Playstation 5 Catch-All

Just to toss in my two cents in on the haptic/adaptive trigger discussion, I think they are a little overrated, but that's more a result of just how hyperbolic the discussion around them has been than a dig at the features themselves. For anyone coming in expecting them to transform the gaming experience, I couldn't blame them for being underwhelmed.

I think haptics and adaptive triggers largely fit into the same category as sound design for me. Bad sound effects are distracting and immersion breaking. There was a recent gameplay reveal for Lost Soul Aside that I found promising, but the one of the things I remember most from the footage was the lackluster basic attack sound effects. The Outriders demo for PS5 had terrible haptics/rumble. It was either off or full blast. It was worse than normal rumble because the PS5 haptics vibrating at full blast really shake the controller hard. I turned it off after 10 minutes of play because I found it so distracting.

Decent to good sound design largely fades into the background. It normally doesn't stand out enough to draw my attention, but it isn't distracting either. Demon's Souls had some nice haptic implementation. You feel the impact when you hit an enemy or when you parry an attack. You feel the rumble on the bottom half of the controller before a big dragon unleashes a breath of fire. You can feel the fire crackling on your weapon when you apply a resin buff. They're nice, additive effects that stand out the first, second, or even third time any of them happen, but then they do largely fade into the background. I'm not actively admiring the haptic effects each time they happen, but like good sound effects, they continue to contribute to the overall feel of the game.

Exceptional sound design stands out. The Demon's Souls remake has incredibly good sound design. Unlike the Lost Soul Aside footage I mentioned earlier, the sound effects from hitting or getting hit sounds appropriately meaty, metallic, or chunky depending on what is being hit. The thunderous boom from lightning splitting the tree at the start of 4-1 actually startled me the first time I entered the stage. 3D audio isn't a PS5 exclusive feature, but Sony's continuous promotion of it got me to try it out, and the difference is really noticeable when well implemented. The dragon flying overhead in 1-2 is truly terrifying in the remake. It is crystal clear where he is at all times just from how it is communicated with spatial sound via headphones. If you haven't been playing the DeS remake on headphones, be sure to try it.

Really good haptics and adaptive trigger use similarly stand out to me. Rift Apart shows off all kinds of great uses for the triggers with differing behavior for each weapon. A couple of my favorites are the Enforcer and the Headhunter. The enforcer is a multi-barrel shotgun. Pulling the trigger down most of the way fires a single shot, but pulling it down fully fires off two shots in one volley. It kind of feels like you're forcefully squeezing the bullets out of the gun for more power. The Headhunter is a sniper rifle where you pull L2 part way to aim, then fully to slow down time to line up the headshot. Some weapons use the triggers in more standard ways, like halfway to aim, full pull to shoot, but the fact that nearly every weapon has different trigger behaviors adds a lot to the feeling of chaotic weapon juggling in combat.

In terms of haptics, Astrobot and Returnal have been the stars for me so far. Astrobot is essentially a big playground designed to show off the controller, so it's no wonder that it's so impressive there. I believe it has also been mentioned that Team Asobi spent a ton of time figuring out the haptics and adaptive triggers to share that knowledge with other developers, so hopefully the base implementation of these features will be better going forward as a result.

In Returnal, the controller feels alive in your hands. I'm not quite sure how else to describe it. It's constantly vibrating, humming, or tapping depending on what's going on in your surroundings, but never in a way that feels annoying or intrusive. You can tell where an enemy is attacking from based on where your controller is vibrating. You know when your alt-fire is off cool down because of the specific jolt your controller makes when that happens. It's awesome. Playing Returnal without a Dual Sense would be completely doable, but it would be a lesser experience.

TLDR: Overhyped? Yes, but no.

Hobear wrote:

Basically it's HD Rumble? I think I was expecting more when I finally felt what it was in MM web slinging at first I thought the buttons were sticking on the controller. It didn't do much for me but if this is your cup of tea then enjoy it as best you can. I don't need to be a curmudgeon about it. Play to have fun.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried anything besides MM? I know some people like the implementation there, but I feel like I've heard just as many people saying it was either lackluster or distracting.

I think every new PS5 owner should boot up Astro's Playroom for a bit to see a good implementation of haptic feedback, and also because it's a great game on its own.

I like you Dyni, I feel like you get me.

The one thing that has me scratching my beard are your examples for Ratchet & Clank. That's something where I'd have to test it for myself, but I feel like the half-trigger thing (which is not new but wasn't implemented much in other controllers/systems with the feature) could actually lead to over-complicating the controls for a game. More possibility is not always better game design.

