Post by Eorl @ 10:14am 09/10/14 | 66 Comments
While you run around screaming like a maniac, Bethesda also noted in the official forum that they will be including some developer options to unlock the framerate, if you wish. Of course, it comes with a warning that "these commands and changes are not recommended or supported and we suggest everyone play the game as it was designed and intended for the best experience."
"Shinji Mikami and the team at Tango designed The Evil Within to be played at 30fps and to utilize an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 for all platforms. The team has worked the last four years perfecting the game experience with these settings in mind."
As mentioned above, the aspect ratio is also locked for all platforms, offering a letterbox gameplay experience. "The letterboxing (a 2:35:1 aspect ratio) is used for gameplay purposes," Bethesda says in the forum post. "As certain elements display in the black areas of the screen. On PC, you can turn off the bars and force the game to render full-screen. However this option is not supported. We’re keeping the ability to turn off bars as a console-only command that we will share at launch."
It isn't all doom and gloom though, with Bethesda revealing that with the console commands players can access game cheats plus more advanced camera controlling. More will apparently be revealed in the coming days.
You can check out the full forum post for a complete list of minimum and recommended system specs, which we previously reported on. You'll note that Bethesda and Tango Gameworks are pushing hard for a minimum of 4GB VRAM for optimal 1080p experience, which is explained as an effect from the current-gen consoles 8GB DDR3/GDDR5 RAM.
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Posted 11:05am 09/10/14
F*****g lol.
Posted 11:20am 09/10/14
Posted 11:30am 09/10/14
Posted 12:02pm 09/10/14
Posted 01:03pm 09/10/14
Posted 01:29pm 09/10/14
the human eye can't differentiate any higher than 30 fps
Posted 01:40pm 09/10/14
Posted 01:47pm 09/10/14
Posted 02:02pm 09/10/14
Posted 02:05pm 09/10/14
Posted 02:17pm 09/10/14
Posted 02:22pm 09/10/14
Really? I would have said the complete opposite. Aspect ratio I can understand since it sounds like they've done it for specific reasons, with bits of the game interacting with the black letterboxed bits. But 30fps seems to be an entirely meaningless, arbitrary restriction.
Posted 02:24pm 09/10/14
Posted 02:25pm 09/10/14
This is the key, the game has been designed this way for what ever feel it is going for, Shinji Mikami knows his s*** and if he thinks that a restricted aspect ration and 30fps is going to enhance the specific experience he wants players to have then I trust him.
Typical gamers whinging about dumb s***.
Posted 02:53pm 09/10/14
Of course.
It's also why the res has been lowered by culling the screen edge and introducing black lines. Some will say "Yeah but it's super wide screen" or "The dev wants it this way, I mean, come on, it's Bethesda!" - Not really, nothing has been added to the image to gain any width. When we went widescreen we didn't cut off the top and bottom, we added to the sides.
An indication of this will be the game will look perfect on a computer without borders. They say "not recommended" and "unsupported" but I'd wager money that nothing odd will appear on a PC running 16:9. (Quake 3 didn't 'support' widescreen but there is no issue here either, and the list goes on.)
I also wager that the higher fps won't detract from the quality of the game at all. When was the last game we aimed to make run slow because we enjoyed it more? (Not including games without frame time limiters, so without a sync limit it would run 10 times it's standard speed) - Even PC games with motion blur that's hard to remove don't need a 30fps limit, what a bottle of snake oil.
Posted 03:08pm 09/10/14
The 30FPS cap is odd particularly for PC but i'd be keen to play it out of the box and see how to feels before uncapping my FPS, than again with my GTX650ti i'll be lucky to hit 30fps so may not be such a problem for me lol
Posted 03:25pm 09/10/14
So why not take that at face value till its proven wrong?
I'm thinking it might be used as a kind of cheap 3d effect to make it like stuff is coming out of the screen at you, like the borders added to gifs to make them look 3d (like these ones http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/3d-gifs). Gives you a cheap 3d effect if the main image is constrained inside the borders but a bit of it comes out over the borders.
Posted 04:21pm 09/10/14
Posted 07:19pm 09/10/14
Posted 07:37pm 09/10/14
Plenty of choice when it comes to games and hey, if you don't like it there's always sunshine and fresh air waiting outside...
Posted 08:49pm 09/10/14
Absolutism is absolute.
Posted 08:14am 10/10/14
Posted 08:29am 10/10/14
That is pretty unequivocal; the creative team behind the game have a vision for it, and that vision happens to include some technical restrictions. Don't panic, just wait and see what people think of it.
