Xbox Series X's cross-gen approach is robbing players of the next-gen thrill

[ArchangelMadzz]

Mr Puggsly said:

ArchangelMadzz said:

Hmm,

Ryse: Son of Rome looked amazing and instantly showed the difference between the 360 and the XB1. It could've been a better game but it wanted to look nice and it did that super well.
KZ Shadowfall did the same and Infamous SS a couple months later.

The cross-gen games like Black flag and Cod Ghosts were the games that didn't really show anything. 

(I support the cross gen approach, as it helps XB1 owners get more value out of their purchase and we will get those next gen experiences eventually. In the meantime I'm sure there will be some games that show the big difference between the hardware)

Hmm,

"The mind-blowing graphics?" The huge step in gaming experiences that we've been waiting for?"

Ryse certainly looked better than 360 graphics, but was it, "mind blowing?" Lets be serious, the visual leap wasn't PS1 to Dreamcast mind blowing. Ryse resembled a 7th gen game but with more polish. Crysis 3 on 360 was technically impressive, but lacked the polish of Ryse. Further more, the launch games weren't the, "huge step in gaming experiences we've been waiting for?" You obviously agree so ignored that.

You're cherry picking. Black Flag and CoD Ghosts barely looked different. Meanwhile something like Battlefield 4 showed a huge disparity. Both in performance (30 fps vs 60 fps) and visuals. I don't think its a coincidence you ignored that game. Hence, 8th and 9th gen games can make the visual and performance disparity like we saw in Battlefield 4.

Again, I hope developers focusing on cross gen games are also designing the games to take advantage of 9th gen consoles. If the 9th gen versions demonstrate better performance, better assets, better effects and reduce load times significantly, than that would still demonstrate a power disparity between 8th and 9th gen hardware.

In fact, its evident something like Gears 5 will do that from the start. The base X1 version is 30 fps with low/medium settings. The Series X version was apparently doing highest PC settings, 60 fps and 4K. I would argue that's overall bigger than what Ryse did.

Ooo good point I completely forgot that Battlefield V doubled the framerate on PS4/XB1. That's huge and noticable. Side by side comparisons are useful, but most of those scenes if they weren't side by side you can't tell a huge difference between the 2 by playing on one system one day and another the next other than just the increased sharpness. But frame rate is huge, totally forgot about that.

I'm not a battlefield player, I only mentioned AC:BF and COD Ghosts because I actually bought those on PS4 and wasn't every impressed with how they looked. and ran compared to the PS3 version. Whereas I remember seeing Shadowfall and Ryse and thinking wow okay that's a serious improvement. 

Because XSX and PS5 uses SSD's, cross gen games will never be on the level that games designed specifically for them, not even close. Level design and game mechanics change massively. Uncharted for example has so many of the super slow, sully and nate helping each other climb over obstacles, because the system needs to load up the next part of the level. The layout of levels is so that pop in isn't too bad for asset loading, the speed of travel in open world games is limited due to the storage. 

Surely they can look decent but the entire game design changes when you know everyone playing this game will have a super fast SSD. I think that's the point most people are trying to make.