Another Upscaled Console Game: Battlefield Hardline

jones_supa writes Video game developer Visceral Games has confirmed the actual resolution that the coming Battlefield Hardline will run on when it is launched on the Xbox One and on the PlayStation 4. An official message from the Twitter account of the studio explains that gamers will get a 720p resolution on the Microsoft console and Sony platform gamers will get the game running in 900p. 60 frames per second is promised for both consoles, but many fans are still expressing their disappointment that neither of the two versions will be able to properly deliver the native 1080p resolution of the consoles. When development started, Visceral Games and publisher Electronic Arts said they were aiming to use the power of the modern consoles to push the game engine as far as it would go, but they clearly couldn't fit that target without cutting corners. This is similar to what happened with Titanfall, which renders into an 1408x792 framebuffer on Xbox One.

Comments

Another FPS

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if they pushed the boundaries in other ways, other than graphics? Like Story? Idea? Gameplay?
Sorry but I'm sick of these endless FPS! And the graphics alone aren't going to hold a jaded player.

Re:Another FPS

[captjc]

Then don't play it. It isn't like there aren't thousands of other games in dozens of other genres to play.

Fix gameplay related issues first

[khchung]

As a BF4 player, I would rather they focus on gameplay related issues (rubberbanding, etc), rather than spending a huge effort on getting the last 180 pixels on the screen.

Sure, it's nice to have 1080p resolution, but it's worthless if the game isn't fun. If the game is fun at 900px, who cares about that last 180px.

Re:Fix gameplay related issues first

[Dutch Gun]

I agree. The focus on resolution seems ridiculously overblown. It doesn't help that the press breathlessly reports on it every time it happens. Faux outrage makes for lots of page views, I guess. It's pretty damn clear the current generation of consoles are far too underpowered to render a complex scene in high resolution, so we shouldn't be surprised at this anymore. The developers probably looked at how much rendering detail would be lost to try to boost it to full resolution, and decided it wasn't worth the tradeoff.

From TFA:

some of the worst fears of the community are becoming reality.

720p is really what they fear most? Not bugs, crappy frame rate, day-one DLC, broken matchmaking, overloaded servers, or cookie-cutter gameplay? Really?

Does resolution matter?

[RogueyWon]

There was some Nielsen market-research data published recently on why current-generation console owners had published the console they had. For PS4 owners, the answer was "better resolution", for Xbox One owners it was "brand" and for the Wii-U it was "fun-factor". There's been a lot written about this data since it was published.

But what I suspect is that it tells us very little about either the consoles themselves. Rather, it tells us a lot about the self-image of the people who buy them. So the PS4 fans are the ones who want to be able to point at the bigger numbers. The Xbox-One fans are the ones who honestly do care about brand (and given this is US survey data, "buy American" is probably a big part of it). And Wii-U fans have a strange obsession that they have some kind of monopoly on fun. Watch the fanboy-wars on any gaming forum of your choice (and they are more vicious this generation than I've ever seen them before) and you will find that each of those stereotypes holds up remarkably well.

And does resolution actually matter hugely? I'm unconvinced. If I want technical perfection (and sometimes I do), I'm playing on a PC anyway. Some of my favourite console games of the last generation were a technical mess.

I would argue that framerate matters more for certain genres. For anything requiring fast reactions and/or fine control, such as a shooter, high-end driving game or fighting game, a steady 60fps translates into a huge increase in responsiveness.

I think it's generally accepted now that in performance terms, the new console hardware has disappointed; promises of 1080p x 60fps haven't materialised. Given the constraints of a fixed hardware platform, I'd rather developers drop resolution or image quality in return for a higher/steadier framerate.