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.

Re:Another FPS

[stealth_finger]

Lots of people play CS.

http://steamcharts.com/ 207,620 people play CS:GO right now (max 463,265, 178 million hours played.) 44,475 plays Team Fortress 2. 19,343 play original Counter Strike.

"could replace"? That's not as replace. 12.55 % of all people who play a game on Steam plays CS:GO right now.

Why not this game? Isn't it the standard for competitive gaming / esport in the FPS area?

I don't know in what way it's superior if anything but I guess people play it because it's the one which matter kinda. Also most media focus, most people who care, maybe good maps, maybe because of investments into customizing ones character, maybe because it's very cheap relative all the money they have put into it and they don't normally purchase games?

He's asking why they would switch to Hardline instead of any of the other CS potential replacements that have been released since. What is so good about hardline that the others lacked. The short answer is nothing, these 'friends' will likely stick to CS.

Re:Another FPS

[BronsCon]

Wait... people on 4chan grow up?

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?

Re:Fix gameplay related issues first

[drinkypoo]

The focus on resolution seems ridiculously overblown.

We don't buy 1080p consoles and displays to have graphics muddied up by scaling.

Re:Fix gameplay related issues first

[drinkypoo]

We don't buy 1080p consoles full stop. We just buy consoles.

Disingenuous, since you know what I meant, and proved that full well in the next sentence.

I personally prefer gameplay over graphics,

It's not all about you.

Assassins Creed Unity was full of bugs, regularly crashed, and ran like shit, but hey at least it was pretty and ran at 1080p right? No, I'd much rather they'd just dropped it to 720p

I'd much rather they fixed the bugs and I could play at 1080p. The hardware's capabilities are known before the game hits the street, they decide how to tune it, it's their decision. They increase poly counts too much to hit their resolution targets and then act surprised.

That way I wouldn't have wasted ã40 on a turd.

You could also have just not made your purchasing decision until after it was demonstrated whether it would be a good one. I don't preorder any more because virtually no games are complete when released and I'm not paying for that. I wait until the game is finished now. The last game I even bought when it was new was GTAV for 360 and wow, what a piece of shit that was. It still doesn't work very well, but I'm done with Xbox-land now so that doesn't matter. I could go through it all over again with GTAV for PC but I'm definitely waiting until the end of that product's lifecycle before considering buying it, because only then might Rockstar have worked out the numerous glaring bugs which accompany each new release from them.

Re:Fix gameplay related issues first

[Xest]

Honestly, I'm from the UK myself but I try not to listen to the gaming media. I've been aware for many many years now how the gaming media is effectively a protection racket. I've seen great games get poor reviews because they didn't pay their protection money and vice versa. Mostly where I've encountered this attitude is here in the comments section of Slashdot. I was late to even hear about the whole Gamergate thing for exactly this reason. When it filtered through to me on the media I do pay attention to it reinforced my view that visiting gaming sites is still a waste of time because they're still just fervent pits of rent seeking that provide nothing of actual value to the world of gaming. If I want to get a realistic idea of the quality of a game I just go and look for combined average user ratings across a decent size review set and that's about it.

I've probably been hypocritical myself, I got too caught up in the fanboy wars myself last gen back around 2006 or so as a 360 fanboy, but nowadays I can see how meaningless it was, and how pointless it was. I'm not sure if this is a sign of getting old, or growing personal financial security, but nowadays I just don't see the point, I have an Xbox One and a Wii U, but my PC is really dated now and there's not enough unique to the PS4 that takes my interest yet, if there was I'd just go out and buy one- I think all systems have their pros and cons, but I can't see much point complaining about them. You either like a system enough to buy it or you don't, I don't really see what there is to argue about beyond that, hence why I find articles like this one to be pointless vitriol - it tells us nothing useful, it achieves nothing useful, it's not informative, it's not interesting, it's just childish bickering.

I think there's some truth in what you say though, I've seen the exact argument you cite before too and I couldn't tell if it was sarcasm or seriousness, that someone preferred the PC because pirating games is easier, yet then went on to complain that devs are focussing too much on consoles. I just could not get my head around the sort of mindset that leads to such absurd obliviousness to how stupid an argument that is.