On the whole, though, I feel like you said what I feel: that this will include ways to improve feedback and the experience, but it's not like they make the experience alone. They'll add to good game design, but they aren't necessarily good game design themselves nor can they make up for poor game design. I just perhaps am a bit more doomy-gloomy in my prediction that people will stop thinking of it as being this amazing technology when the next big tech gimmick is being shouted from the rooftops in 2030.

ccesarano wrote:

I just perhaps am a bit more doomy-gloomy in my prediction that people will stop thinking of it as being this amazing technology when the next big tech gimmick is being shouted from the rooftops in 2030.

I think it will stop being the next big amazing technology because it will become the norm. The haptics and adaptive triggers on the PS5 when implemented well to me are as essential as dual analog sticks. We will reach the point where we take these for granted because they are so commonplace, not because they were a blip on the radar.

Are SSD’s a gimmick? Because faster load times for me are just kind of overhyped. Not enough time when loading to go to the bathroom or get a new drink.

Yes I jest because PC players have been rocking finger snap load speeds for almost a decade and even now an NVMe drive obliterates any new console load time. For me haptics are a differentiator because other than the “console experience”, there’s nothing that’s objectively “better” on console than on a nice PC rig: really good ray tracing, better graphics, much much higher frame rate, even faster load times, much better monitor quality. Haptics aren’t present on PC right now.

staygold wrote:

Yes I jest because PC players have been rocking finger snap load speeds for almost a decade and even now an NVMe drive obliterates any new console load time. For me haptics are a differentiator because other than the “console experience”, there’s nothing that’s objectively “better” on console than on a nice PC rig: really good ray tracing, better graphics, much much higher frame rate, even faster load times, much better monitor quality. Haptics aren’t present on PC right now.

I think faster load times are a differentiator. Developers can build their game knowing the specifications of the NVMe drive and create experiences around that. Ratchet & Clank would not[ be the same game or the same experience without the guarantee of the PS5's NVMe. It really is a fantastic demonstration of what it means to have "no load times". It's not just the dimensional warp sequences (which are awesome), it's the entire experience of how it does a cinematic wipe and the game transitions you to another planet just like in a movie, e.g. no black screens, no loading spinners.

Granted any cross-platform title will not really be able to build their experiences around this so they will feel more like "traditional" ports on a PC with a fast drive: load times are significantly reduced but the experience is still broken into chunks. I think the system exclusives (Xbox and PS5) are going to be able to create experiences that may have simply not been possible before without significant hardware restrictions on a PC.

Dreaded Gazebo wrote:
staygold wrote:

Yes I jest because PC players have been rocking finger snap load speeds for almost a decade and even now an NVMe drive obliterates any new console load time. For me haptics are a differentiator because other than the “console experience”, there’s nothing that’s objectively “better” on console than on a nice PC rig: really good ray tracing, better graphics, much much higher frame rate, even faster load times, much better monitor quality. Haptics aren’t present on PC right now.

I think faster load times are a differentiator. Developers can build their game knowing the specifications of the NVMe drive and create experiences around that. Ratchet & Clank would not[ be the same game or the same experience without the guarantee of the PS5's NVMe. It really is a fantastic demonstration of what it means to have "no load times". It's not just the dimensional warp sequences (which are awesome), it's the entire experience of how it does a cinematic wipe and the game transitions you to another planet just like in a movie, e.g. no black screens, no loading spinners.

Granted any cross-platform title will not really be able to build their experiences around this so they will feel more like "traditional" ports on a PC with a fast drive: load times are significantly reduced but the experience is still broken into chunks. I think the system exclusives (Xbox and PS5) are going to be able to create experiences that may have simply not been possible before without significant hardware restrictions on a PC.

I agree with DG. I speak as a primarily PC gamer here but I think staygold's take underplays the PS5's tech impacts. The known quantity means that the games can be designed to utilize the drive to its utmost and as far as I understand the PS5 has custom I/O processes to facilitate the manner of transfers games use. The Mark Cerny presentation from GDC goes into a pretty good detail about that. We're not going to see that level of specialization on the PC. On the downside for Sony even multiplatform games in general are likely to suffer unless Sony pumps resources into ensuring extra development is performed for the PS5 versions.

Finally the PC stuff is limited the top of the line, it's a heck of a lot smaller niche than us older & often financially comfy gamers that inhabit this site might notice. The RTX 2000+3000 line still is barely 15% of PCs surveyed on Steam and the 2060 is the bulk of that. 90% of PC gamers are NOT getting PS5 raytracing performance and only the tiniest sliver are getting RT along with higher than console framerates. As far as monitors go, that's a bit subjective as playing games on a big ass OLED can be pretty rad.

Dyni wrote:
Hobear wrote:

Basically it's HD Rumble? I think I was expecting more when I finally felt what it was in MM web slinging at first I thought the buttons were sticking on the controller. It didn't do much for me but if this is your cup of tea then enjoy it as best you can. I don't need to be a curmudgeon about it. Play to have fun.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried anything besides MM? I know some people like the implementation there, but I feel like I've heard just as many people saying it was either lackluster or distracting.

I think every new PS5 owner should boot up Astro's Playroom for a bit to see a good implementation of haptic feedback, and also because it's a great game on its own.

I have a bit but mostly my daughter has played and it's been a bit. Need to get back to it.

Dreaded Gazebo wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

I just perhaps am a bit more doomy-gloomy in my prediction that people will stop thinking of it as being this amazing technology when the next big tech gimmick is being shouted from the rooftops in 2030.

I think it will stop being the next big amazing technology because it will become the norm. The haptics and adaptive triggers on the PS5 when implemented well to me are as essential as dual analog sticks. We will reach the point where we take these for granted because they are so commonplace, not because they were a blip on the radar.

Let's not put the cart before the horse because the games you're talking about were all paid for and designed to take advantage of all the newest features of the PS5. From stuff like Activity Cards to the high end haptics you're already seeing other games not implement them well or at all. History tells us that most of the changes will fade into the background by the end of the gen with gimmick status applied.

The Adaptive Triggers, however, is something I absolutely can see becoming the norm at some point. That has the ability to function as a new button for each trigger and is intuitive to use. However, Xbox's Impulse Triggers didn't exactly catch on and that's where I expect Adaptive Triggers to land until they're available on PC and other consoles.

The SSD comments are interesting to me, because I feel like they're noticeable when it's obvious, but when developers are getting so good at hiding loading screens it's easy to forget all about their use. I've been playing Resident Evil Village on PC, and it isn't until I decide to take an elevator down to one of its two locations requiring it that I realize it's only so long to ensure loading all assets on standard hard drives.

That's one area where both Xbox One X and PS5 will have an advantage over PC once you get games exclusive to those systems, such as Rift Apart. However, as long as the game is also being developed for PC, you can't guarantee someone has their game installed on an SSD drive, and therefore you can't just build the game with the assumption that everyone will have the same capacity for lightning-quick load times. So you're still going to see all kinds of narrow tunnels or other areas that are loading screens disguised as gameplay.

It'll be great when someone gets to take advantage of it, but it's not going to become standard until your average PC user is using an SSD by default. Given the cost of SSD's, who knows how long that's going to be.

I'm gaming less than ever these days and I'm a sample size of 1, but I've been playing Nioh 2 on the PS5 for the past 5 months and I'm absolutely gobsmacked by the quick resume functionality and *never* waiting on a loading screen. I mean to say that cinematics are all instant, loading into levels is near-instant.

It's been such an incredible thing to experience that I'm actually toying around with the idea of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 all the way through on it someday (I put it down primarily because I was dying a lot and spending most of my time looking at the loading screens).

Sure, and that's great, we all love that.

I think the question folks want to know is: Can more be done with the hyper fast SSDs?

Personally, I think the answer will be "no, you'll mostly see less elevators and such being used as loading crutches".

I am so sick of those elevators, though. It was a clever idea in 1986, when Metroid used them for palette transitions. Crawling through narrow passages is even worse.

I'm a little grumble grumble that Forbidden West and the next God of War will have PS4 versions, so the level designs will have those features even if the PS5 doesn't need them.

Yeah, I'll be happy if I never again have to see a character suddenly move at half speed so that someone can give them a boring info dump via an earpiece. I'm sure devs want to hold onto that as long as possible in order to juice up the campaign length though.

garion333 wrote:

Sure, and that's great, we all love that.

I think the question folks want to know is: Can more be done with the hyper fast SSDs?

Like, more instant than instant?

Woah

garion333 wrote:

Sure, and that's great, we all love that.

I think the question folks want to know is: Can more be done with the hyper fast SSDs?

Personally, I think the answer will be "no, you'll mostly see less elevators and such being used as loading crutches".

I personally think we'll see a big jump in data streaming when the likes of Spiderman 2 & GTA 6 eventually come out.

You should be able to swing through New York at blistering speeds with the SSD pulling in assets instantaneously. Transitions in & out of huge detailed indoor spaces being seamless too.

It would be nice if we got near the type of speed & detail of the Unreal Engine 5 demo with the girl flying through the valley down to the portal. That was seriously impressive but the jury's out if that level of quality can be done in an actual game.

"Level of quality" being 30 FPS with some of the worst motion-blur I've ever seen. Next-gen, for sure.

Sarcasm towards that particular demo aside, I think it will be a mixture of things. Theoretically you can probably have larger areas to traverse at higher speeds, but then you bump into what the hardware itself is able to process and render at 4K. Even if you can pull the assets quickly, it doesn't mean the system will be able to display it properly.

I feel like that's part of the problem with the industry as a whole. Any innovation that allows them to push forward is then immediately held back by some other high-demand tech. 4K + Ray-Tracing is going to demand quite a bit from the hardware, so even if you can supply assets through an SSD instantaneously, it's another matter regarding how well that stuff can be rendered on screen and how much. I imagine most folks will be fine with 30fps and possibly even motion blur so long as they get 4K + Ray-Tracing.