Posted 08:58am 10/10/14
Posted 09:14am 10/10/14
Posted 09:49am 10/10/14
The latest from Ubisoft is that we should drop to 30fps as a standard Gamers everywhere are having a good laugh about it. Everywhere except here of course, too many casuals that keep bowing to developers without using a single brain cell.
That's ok, I'll still represent everyone though as someone with clearly more insight on gaming.
Posted 11:04am 10/10/14
Posted 11:20am 10/10/14
Evil: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=751614
Ubisoft: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=751707
This morning my feed is full of shares and laughter from gamers all around the world. :)
Excuse the mobile links, but I'm winning on the go today.
Posted 11:18am 10/10/14
Posted 11:21am 10/10/14
Posted 11:26am 10/10/14
Still my favourite refugee if that's any consolation.
Posted 11:37am 10/10/14
why is 30fps a big deal?
Posted 12:20pm 10/10/14
I won't type it on my phone as its a rather detailed, science filled post on the topic.
After I finish typing it the replies will be something about popularity/trolling/what big publishers say and hardly anything based on real evidence.
Not a troll, but convince me why I should remotely bother when it's been proven time and time again that the vocal majority don't have what it takes to understand the topic past what the publisher says. Its hilariously bad for a gaming site.
The only point that's been made outside of what publishers have said in this thread, is khels explanation behind a reason why they went with letterboxing. It's literally one of two reasons to letterbox. Either what he said, what I said, or a third reason that would make no real sense.
Posted 12:20pm 10/10/14
Posted 12:33pm 10/10/14
Posted 01:24pm 10/10/14
lol I thought we were sort of friends-ish, we played some d3 on ts anyway?
That's why I felt free to give you a serve in fun a few times like in the Win10 thread. Did you get butthurt along the way or something? QGL is kinda gruff, we have a go at each other. Sometimes we use mean words. Its ok. I give Davey (Spookles) and pave s*** like nothing else and they're possibly my favourite posters at the moment. Its rough and tumble around here, which is why I like it!
Relax just a little bit maybe. This is not as serious a place as it might seem, its more like a rap battle!
Edit: BroolStory is excluded from the above. People have a go at him because he's a legit f***en muppet.
Posted 01:37pm 10/10/14
I've also been playing games of d3 with joab and others who'd at some stage disagree with me. I put a divide between forums and games. You could call me every name under the sun yet if you're good at any various game I play then I'd be open to playing with you.
What's frustrating is you aren't talking about the topic at hand, you're nitpicking posts and trying to reassert my position or judge my feelings when the fact is none of that matters to me.
But don't worry, if you ask to play a game with me this arvo I'm all open as per any day of the week, because that's what I do with a passion for over 20 years, game on and be a part of it all.
Anyways, that being said yet again, let's see where the conversation goes next..
Posted 02:16pm 10/10/14
Its not illegitimate to have a different point of view dude, and to find the apparent reaction to this announcement OTT. I'll take it into account and I'm more likely to wait and see what the reviews and feedback is like on launch before buying in. Its not the end of the f***en world, that's a legitimate position to take.
If they launched the game on PC without announcing these limitations? Torches and pitchforks brother.
e: plz stop talking about your passion, this isn't a cooking show :(
Posted 02:37pm 10/10/14
Posted 02:53pm 10/10/14
That was an edit, not the point of the post. The end of the world is a figure of speech taken to mean that you think this is a big deal. Is it a big deal or not?
See my point above. I'll repeat: my POV is that I don't think this announcement is that big a deal. Its of some interest to people following the game's development who may want to wait before buying the game. I'll certainly wait and see what the actual creative merit of these choices are, but I'm dubious, sure!
Regarding personal attacks. Read my posts carefully. I haven't said anything about your personal traits at all, not even in passing. I pointed out that the forum is rather robust and I thought maybe you are taking it all just a little more seriously than strictly necessary.
I have no idea how I came to that conclusion. You're a fun guy o.O
Posted 03:02pm 10/10/14
Baby steps, but steps nonetheless.
Posted 07:18pm 10/10/14
Alright, I'll bite. You talk about the future of the industry and being worried where it's going but I personally think that types such as yourself are a part of the problem. You come across to me as someone who has not quite completely forgotten what a good game is, but that it's secondary to making it look good.
Every time I see an iD game (tech demo) I literally hang my head with shame. When it comes to them, it feels like that the good days are gone all for the expense of a little more whiz-bang (graphics & sound).
