Let me start this off with a question: have you ever played a game shortly before its release and found that it had a number of loading times in-between sections? Now have you ever played that same game on a much more powerful set of hardware and found that the loading times were near instantaneous? This is the benefit of modern day game development.
Back in the day, games only had a select set of hardware to choose from for any given port. Back during the era of the 3rd Generation of game consoles, you had only a very small number of options, all of which were around the same level of power and none of which would support playing your game on a more powerful system. The closest thing to that was in the 4th generation where you could in theory play an NES game on the Super Nintendo, since it was backward compatible.
Backward compatibility is something that every gamer appreciates but rather than dwell on the costs and benefits of that, let's focus on the fact that for a long time backward compatibility was not an option. Nintendo 64's couldn't support playing NES or SNES games due to the change in physical media, the GameCube couldn't support N64 games due to this same issue, the PS3 only had a select number of models that were backward compatible with the PS1 and 2 due to changes in hardware and operating system, and the XBox 360 was only able to play one OG XBox game and that was Halo 2 for some reason.
However, now we live in a very different time. The Playstation 5 is just around the corner and is looking like it's going to be just a beefed up version of the PS4, and while that may sound like an insult, the benefit this has is that you can get the console and play all of your PS4 titles from your same account without needing any additional modifications. If Microsoft are smart, they will follow this example with the next XBox console, and the fact that modern day consoles are becoming more and more like PC every day hardware-wise allows the increase to hardware functionality to improve the overall quality of your game titles. At least, in theory.
You see, I've seen a fair few game developers, particularly from Sony, who actively restrict the overall ability for their games to grow. You look at God of War (2018) in particular, which had various sections where you sit in one place as an animation plays, this is clearly to cover up a loading time. However, now that we live in an age where hardware for any given title is going to improve over time, these arbitrary animations get in the way of this type of growth because even if the loading times shorten the animations will not.
Now, at first glance, this doesn't seem like that big of a deal since that's generally how good devs have handled their development in the past. Jak 2 is a perfect example of a game that uses masked loading times to get from one area to another without it seeming too jarring. However, there's a problem with this example. Although Jak 2's visuals were definitely power intensive at the time, the loading from one area to another was always really short, even when loading seemingly took place behind the scenes. In God of War, some of these sections take a minute to as long as a few minutes, which really eats up your time in between gameplay sections.
To understand where I'm coming from with this, let's take a look at Half Life. Half Life is one of those PC exclusive titles that once upon a time was plagued with loading issues. However, if you play it now on modern hardware, those loading times are near instantaneous.
Now for some older titles of that nature, you don't get too many performance boosts with new hardware because there are only so many computer parts that games of that era factored in. While you can definitely improve the performance of a PS2 game with a higher clock speed and harddrive with more space and faster read speeds, games of that time didn't factor in graphics cards because, well, graphics cards didn't exist at the time. The first graphics card historically was introduced by the original XBox, which may be part of the reason that so many XBox exclusive titles never made it to either the GameCube or the PS2, because those games were using hardware those consoles lacked.
However, this isn't as much of an issue anymore because nearly every device from PC to game consoles uses a GPU meaning nearly every game nowadays will benefit from hardware growth of any kind, be it clock speed, CPU cores, graphics cards, or faster hard drives.
And given that nowadays older games are being released on new hardware as if to say their original consoles were simply their launch window, it makes sense for developers to, if they can't make their game run flawlessly in the moment, to remove any barriers for it to run better in the future.
And I'm not saying that a game shouldn't try its best to run on current hardware, just that some things a developer may want to try aren't entirely feasible right now but with good game design could have players returning when they have a stronger device to have a much smoother experience.
Now, you'll notice I've been mostly ignoring Nintendo for this post and there's a reason for that. You see, for whatever reason, Nintendo has enforced heavy restrictions on themselves in terms of physical media to allow for growth over time.
The Wii was able to play some GameCube games, sure, and the Wii U was backward compatible with both. However, the Switch uses such drastically different media, going to an SD card setup that removes not only the disc based media of previous consoles but the cartridges of the ones that came before as well. Not only that but this sets a precedent for future consoles Nintendo makes where you can almost guarantee that whatever device they make will use such different media that Switch games will be mutually incompatible with the next device as well, although I'm not sure what device they'll even make given that they've tried every gimmick a console can have short of full dive VR.
This is one area where Nintendo are thinking in a shortsighted manner. Yes, the SD cards they're using definitely have lower read times than the discs of PS4 and XB1, and use of a solid state drive will improve performance even more. But the specific media they're using along with the console/handheld thing the Switch is doing hampers improvements over time to existing games to make them work better as they are, and even then some of them aren't ideal.
This is a problem not just because of loading screens but also because of glitches in general. If you recall back in the N64 era there was a game called Donkey Kong 64. That game was the only game on the entire console that came with a RAM booster because the game ran into a glitch that stopped it from working and more RAM was the only solution that the developers could find. Well, let's say Donkey Kong 64 was on the PS1 instead. The PS2's backward compatibility and substantially higher RAM would've allowed the game to operate properly on the PS2 even if the PS1 never received any RAM boosts.
If you can think of any games which suffered due to graphical problems imposed by your limited hardware then you can see how this solution can encompass a wide variety of different titles.
Loading screens are a bit of a negative in games in the sense that games that have obvious loading screens are looked at as lesser than games that don't. However, when both are placed on progressively increasing hardware, the game with the loading screens improves with age, where the game that covered them up stays the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment