to think of this as a problem unique to gaming, I'd wager reviewers of all varieties can get plenty of free meals if they snuffle the proper trouser legs.
It is as the cynical amongst us feared. Graphics have simply reached a plateau.
Between 1997 and 2007 or so, it seemed graphics would keep on getting better and better, forever, until everything was either photo realistic, or if it was more stylised, the artists would have infinite potential.
Instead, what happened is Crysis came out, and graphics haven't advanced signifitantly for nearly a decade since.
Do you even know how they work? You need to render the image twice, so for the same graphical fidelity as we have currently at, say, 1080p you need twice the power.
It reamains to be seen if it will be a boom though, or another short lived fad.
It seems like VR has huge potential for some types of games- Mainly simulators or driving games, the type of game where you sit in a cockpit and so the whole thing integrates quite nicely with the typical way you'd sit and play a game. For stuff like first person shooters or your more traditional third person action/adventure sorts of games, I can see it being a bit less successful. You're not going to get the proper immersion unless they come up with a way of doing full body interactivity practically, and even then, we can see from motion controls that not everybody wants to have to put that much physical effort into a relaxing hobby.
I do hope it takes off, don't get me wrong. Mainly so I can open a seedy VR parlour business that sells under the counter narcotics, getting people hooked on a combination of sedatives and virtual reality escapism, in order to quit my job to become some kind of cyber-punk stock character. But the cynic inside me knows it'll probably never live up to our dreams and stop just short, being a sort of naff could-have-been like all the other technology we put up with on a daily basis.
Firstly, I wasn't saying an Oculus would somehow make your computer run better graphics, that should have been obvious really. I'm talking about a (hopefully) huge market that would benefit from higher graphical quality in a much more direct way than our current TV/monitor formats.
Secondly, you're only doubling the resolution across one axis, not two, and if you've ever plugged two monitors in to your desktop you'd know it doesn't take 'twice the power' to output such a thing.
Oculus Rift places incredible demands on the computer. You need to push a lot of pixels through the pipeline (2160x1200 for the first consumer release) and you need to do so at a vertically synchronised 90fps with very low frame jitter and very low latency in order to achieve presence. The relatively low angular resolution (~20 pixels per degree) necessitates good anti-aliasing; ideally, you'd render at a substantially higher resolution and downsample. Head tracking adds substantial CPU burden, and a lot of physics tricks that look perfectly reasonable on-screen don't work in VR. Fall short on any of these factors and the user will start to feel physically sick.
Bear in mind that the upcoming Oculus Rift is just barely adequate, particularly in terms of resolution. To achieve truly life-like acuity, you'd need a tenfold increase in angular resolution - a hundredfold increase in total pixel count.
With that all said, the primary limiting factor on graphical quality in gaming is simply development cost. The algorithmically generated stuff mostly looks brilliant, but the sticking point is things like characters that need to be modelled, rigged and animated by hand. Racing and flight sims are damned close to photorealism because you don't have to animate any pesky meatbags; a game like LA Noire is a remarkable technical achievement, but feels a little bit silly because all the human characters look like haunted mannequins.
I don't know how to feel about this. I've not played the series before, it's just surreal to see an action-based trailer that features Marx and Dickens, seconds away from stylised martial arts and people getting stabbed in the head.
Doesn't vsync fuck with the low latency? I guess maybe it's not so noticeable at 90-120Hz, but I can definitely feel a bit of extra lag when I enable vsync at 60Hz.
Absolutely, which is why it presents such a technical challenge. In VR, almost anything that interferes with the relationship between head position and the visual display will reduce the immersiveness of the experience and induce motion sickness or disorientation. Tearing, latency and frame jitter are all unacceptable, so the only way to get a good experience is to use graphics hardware with enough performance in reserve to render each frame on time even when things get hectic.
The Oculus SDK does all sorts of clever things to mitigate the unreliable nature of the graphics pipeline. The head tracking is predictive, to reduce perceived latency - frames are rendered based on the predicted trajectory of your head rather than the measurement at the beginning of the frame. Each frame is slightly warped at the end of the rendering process based on a new reading from the head tracker, to more accurately match the correct head position and compensate for pipeline latency. Oculus are incredibly committed to getting every last detail right.
Part of the problem is that GPU manufacturers have been using buffering to cheat on benchmarks. They write drivers that maximise FPS, at the expense of latency and jitter. This is more or less the exact opposite of what you want with VR - a relatively low frame rate is acceptable, but latency isn't. Fortunately, Oculus have John Carmack on board, who is an absolute genius at low-level graphics hacking.
>>21043 >frames are rendered based on the predicted trajectory of your head rather than the measurement at the beginning of the frame.
If it gets this wrong, wouldn't that introduce the kind of frame jitter you're trying to avoid?
>Part of the problem is that GPU manufacturers have been using buffering to cheat on benchmarks.
Quelle surprise.
>If it gets this wrong, wouldn't that introduce the kind of frame jitter you're trying to avoid?
Of course, if the prediction is wrong then you'll introduce error rather than reducing latency. Predictive tracking works well for Oculus because a) it only has to predict one frame in advance, a few tens of milliseconds and b) the motion sensor updates very quickly, allowing for fine measurement of velocity.
There is a blog post by Oculus about tracking prediction at the link below, which includes the graph to the left. The graph shows the tracking error in degrees during a rapid series of head movements, zero representing perfectly accurate tracking. The blue line shows error with prediction turned off, red shows the first iteration of their predictive algorithm and yellow shows the version used in the consumer Rift. As you can see, predictive tracking provides a huge reduction in effective tracking error.
>>21048 Better than Unity, still not as good as AC2.
Some modern day story progression, not much though.
Victorian London very atmospheric, might feel better because it's home country, recognizable landmarks etc. Graphics worse than unity, but more happening, smoother etc.
