Should Halo Infinite drop Xbox One and go Scarlet exclusive?

[Mr Puggsly]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

I should clarify something about hardware. I feel the 6th gen, primarily Xbox, was big turning point for game design. I feel that's when ideas and visuals of Halo, Half Life 2, open world games and many other styles of games could be executed without looking like a mess, having poor draw distance or other technical problems that really compromise gameplay. I feel a lot of modern games could still be enjoyable even built around OG Xbox specs, but I don't feel that way about N64 per se. I'm not looking to have a debate on this, but that's a response to people who keep bringing up PS1 or N64.

I mean. I don't disagree. But even during the 5th gen, consoles like the Nintendo 64 started to stretch out towards being open-world, mostly thanks to the carts having such high read-speeds which allowed for streaming of assets super effectively...

The fact that Nintendo 64 games look like ass today on the graphics front is besides the point.

The Original Xbox though had more in common with the 7th gen than the 6th gen on various technical fronts, it just needed more DRAM to let it breathe some more, 128MB would have made a big difference... In saying that, developers leveraged the internal mechanical drive for streaming, which is what made Morrowind entirely possible with it's heavy scripting and streaming... That game would have been impossible on the Dreamcast, Playstation 2 or Gamecube... And that is my point from the get go, that more capable technology opens up new possibilities.

Mr Puggsly said:

I'd say its fair to be critical of MS for not selling Fable 3. I also don't really care. I should have said that from the start. The problem is I was explaining MS's decision and I understand it, whether I PERSONALLY like it or not. Maybe you thought I was attacking you for having been critical of MS. Its really a stupid discussion and I feel people who want it should simply pirate it.

Piracy is never an option in my opinion.

Mr Puggsly said:

I know poor frame rates were pretty standard in the 5th, 6th and 7th gen. I just consider them playable, not fine. Halo 3 didn't run that bad, so we just disagree there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SygMunkVEzc

Digital Foundry and myself disagrees.
I was a day 1 owner of Halo 3, heck it's the sole reason I owned an Xbox 360... And frame pacing was always an issue as that kind of issue was non-existent on PC games unless you were running multiple GPU's... Which became a really documented issue that AMD solved with Southern Islands... So frame pacing is not a new thing to me.

Whilst the framerate is okay for an Xbox 360 game, the framepacing was terrible...

www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-what-works-and-what-doesnt-in-halo-the-master-chief-collection

Mr Puggsly said:

I don't feel GTAV was an expensive game to create just because its a technical marvel. Its also an incredibly ambitious game, simply designing a game like that is expensive. The attention to detail and game mechanics certainly take time to design, its not just specs.

But you can't ignore the fact that allot of R&D had to be invested in order to showcase the title in the best possible light on anemic hardware.

The 8th gen has made development easier and reduced costs on various fronts.

But yes, in general a game like that tends to be expensive.

Mr Puggsly said:

I really feel you're confused about my thoughts on the Jaguar CPUs. I'm really saying they could create ambitious experiences and even achieve 60 fps when the GPU wasn't pushed too hard. For example, MGSV was an ambitious game but still hits 60 fps. You're arguing about the hardware compared to other hardware, I'm simply looking at what was achieved in practice.

Doesn't matter what was achieved, Jaguar is still a terrible CPU... It wasn't even great on it's release, nor was it's predecessor on PC.

If developers have achieved something great on such hardware... That is a testament to their development pipeline rather than the intrinsic hardware itself.

Mr Puggsly said:

We agree the Jaguar CPUs were an increase in power, but there wasn't many impressive attempts to leverage it for unique experiences.

Indeed. Jaguar has less "theoretical" flops than Cell, which many (even on this forum) chalked to Jaguar being inferior to Cell. - But flops isn't everything.
Cell only beats Jaguar when Single Precision Floating Point with Iterative Refinement was being used... Where-as Jaguar can maintain it's performance regardless of situation... And absolutely dominates Cell and Xenon in integer capabilities.

But, it's still not a great CPU, it's an improvement over 7th gen, but still not a great CPU. - Jaguar is a very small, cost effective core, more so than Bulldozer or Stars, so it was really the only viable option for the 8th gen from the start... The 9th gen however is going to be leveraging another very small, cost effective core... Ryzen.

Mr Puggsly said:

In regard to Crackdown 3's MP, I feel the limitation was the developers when it came to designing that experience. Not the X1 or the cloud. At some point they probably determined it was a waste of time and just threw something together.

The developers were a limitation, but with a protracted development cycle I would have hoped they would have put all their ducks in a row so to speak.
Props to Microsoft for not rushing the game out with a reduced "cooking time" though.

The lack of hardware did limit the ability for fully physics based destruction to be done locally... Not even the Xbox One X could achieve it with a degree of fidelity that would impress, 9th gen and the PC could do it though.

Mr Puggsly said:

My main point was load times can improve via upgrades to other specs even if you use an old rusty HDD. In a nutshell, you agreed with me.

I could increase my load times further with a external SSD, but loading in general is already noticeably faster even on my same old 2.5 external HDD.

Also, in regard to GPU I was really saying a video card upgrade can improve load times in a game that's struggling with an underpowered card. Maybe for memory reasons or whatever, it does impact load times.

Well... I wasn't exactly intending to disagree.
Just taking up a contention point of the GPU improving load times.

Even a faster GPU doesn't tend to improve load times, that's not where the bottleneck lays... Because even a low-end GPU like the Geforce 1050/Radeon 540 has more bandwidth than system memory... Plus the bottleneck to shifting data to the GPU tends to be the PCI-E 3.0 16x 16GB/s of bandwidth anyway... Before that it's the devices system storage.

The GPU doesn't hardware accelerate memory transactions generally... Ram, CPU and SSD/Hard Drive/Interconnects are what generally limits you... With device storage being the single largest culprit which SSD's have rapidly started to resolve.

Even the PS2 impressed with GTA3, in some ways that was more impressive than Morrowind. 5th gen was more experimental with some very notable 3D games, while the 6th gen was really delivering ambitious ideas like open world games with many NPCs or vehicles, etc.

I'm not gonna deny your view on piracy is morally superior. I just dont see it all as equal.

Well I put up a link showing Halo 3 actually runs good on 360. If you wanna see genuinely bad frame pacing then look at Halo Anniversary on 360.

The Jaguar was still quite cabable, not arguing how it compared to other CPUs. I really dont believe more capable CPUs would have had a significant impact this gen in regard to game design.

Better specs didnt mean every studio was suddenly creating products as impressive or as polished as GTAV. Again, I'm.sure much of the budget really went into creating that massive game in general.

I feel the MP experience Crackdown 3 did get was rushed in the end, it was a new project thrown together. While the single player of Crackdown 3 was probably completed long prior. If anything, the extra development helped it become a more technically polished.

Again, just pointing out improving other specs helps with load times, even before jumping to SSD.