u/Joris-truly

I mean, AAA has never really been the right fit. AAA means "the safest investment," which inherently makes it a bad fit for immersive sims, especially if you want devs to experiment and iterate on new systems or technology.

The Eidos Montreal Deus Ex reboots are AAA and, while great, look at how their owners handled that series purely because of the ROI risk. And Xbox divesting from Arkane says a lot about the state of immersive sims in the AAA space.

The only real hope for big-budget, highly polished immersive sims is established IPs integrating more and more immersive sim design values, like Nintendo did with BOTW or Kojima did with MGSV.

I feel like this is hardly known, and it took a while of searching around to find any solid 60fps material online (only the Japanese walkthrough?).

It's kinda crazy that MachineGames set this bar for Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, especially for a release post the launch of the 8th gen consoles. id Tech 5 really was a beast. Even with all the baked lighting, the complete game is intact. Sure, lower-res textures and 720p res, but for a 2005 console with 512 MB of RAM, this is a hell of a feat.

This probably flew under the radar because it was a year before Digital Foundry started doing VO content, and 60 FPS on console wasn't really a big talking point back then like it is now. So I thought it would be fun to share.

Hardware being so expensive now, hardware demanding game development taking forever and with next gen around the corner, leads to this feeling like this is the first generation where pretty much no one is excited for next gen hardware, and I get why.

It got me thinking about how much hardware leaps have flattened over the years. So I made this little list to see how big the leaps were before and how much they have flattened over the last 20 years.

Gen	Console	CPU	RAM	GPU	Total leap vs prev
2	Atari 2600	1.2 MHz	128 bytes	none	(first CPU)
3	NES	1.8 MHz	2 KB	none	~10x
4	SNES	3.6 MHz	128 KB	none	~15-20x
5	PlayStation 1	34 MHz	2 MB	~100 MFLOPS	~40-80x
6	PlayStation 2	295 MHz	32 MB	6.2 GFLOPS	~50-90x
7	Xbox 360 / PS3	3.2 GHz x3	512 MB	~240 GFLOPS	~30x
8	PlayStation 4	1.6 GHz x8	8 GB	1.84 TFLOPS	~8x
9	PlayStation 5	3.5 GHz x8	16 GB	10.28 TFLOPS	~5x
10	PlayStation 6 (based on leaks)	Zen 6 x8	~32 GB	~34-40 TFLOPS	~3-4x

quick methodology explainer: the leap number is a rough blend of the CPU, RAM and GPU jump each gen. Real measured figures from Gen 6 on, the earlier ones are estimates since those old chips had no floating point hardware to measure. For each gen I used the mainstream best selling console games were actually built around instead of the most powerful one, you know: lowest common denominator and all that. The PS6 specs come from Moore's Law is Dead, so not confirmed. Keep that in mind.

so, as you can see the end of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling really did a number on the hardware leaps, more than I thought honestly. For those unaware, the end of Dennard scaling (around 2005-2010) basically meant raw single core cpu gains dropped off big time, so we moved to multicore, but that didnt automatically help because of Amdahl's Law, meaning some core parts of your simulation code cant simply be split up onto multiple cores and are still single core speed dependent, which holds the whole thing back.

this is just a rough estimated list so dont lean on it too harshly, but I thought it gave a fun overview of the hardware landscape history and it might explain some stuff, like why most modern games still feel remarkably 7th gen in a lot of ways. And MAN... look at that 6th gen leap. u/dark1-df John wasn't kidding.

Forum is dead, and the site 404's for a month or more.

RIP if true

I've been playing and enjoying the Halo remake recently, and it got me thinking about how the definition of a game engine seems to have changed.

When I first heard Halo was moving to Unreal Engine, I assumed that meant Halo would inevitably lose some of its signature feel by leaving BLAM! behind. Instead, the gameplay simulation was ported over, with Unreal essentially serving as the rendering and tooling layer.

That got me wondering whether the term game engine has fundamentally changed over the years.

Back in the '90s and 2000s, an engine meant much more than a rendering engine. It defined a game's mechanical and gameplay identity. If you heard a game was built on Quake, Source, LithTech, or BLAM!, you already had a good idea of how it would feel. Movement, physics, AI, networking, scripting, and countless gameplay quirks were all closely tied to the engine.

