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For the Microsoft Conference! Seeing as everyone is paranoise about the Kinect watching them, I figured this'd be appropriate.

And here's a quick gif I made of it to make it a bit creepier. I know the contest says no animated gifs, so this one is just for fun. First time I've actually figured out the trick to saving a gif properly so hopefully it works.

Hrm... It animates fine when you click on it. I could have sworn I'd seen animated gifs on the forums, is there some trick to posting them?

@red said:

That's an entirely different subject, and an awfully... subjective one! See what I did there? Take for example me upgrading from a 5770 to a $680, back when the 680 cost about that many dollars. I considered that worth the money, and I also spent another $1500 building a completely new rig with that video card. Granted, I won't need to spend any money if I don't really want to for another 10 year at this point, but I'll probably do it anyway.

Ultimately it should come down to the games anyway. If you're buying the next gen consoles to see pretty lights, you're probably either like me and just want to investigate those lovely pixels, completely naive, or rich as all fuckin' hell so it doesn't really matter. Most of us I expect will either wait until the games come and then purchase the console, or purchase the console taking it on faith that more games worth having will come, and at least they won't have to buy like 10 "must play" games along with the purchase of their console all in one go to get caught up.

I'll be curious how you feel after E3!

I thought about using Call of Duty 2, but felt that I should stick within the same "tech" because Call of Duty 2 came before what we think of as the contemporary Call of Duty engine. And I did include Black Ops 2, running at top notch settings no less. That gallery at the end there is all Black Ops 2 running on my PC with lots of AA running at a ridiculous resolution and all that good stuff. I even spoke about how it was a good point of reference for how far the engine has come since the first Modern Warfare, albeit briefly.

Also, no, it is not an updated Quake 3 engine. That is a fallacy spread by journalists that latch onto headlines far too quickly. It uses a bit of code for I believe the networking from Quake 3, but the tech isn't the same at all. It just isn't.

Quake 2 was probably the last real id Tech based game. Since then, the engine has seen such an overhaul that while it may share a few strands of DNA, it's not at all the same engine. The relation is greatly exaggerated.

Call of Duty was at that event because that event was trying to gather attention from the masses, not from enthusiasts. And the masses don't really care quite so much about visual fidelity as most enthusiasts pretend not to but actually do. You don't need Crysis, you just need to say "hey, it's call of Duty, it's much better looking, and it's still awesome!" and the frat boys, servicemembers, etc are all pretty happy. They probably won't pick up a new console just for that, but it's still important that Microsoft show them that Call of Duty will be available on that platform, for the well off part of that spectrum that'll probably buy it just to have the latest cool thing.

@jimbo said:

Well, Sony showed off much more impressive stuff on their event, and Microsoft has yet to hold an event focused on games. If you're disappointed in the Xbone because of a third party, multiplatform game, that's on you for being unrealistic.

Halo 3 isn't a bad example because like I said, that success came from Halo 3 and Call of Duty combining forces. Remember, this was the holiday of 2007. The consoles hadn't been around for long, and a lot of people didn't see the need to get the new 360 quite the way they did after Halo 3 and Modern Warfare proved that A) the new consoles had some real banger games and B) that the new Xbox Live was bringing a lot more to the competitive scene.Those games both sold systems, and only one of them was designed to. I would argue that the holiday of 2007 is when the current generation Xbox planted the flag, if you will. If either of those games had come later, I think it would have been a very different holiday for the Xbox division.

I will agree that Ghosts won't be as much of a system seller as some of it's predecessors have been, but I was never talking about the game's ability to sell systems, or sell software really even. This blog was mostly about the tech and the misconceptions about the franchise because it's so popular to dislike it.

I don't think this will be a huge system seller, but I don't think it'll be incapable of bringing people up to the next generation. Especially depending on how the pricing for the Xbone and PS4 come out. The simple fact of the matter is that Activision is in the practice of selling software, not systems. The closest they get to wanting folks to buy systems is trying to get first time console buyers into the market, because that expands their market. Beyond that, they really do not care who buys which when as long as they make one of their million versions for the important ones. They will cover any major demographics, including the next generation, because it means sales. Just like they released games on the Wii occasionally. Not the focus, but worth selling for, because if it's the best you have, you'll probably buy the game on it. You're not about to buy the 360 version of a game you could get for your shiny new Xbone or PS4.