Would I take a tech-demo like game over something like Final Fantasy 7/8/9, Telltale's The Walking Dead, FTL, The Last of Us, or Mark of the Ninja? Not ever. Would you?
Technology is great for games (seriously thinking Oculus Rift) but at the expense of gameplay, no thanks. As I once saw on a forum; iD makes pretty games but when you strip away the visuals, all that's left is what the average developer is already doing so much better.
Posted 07:37pm 10/10/14
I was looking forward to this one.
Posted 07:53pm 10/10/14
Which is why I don't own all them 'awesome graphics' games like Metro, Watch Dogs, Titanfall and SoM, yep really. All of them (except SoM, it's new) burned out fast considering they all got a ton of positive reviews. I can see a game not worth my money through the graphics and shinies man.
Tech demos are great, but they are to show off the featured engine and nothing more. iD moved on to making engines and less games because towards the end, their games were just boring to play (Doom 3, Rage, etc. Even with Rage being a technically superior engine to everything else out there at the time.) When Epic felt the crunch with Unreal Tournament, they also went with mainly working on engines and supporting it. It's an industry of its own.
As per above and above that, no. Edit: If I recall, Watch Dogs had it's own tech demos didn't it?
And we get to this line, and I totally agree here as well. Doom 2 was the last version I liked, and I love doom..
The way I look at it is, if the consoles had more power (as an example) then we'd get the best of both worlds. We could have graphics as well as good design, especially considering that quite often level designers and animators don't have much bearing on whether the game is any fun to play. But lately all we have is graphics (because graphics are easier than thinking up a totally new idea someone hasn't done, gameplay-wise) to the point where we need to have drops in performance. This sea-saw of speed vs graphics where design takes a back seat. Now we're into an even darker era of companies buying games to be exclusive, or (I bet) paying companies to say 30fps is a great thing and the industry is going that way.. This has a flow through effect to PC.
My most recent favourite game design-wise would have to be Antichamber. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like in-game:
It doesn't even run in SLI meaning all that money spent on graphics cards is going to waste, onoes. The problem here is you haven't worked me out and think I'm all about graphics. The reason I don't have SoM is because it's single player. If it was 4p co-op or an MMO then I'd be all over it. ;)
For your comment about the Rift, I agree on that as well. I can't wait to play some racing games on one - it will be a perfect match for that type of game. However, even then, I still think it's important to go for the highest res possible at the time of release. We can agree resolution has no bearing on gameplay, but it enhances the gameplay further. Already it needs to run an fps higher than 60 for it to feel real.
Posted 09:17pm 10/10/14
It's obvious that the industry is in decline. Developers are less about taking risks and more about delivering to shareholders than their customers. My old man would call it putting the cart before the horse.
Gamers have different tastes but there's always common ground. Even if we end up liking the same product it's very likely that our reasons for it are going to be different. I get immersed in a great story backed up with great gameplay. You are very much about visual in order to feel immersed. It's not that you don't care about story or gameplay, they're just not the first thing you consider (you can try to argue that but your first post in the thread says a lot.)
We both agree that technology plays a big role and can see that the future looks pretty good with products like the Oculus Rift on the horizon. Consoles are a big plus and a negative. When new they're fantastic but as they age they do become a hindrance. There needs to be more innovation in that space (maybe a modular design to swap out parts e.g. CPU, GPU) to support the extended life that they go through. Likewise I think the PC space there needs to be better innovation to support the shorter parts lifecycle (2 CPU and GPU releases a year is not sustainable) and justify the significantly larger expense that acts as a barrier to entry. That in itself might lead to a more unified system preventing unwanted design choices filtering through platforms (the 900p debacle with AC: Unity comes to mind.)
Lastly, Publishers need to change their behaviour. Exclusivity deals and other underhanded behaviour (e.g. the Australia Tax) only hurt customers which hastens the industry decline.
Anyway, trying to steer this back to the topic. I think Bethesda is doing the right thing by giving gamers the heads up on what they're doing. There's plenty of publishers who wouldn't do this until after all that sweet pre-order coin has come in (I like what Francis had to say on that in his Paid Promos, Brand Deals, Youtube and You! video.)
Posted 02:14am 11/10/14
Posted 09:31am 11/10/14
Pity after 15 years nobody gets it. Well in this thread anyways. Look at the other thread with all them graphics whores who don't care about gameplay one iota.
Sometimes its just where you post.