At the end of the day gaming markets are determined entirely by where the money is. I understand it's frustrating if your platform isn't where the money is, god only knows having bought an X1 it's frustrating to hear that Street Fighter has gone PS4 exclusive but I don't see much point getting too wound up about it. All platforms have their exclusives and as I've said before if one has enough to attract you to it, then save up your pennies and buy it, if not then it doesn't seem worth trolling the internet over it - it's almost as if there's an attitude of entitlement whereby some people feel they should have the right to have everything they want, when they want it, in the way they want it. It'd be nice for sure, but it's not the way the world works, and I doubt it's the way the world will ever work.

Re:so why 1408x792, technically?

[xororand]

Marketing; so nobody can say it's just "720p".

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.

Re:Does resolution matter?

[ezdiy]

Amateur LAN party organiser (>50 players) with anecdotal sample here.

Does resolution matter?

It depends. When the game demands it, ie frantic action shooter, like q3a or cs and even the slower ones like arma/cod/battlefield, most players will sacrifice visual details and/or resolution till they get smooth 45-60 FPS.

Conversely games not that epilepsy-inducing (RTS and anything slower than that up to casual gaming), 30fps is often enough and the rest of GPU power can be spent on finer details.

Re: Does resolution matter?

[RogueyWon]

Whereas in reality, the differences between the PS4 and Xbox-One (and their respective software lineups) are vanishingly small. The PS4 generally offers a marginal performance benefit. The Xbox-One has marginally better multimedia functionality (though still not as good as the old PS3). But you're really down to splitting hairs here and only pedants or perfectionists will ever notice the difference.

And on the games/franchises front? Exclusives are fewer and further between than ever and the PS/Xbox franchises largely parallel each other. Gran Turismo vs Forza. Killzone vs Gears of War. To be honest, I don't think any of the current gen consoles has a "must have" exclusive yet. Bloodborne (released later this month) might manage to become the first - but the nature of the industry these days is that cross-platform games get most of the effort and attention.

There's really very little to choose between the two machines. Rational decision making factors right now might include price, which platform your friends game on and possibly the future promise of a particular must-have exclusive. Everything else comes down to marketing messages.

Re: Does resolution matter?

[RogueyWon]

Platform-exclusives tend to happen for one of three reasons:

1) The platform owner has funded the development of the game, or paid the publisher a large amount of money for exclusivity.

2) The developer/publisher only expects development for one platform to be profitable and considers that investment in porting would be wasted expenditure.

3) There are particular hardware features of one platform, such as mouse/keyboard on the PC, or the Wiimote on the Wii/Wii-U, which the game has been specifically designed to use and which can't be replicated on another platform.

All three of these reasons are becoming less common over time.

In the case of 1), it's not that the platform owners wouldn't like to fund more exclusives, but that it's become more expensive to do so. Development costs for an AAA game are now are many, many times what they were back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation. First-party games often function as loss-leaders (or at least, mediocre investments) anyway - they get the console's installed base up to attract the third parties, whose licensing fees are where the profit really lies for the console manufacturer.

Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, reason 2) used to be very common. The installed base of the PS2 was completely out of proportion with that of its competition. With all three consoles having quite different architecture, cross-platform development was a pain. For a lot of mid-ranking developers, releasing only for the PS2 would make a lot of sense; even with a multiplatform release, 90% of their sales would come from that platform.

No console since then has matched the PS2's dominance. The Wii got an early lead last time in installed base terms, but its attach rate ended up miserable, particularly for third party games. The 360 and the PS3 tended to level-peg on installed base and attach rare, albeit with some regional variations.

And reason 3)? There are still a handful of PC exclusives - complex strategy games and simulators - which wouldn't work without a mouse and keyboard. But those aren't all that common these days. As for developing around motion-controllers on the consoles - too many developers got burned on the Wii and Kinect for anybody to have any enthusiasm for that any more.

oh who cares...

[SuperDre]

I think all this resolution talk is just nonsense, if nobody told the gamers what the actual resolution was, they wouldn't care...
Just play the freaking game, and care about the gameplay, because the graphics will look good enough (it's still a major improvement over the previous generation consoles)..

Re:What kind of case?

[damnbunni]

You mean other than 'most of my games won't work on it'?