I wasn't really making this to address issues with people being underwhelmed by the systems themselves. The blog was in response to people saying that Infinity Ward was somehow being lazy by sticking to their guns with 60fps, something we almost never see on consoles. There were a lot of people who, not understanding A) how real time rendering works, B) how the ability to harness hardware changes over time, or C) just how bad those older 360 games looked compared to the newer ones.

I probably should have mentioned Gears of War as an example of when next gen games tend to really start to get comfortable with the hardware and do some really impressive things. That first Gears of War game looked superb at the time, and it came to the consoles the year after the 360 launched. It was probably the first game that made me look at a console game and say "holy shit that looks great." And then they did it two more times with Gears 2 and 3. And, surprise surprise, less so with Judgement. Seeing a pattern anyone?

@jouseldelka:

Lets be honest now, Battlefield 4 is Battlefield 3's engine with maybe some better assets (Though not much better, look at the hands, look at any of the screenshots showing faces, etc) but mostly just pumping up a bit of the "density" of scenes and a couple of cool tricks, like water "physics" (looks like it'll just be a polygonal version of what's normally a normal map effect though, not really actual physics in any way) and that very awesome fireball effect. It looks pretty nice, but I've already played plenty of Battlefield 3, with lots of AA and full settings and at 60fps. It's going to be tough for Battlefield 4 to really impress me. I'm sure it'll have it's moments when it does, and it certainly will look very nice indeed, but it's a pretty insignificant increase in fidelity. And if the community gets it's way, it'll likely not change much from a gameplay perspective either, just some rebalancing and hopefully optimization of CPU code and networking.

@selfconfessedcynic

:

I sort of take issue with the "Oh it doesn't please me aesthetically" argument. I mean, I don't blame you for not finding it visually interesting, but some people don't find games like Borderlands 2 or Dragon Age 2 aesthetically pleasing either. It's not really fair to say "Oh, this looks realistic but without blowing me away, not impressed." I wouldn't want Call of Duty to look cartoony. I'm happy with it looking like the real world.

As for Killzone, if anything I think it looked less unique and interesting than previous entries in the franchise, so I'm not sure that's a great example. Again, I thought Killzone looked very sharp but it looked sort of like another fairly impressive PC title. Nothing about the aesthetic stood out to me, and the visuals were impressive in the way that the Battlefield 4 visuals are. In a sort of familiar way.

Actually, the comparison image does that! :3 If anyone wants to see the simulated console quality shot blown up, there's always CTRL+Mousewheel!

Obviously? How is it obvious? You've no idea if that is pre-rendered and even if it is likely the only difference is the AA, which won't be nearly as big of a jump as it has been in the past from bullshot to ingame quality, as I've explained. Using the right kind of AA, you can easily erase the majority of aliasing for about the performance overhead of 2-4xMSAA. I'm not talking FXAA either.

And I'm not just comparing it to a 6 year old game. I'm comparing it to the game in the same franchise that was in the same position for this generation. It was the first engine of the generation using that engine. It looked okay, but never blew any minds. Sure gamersyde wanted us to all believe it looked "stunning" and "Unbelievable" when they did their cover story on it, but it didn't, even for the time, except for the excellent framerate. Ghosts is in about the same situation. In fact, it has the added disadvantage of being a launch title.

As well as this, I did talk about Frostbite's evolution and stated that the changes weren't all that different, relatively speaking. If we were to say that from MW1 to Ghosts the engine now produces an image with three times the image quality as MW1's engine, I think that's pretty close to the jump in quality from Bad Company to Battlefield 3/4 (which look very similar, another point I made to remind people who were championing the very pretty Battlefield series as the proof that Infinity Ward is sitting on their asses doing nothing).

I also included the most recent and fairly contemporary game in the franchise, Black Ops 2 running at resolutions even enthusiast PC gamers rarely use with every possible advantage in it's favor including very effective AA and max settings. It's a sharp looking game and even with all of those advantages, it still doesn't have the quality of assets that Ghosts has.