Maybe I'm talking out my butt, I dunno, but having experimented with my current PC a bit in terms of settings, I've found that the SSD makes the least amount of difference in what it can and cannot handle.

I think plenty of folks want 60 fps way more than RT, etc.

Most of the games have dynamic resolutions thus far so the fear that many of us had that resources would be wasted just hitting a full 4K resolution doesn't look like it's materialising.

The options we are getting in quite a lot of the first party PS5 games are 60fps Performance mode at a dynamic resolution, Ray Tracing mode at 1080p or just above then the 4k Fidelity mode (usually via an upscaling technique) at 30fps. This has been the case in most of the PS5 games I've played, Demons Souls, Miles Morales, Rift Apart, Returnal etc

In terms of what the SSD can potentially do the jump forward would be similar to what they showed a couple of years ago before the PS5 was officially revealed. It's the fly through of the city in Spiderman running on a PS4 Pro vs a PS5. It's a huge difference.

You'd just get quicker loading on your PC with an SSD Chris, there's not gonna be any game designed with them in mind like there will be for the new consoles.

Spikeout wrote:

You'd just get quicker loading on your PC with an SSD Chris, there's not gonna be any game designed with them in mind like there will be for the new consoles.

That's what I'm saying, though. When you consider that Microsoft themselves are releasing all their first-parties on PC, even after they stop building for Xbox One compatibility, you're left with just Sony building exclusively for an SSD.

...and maybe Nintendo since they're using flash memory as well, but it's not quite the same.

The number of games taking advantage of SSD tech is going to be very, very slim.

Remember that Windows 11 is going to have DirectStorage, and assuming you have hardware for it, you'll be able to get similar performance to the Xbox Series consoles. You can bet Bethesda's games like Starfield and showcases like Forza Horizon are going to take advantage of it on PC.

It's going to take time, but SSDs becoming mainstream has a lot of developers excited. I'm confident that in the long term it's going to have significant impacts on how games are made and structured.

I was watching the Noclip Demon's Souls documentary, and at around 42:00 one of the developers mentioned another advantage of an SSD. It sounds like they were able to have hundreds of audio streams come directly from the SSD, rather than being loaded in memory first. I had not thought that the audio could be improved as well.

Surprisingly won an electronics stores raffle today, for "being allowed to buy a PS5 from us" (what a crazy world).
Was starting to believe it might not happen in 2021.

Though maybe things are starting to improve. Also saw some Nvidia 3070 TIs in stock today, first time since... well, ever.

Did you buy one? I assume the answer is yes, but ...

garion333 wrote:

Did you buy one? I assume the answer is yes, but ...

More importantly, if you bought one are you going to keep it or scalp it?

Bought it, definitely. And keeping it
Scalpers can go < censored >

ccesarano wrote:
Spikeout wrote:

You'd just get quicker loading on your PC with an SSD Chris, there's not gonna be any game designed with them in mind like there will be for the new consoles.

That's what I'm saying, though. When you consider that Microsoft themselves are releasing all their first-parties on PC, even after they stop building for Xbox One compatibility, you're left with just Sony building exclusively for an SSD.

...and maybe Nintendo since they're using flash memory as well, but it's not quite the same.

The number of games taking advantage of SSD tech is going to be very, very slim.

I think the Series S/X SSD will be the baseline for most AAA games in a year or two. The minimum spec of PC games will increase so that you'll need some sort of SSD, it has to become the standard at some point.

Microsoft has a huge number of studios now & with the likes of Hellblade 2, Forza Motorsport 8, Avowed, Outer World's 2, Fable, Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6 all being current gen/PC exclusive, they will all be taking advantage of the SSD. Maybe you'll be right & they'll scale back some games to work on weaker PC's with HDD's, it will be interesting to find out.

Sony's first party will take advantage of the extra speed in the PS5's SSD, once this cross generation phase ends. They don't need to worry about making sacrifices to get their games running on a broad range of PC's either.

I'd say the amount of devs taking advantage of the SSD's in the PS5/Series X&S will likely be a much larger pool than you think.

Windows 11 will bring DirectStorage from the Xbox Series X to any PC equipped with an NVME 3.0 or 4.0 SSD and a modern Discrete GPU (so just about any gaming laptop sold these days). I think you will see most if not all modern AAA PC/Cross Platform games take advantage of DirectStorage in the coming years (2022+)

Like most Microsoft standards its typically easy to implement for Dev's and has backwards compatibility as well.

garion333 wrote:

I think plenty of folks want 60 fps way more than RT, etc.

Hell, I'm just happy that so far 30FPS actually means a stable 30.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/NBkP0cp.jpeg)

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