Posted 05:40pm 11/10/14
Posted 11:30pm 11/10/14
Stop being so grumpy because people are saying it's nerd rage. The game isn't even out yet; it's clearly nerd rage until such time as the game is out and people have spoken about their experiences. (Even then, it might still be nerd rage.)
An artistic decision to cap the game at 30fps certainly sounds weird to me but a) I'm not going to second guess the developer until I've played it (which I won't because I don't play games like this) and b) there are plenty of other games out there that don't run at 30fps
Posted 10:45am 12/10/14
You keep ignoring the other thread where there are another 10 odd people laughing at the 30fps thing. The only difference is they didn't get the true nerd ragers climbing all over them (when has a dev ever lied to us or got it wrong?!) and as a result the thread didn't get messy. Keep ignoring those little details though because it certainly is convenient. I see more people on this site laughing at the idea than supporting it because clearly it's dumb. :)
The developers of Windows 8 spent years making it awesome, they said it's awesome, they wrote about how awesome it was. Ultimately though it was a flop because the customer base knew better, even though the devs spent years doing so.
Here is a quote from Nicolas Gurrin, one of the Unity devs: "So I think collectively in the video game industry we're dropping that standard because it's hard to achieve, it's twice as hard as 30fps, and its not really that great in terms of rendering quality of the picture and the image."
And another quote revealing the sea-saw between quality and performance on a console: "It also lets us push the limits of everything to the maximum. It's like when people start asking about resolution. Is it the number of the quality of the pixels that you want?"
So now apparently res 'and' fps have no bearing on image quality. Haha.
This game has been designed for the PS3/Xbox360 and has been poorly ported after the fact. They've designed the game around tough hardware constraints and everything afterwards is a result of that. All the other sites are talking about it much more critically than here, where we just roll over and expect the devs to do good by us with smooth catch phrases and talking about what gamers need (30 fps) with no evidence to support it.
Posted 11:59am 12/10/14
what is this, a popularity contest to get you to answer a simple question?
Posted 01:04pm 12/10/14
Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that it's a popularity contest? If all my posting so far has brought you to the conclusion that this is all about popularity then I can guarantee the science behind what you're asking me will fly right over your head.
Edit:
I'll be a champ though and give you some pages to read. Here's information about rotary disc shutters found in cameras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter
Some more information about shutter angles: http://wolfcrow.com/blog/understanding-camera-shut
Keep in mind all of this matters to a film based recording device because of the amount of light needed frame by frame. Think high speed cameras and how much light they need to even work. Or how the 'auto' settings on most digital cameras work, where the camera simply aims to get a certain amount of light into the sensor. None of this (none at all) is comparable to videogame tech. Using film vs game to make comparisons to begin with is flawed because of the above reasons and I'm certainly not the first or last to make that comment.
Movies and cinema 'can' run at 30fps because of the way light interacts with film. This isn't the case for games and it's why there is such a divide in opinion over this where it's a non-issue with movie buffs for the most part.
Posted 03:09pm 12/10/14
easily, you immediately jumped on your high horse about not having enough time to explain the "science" on the basis that I wouldn't understand it. you came across as a little turd, especially when i didn't mean any harm by my question, i simply wanted to understand your specific opinion on this topic, in direct response to my question. unfortunately i do not have as much time as you apparently have to read and respond to countless posts. you're a good kid though and your heart is in the right place.
Posted 03:26pm 12/10/14
Posted 04:06pm 12/10/14
I'll take qgl/AusGamers Forums over the alternatives any day of the week.
And for the record, I think the 30fps thing sounds pretty silly, but in the case of this game, its just conjecture until it's out and we can see the effect it has. I'd assume all the demos and previews were locked at 30fps and theres been no mention of it being a negative experi nice in any I've read. And if it does turn out to be s***, theres a console command to unlock it anyway, so its kind of a moot point.
Posted 10:02am 13/10/14
Posted 01:26pm 13/10/14
If this is the biggest thing to hit gaming in 2014, then 2014 has been a very uneventful year indeed.
Posted 05:43am 15/10/14
Posted 08:42am 15/10/14
Posted 08:59am 15/10/14
really, unless a game isnt 120fps, its got no chance of being fun or engaging.
(note: this opinion also works with polygon counts, am i right pave?)
Posted 09:57am 15/10/14
but continue, because lets face it that little argument you have conjured up is all you have to try and apologise for the wii
Posted 10:12am 15/10/14
its been my best console experience.