It's like you said: they don't need to sell consoles, just software. In fact, they don't need to prove anything to anyone other than "Hey, if you're buying the console already, buy our game on the platform where it'll look best, and last longest." Most folks who are going to buy Call of Duty probably fall into two camps on that issue, if I had to guess. They either aren't buying and Xbox One/ PS4 early enough to get the game on those platforms, or they are and won't see much of a point to getting it on a console they likely won't even keep around beyond that anyway.

If you think they need to blow people away to sell the game, you're dead wrong. And I never said that the game would or wouldn't drive console sales. Which it almost certainly will, for better or for worse. Halo 3 was given shit for not looking very impressive by enthusiasts, and shortly after it launched along with Call of Duty 4, Microsoft sold so many bloody consoles that there was a genuine supply problem in the market that holiday season, at least in the states.

Sadly, it's not going to be the interesting games that really drive sales on consoles. Enthusiast gamers need to stop insisting that they are the center of the industry. They aren't. Yes, we are the reason the industry is here, and we are certainly instrumental in making it what it is. But ultimately, it's the masses that keep the industry growing. And they are who decide the victories, and the successes. Mirror's Edge 2 will probably blow Ghosts out of the water in every way imaginable, but the sad fact is that very few people will buy a console because of Mirror's Edge because they are sad and have poor taste or are bad at video games and therefore can't figure out how to jump before running face first into a wall. Ryan Davis I'm looking at you.

Really? And you saw that supposedly Dragon's Dogma bit at the Sony event? With the guys in the cave with the torch and the dragon breathing fire?

I'm surprised, if Oblivion was enough to impress you that much, you haven't seen anything that really made an impact on you. I'm a PC gamer with a very nice rig and I was still impressed by things like that DD demo and the UE4 Infiltrator tech demo. Some have been more or less impressive, sure. But there's a lot of really cool stuff going on in a lot of the next gen stuff. Much, much better particle effects, particles that shouldn't be using particles actually being done properly (see: volumetric explosions! how awesome is that?), far more dynamic lighting (potentially even some real time indirect lighting!), reflections, real skin shaders, and all of that at a higher resolution with better assets. Sure it may not be night and dark with some of today's PC games, but I've been at least fairly impressed by a few demos out there. Maybe I just tend to pick up on the details though because I'm so interested in seeing all of the neat tricks they are pulling off in real time.

Well I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'm honestly not that much of a tech wiz, but I do try to know what I'm talking about. And again, I do really enjoy the field of real time rendering, it's pretty exciting especially with us being on the cusp of so many previously offline techniques finding their ways (albeit in "optimized" forms) to mainstream real time rendering.

I also wrote this in the middle of the night so I'm surprised anyone was able to see it as anything but a rambling mess! :p

@psylah said:

NEXT GENERATION GRAFICS

Man. My computer would be destroyed trying to run this. Brought to it's knees. I'm not sure I'm ready for the Next Generation!

Not really sure what's up. I just did a big blog post as my first real foray into the community, and for some reason I can not comment on it. Or reply to threads. Or comment on articles. I'm definitely logged in, and don't believe I've posted 5 times. And even if I have, "Please Log In" seems like a really poor way to communicate that. So did I just not pay attention to the number of posts, or is this something else?

@mrpibb there ya go.

So that's why Levi commercials suck. Guys like this. Great.

Also, watching this I discovered that what I thought were actually like 4 songs are just one, and that's sort of blowing my mind.

Well, considering I'm comparing Call of Duty to... Call of Duty, I think it's perfectly fair. I also think the relative difference in fidelity between Killzone 3 and Killzone: Whatever is about the same as, say, between Black Ops 2 and Ghosts seems to be.

This isn't about proving that the next generation will look amazing or saying that Ghosts actually should be blowing people away. It's about reminding people that, when you consider what Ghosts is: a launch game for a new platform, it's actually not that bad.

