Registered: Jun 2008
Location: In Luna's mane, chasing STAAARS!
Any word on whether the 720 will have backwards compatibility for last gen games? Sony had to make sacrifices to make their PS4 but surely Microsoft isn't silly enough to screw over people who played the Xbox 360 since 2006, right? If it does come to that, well, it's been a good run but if they expect me to repurchase stuff I already have via download or whatever, they have another thing coming. Played the crap out of my Xbox and bought 70 games for it. To say that's a low blow would be an understatement if the 720 can't play them and my 360 becomes obsolete.
Registered: Nov 2004
Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
That's definitely a large contributing factor. But I doubt it's just that, I think over all Nintendo will just not do that well this generation. I guess we'll see in time.
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
Bad news for the Wii U. Both the new Unreal 4 engine and the Frostbite 3 engine, both of which will probably power a good amount of 3rd party titles, as of now, will not work on the Wii U.
Registered: Jun 2008
Location: In Luna's mane, chasing STAAARS!
Saw that coming a mile away. Well, not the Frostbite 3 engine being excluded but still not surprising the UE4 wouldn't work. Wii U runs on what will soon be last gen so duh. Doesn't mean the system won't have interesting titles though like the Deus Ex Director's Cut for example.
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
Actually, I dug a little bit further after I posted that, and it turns out the UE4 WILL work with the WiiU. Just with what sounds like significantly lesser visuals than what would be available on the PS4/Xbox3.
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
Yes, I mentioned Frostbite a couple posts above, as far as I know that one is still not supporting the WiiU. The boss of Epic also said that Unreal Engine 4 wouldn't support WiiU, but then backtracked saying that it would, just not on the same level as the PS4/Xbox.
The CryEngine's are always very impressive, but for whatever reason they don't seem to catch on on the same level as the Unreal engines do.
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Last edited by BackFire on Mar 31st, 2013 at 11:10 AM
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
I dunno. It could be that the Unreal engine seems to work on consoles better than the Cryengine does. Look at games like Gears of War or Mass Effect and they run very well on the limited hardware of consoles, where as the Cryengine seems to be really optimized for PC's but kinda struggles to scale down and provide decent framerates on consoles. Crysis 2 and even moreso Crysis 3 don't provide a great experience on consoles, often dropping below 30 frames a second.
Could also be what you said - just familiarity. No idea.
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
I'm playing Crysis 3 on the 360 right now and it dips below 30 frames pretty often. Crysis 2 did a bit of that as well. I dunno if it's the actual engine, or just because the Crysis games have big levels with really long LOD's that cause the problems. Maybe a different game with smaller levels with less to render at a time would run better.
Sounds to me like it was just a poorly scaled game for the 360. They could have done the "fog" trick to keep from having to render so far. To get around the "zoom weapons" problem (where if you zoom with a sniper rifle or something, almost all surfaces are not textured/lit properly), they could make all zoom weapons change the view to a "TRON" type of interface where it is simple colors and surfaces on a grid outline. I have seen implementations like my suggestion done before, partially....and it really would take away from the awesomeness that makes up the visuals in a Crysis game....but that is better than constant frame slow down.
Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Moderator
I don't want to give the wrong impression, it's not constant, really. Just happens somewhat often. It's actually pretty impressive how good the game looks on the 360 considering how ancient the hardware is. The game's still perfectly playable.
Just have to wonder if the game was made with the Unreal Engine, and if it had the same LOD's, would it run better. Since the UE seems really well optimized for consoles.