I did consider going and comparing something like Bad Company, the first Frostbite game, to Battlefield 3, but I didn't feel it'd really help push my point to much more. Honestly, the first Bad Company still looks really damn sharp. In some ways, it actually looks sharper than Battlefield 3/4. It has it's downsides, obviously, and I think it's actually a pretty good analogue to the comparison between MW1 and Ghosts. The bump up from Bad Company to Bad Company 2 was significant (as was from MW1 to MW1), then it saw another big bump up in BF3 (as did the Call of Duty engine from Black Ops to Black Ops 2), and now it's seeing a smaller step up as it sort of pulls itself up onto the next tier, much like from Black Ops 2 to Ghost. Some might even say the difference between the console of Black Ops 2 and Ghost are bigger than the difference between Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, especially on PC where things like resolution won't be changing much because they were already nice and high.

But people are convinced that somehow the improvements to Frostbite are bigger than those to the Call of Duty engine for one reason: they aren't comparing it to the right things. You can't compare a frame from Call of Duty to a frame from Crysis 3, even if their both running on PC at their highest settings, because one is designed to run really smooth and consistent while the other is designed to make your PC work for it's frames and to look as good as possible at any given moment.

Hey, I was more impressed by the image quality in Killzone too. But that's because it was built with image quality in mind over the quality and responsiveness of motion and input. I actually thought relatively, Killzone wasn't mind boggling because while it ran at 30 and certainly looked nice, it didn't look like it did much that was all that different from a nice looking PC game today, like that Dragon's Dogma demo which had some very impressive looking characters, not to mention all of the gouts of fire that blistered around objects!

My point is that Ghosts isn't somehow less of a jump forward that it should be considering it's a launch title being built to run at 60 frames per second 100% of the time, or that choosing framerate over frame fidelity is somehow lazy because the game looks "worse."

As you said, most people who really understand these things understand that 60fps is a very difficult thing to accomplish when you don't have the raw power of a GTX 680 and top of the line PC components, like the PC I used to take those Black Ops 2 shots. It's not easy to make any game run at 60 frames per second on a console, but I do believe it's worth it. Not just for the better response times and smoother controls, but because it comes with it's own set of visual fidelity perks, specifically that it's easier to pick up on details at a higher framerate because there's more varied data to help your brain construct the image as objects move about.

I'm glad you enjoyed the write up and thanks for the response. I'm a bit of a tech nut and I am pretty interested in real time rendering, so it just disappoints me when people feel that stuff like Ghosts is somehow less impressive just because it doesn't produce as pretty of a bullshot as something like Forza or Second Son. I think Call of Duty's tech is just as cool and worth being interested in as something like Star Wars 1313 or what have you. A little more variety in how folks try to push the bounds of our hardware is a good thing in my opinion :)

The problem is that this pressure prevents people from having basic rights that married couples have. If the governments of this world actually followed the same rules that come along with "free speech" gay marriage would be legal and completely identical to straight marriage other than the orientation of the partners. It's a tricky issue because the people complaining about it will never be impacted by the changes, but the people who are told to "shut up and wait until the rest of the world decides to stop breaking the rules" are actually suffering. Genuine issues are born from the horrible restrictions against gay people. And for what reason? Absolutely nothing. Gay marriage will do nothing to impact anyone who isn't actually getting married to a same sex part- no way, more kids will be able to have a statistically better upbringing because it's been shown that marriage has a positive impact on the lives of the children born in those marriages.

But hey, African Americans got their rights, so I trust we will too, someday.

Are you really saying that because of one idea they had months ago and may not even act upon that does nothing but add a feature, albeit a pretty dumb one, means that Microsoft's going in a bad direction? Does that seem like maybe an overreaction to anyone? I like TV, I must also be a traitor to gamers everywhere.

@legion_: I understand where you are coming from but I think you just have the wrong idea. These people are probably dicks. But they are just trolls, trying to to get this exact response from them. It has nothing to do with their chosen hobby. They do it to piss you off. Its shitty and I think those people are one of the largest problems the internet has. They even treat friends like shit.

Freedom of the "do whatever the fuck without any consequences" variety makes people stupid. But that's just as true when a mother drinks with her underage daughter and never disciplines her or when dictators give authorities absolute power and immunity. It turns people into shitheads, to be blunt.

I have to say, anyone saying it's the same as a PVP server doesn't really understand how Read Dead works online. Even on an active PVP server, you have safe areas and allies. In RDR the lines are fuzzier and it is supposed to be a free roam. It can be PVP focused but to expect it just because PVP is enabled by default I believe is kind of silly.