That's why so many Source games felt like Half-Life 2, or why games built on LithTech Jupiter often shared some of the same gameplay DNA as F.E.A.R.. Halo always felt inseparable from BLAM! as well. (Stubs the Zombie, also using BLAM! still felt like Halo)

Today, that seems much less true. Oblivion Remastered, for example, uses Unreal Engine 5 for its visuals while preserving much of the original Gamebryo-based gameplay simulation code underneath. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater takes a similar approach, modernizing the presentation while staying faithful to the original PS2 systems and design code. The Shadow of the Colossus remake took this approach years earlier, replacing the rendering technology while keeping the original game logic intact. And there are more examples in recent years.

It feels like we've reached a point where gameplay simulations can be more easily carried over from older technology, while the term game engine increasingly refers to the rendering, tools, and asset pipeline. Twenty years ago, knowing a game used Quake or Source gave you a rough idea of how it would play. Today, knowing a game uses Unreal tells you almost nothing about its game-feel, (apart from maybe giving you a rough idea of performance expectations.)

I also wonder if there's a downside to preserving older gameplay simulations. They preserve the feel players expect, but they also preserve technical assumptions and design constraints that were originally built around the hardware limitations of their time. For example, it's interesting that remakes like Oblivion Remastered, Dead Space Remake, and Halo can inherit some of the same technical quirks and limitations of their predecessors. Even with modern hardware, they can still be constrained by legacy technology and design decisions. It raises the question of whether modern hardware is sometimes being used mainly to improve presentation, rather than to rethink what is possible in terms of gameplay systems and simulation.

Maybe that's also why I've become less interested in game-engines as a topic. Not because modern engines are less impressive, but because they feel less like a defining feature of games. In the past, a new engine often meant a new set of possibilities that separated games from each other. Today, many engines feel more like general-purpose foundations, with fewer immediately recognizable differences from a player's perspective.

The exception that still stands out to me is Rockstar's RAGE engine. Its combination of physics, animation systems, with meticular collision detection systems. and procedural character reactions has given Rockstar games a very distinct identity since GTA IV. It feels like an example of an engine still actively shaping a experience that can only be achived with their tech.

Just some rambling thoughts, but I'm curious you guys felt similar.

It's the Silent Hill 2 tweak.
Add:

[SystemSettings]
r.NGX.DLSS.denoisermode=1
r.Lumen.Reflections.BilateralFilter=0
r.Lumen.Reflections.ScreenSpaceReconstruction=0
r.Lumen.Reflections.Temporal=0
r.Shadow.Denoiser=0

to Engine.ini in:

AppData\Local\Meteorite\Saved\Config\Windows

Edit: I forgot, set Engine.ini to read-only, otherwise the game deletes it.

The RR reflection denoiser breaks on all settings except Ultra, so keep that in mind.

RR ON

RR ON (reflection of chief is way more stable)

RR ON

Default Denoiser

Default Denoiser

Default Denoiser

Stills don't really do it justice, but you can probably make out the less distinct reflections and the noisier image.

Enjoy a much more stable image. I just wish a Ray Reconstruction toggle was a standard graphics option.

Looks more Resident Evil meets Condemned inspired, than an actual systems driven and reactive Immersive Sim.

• Lock & key logic,
• no real systemic problem solving in this clip.

That said, ImmSims (or adjacent) are notoriously difficult to demo, but this one honestly doesn't look like one. I'll probably play it, as I'll take every bigger budget ImmSim-ish thing I can get in this 10 year drought 🪾

(Not my content, like the stupid Reddit AI seems to think)

Looking forward to this one.

Ex-Starbreeze/Machine Games folk finally making a Deus Ex-Like Immersive Sim

https://preview.redd.it/fma4osnwy37h1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=94d1f50fe11f518fa793e1e4876dddbd0bffa7c0

https://preview.redd.it/9dhklsnwy37h1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=08ac402cf6b8d7de12c7e57abe8d3d7452919773

https://preview.redd.it/t15q3tnwy37h1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=fb8d22d148d69cb11db1d2164421ce8db1e97a29

My first mod ever. Still really janky, and I'm working out some kinks, but I'm proud I got it to work in the first place. Enjoy!

https://www.nexusmods.com/vtmbloodlines2/mods/174

Known-issus / To-do's:

• weapons shadow not casting (currently fixing some memory leak issues) SOLVED!
• The player model's shadow has no head (to prevent camera clipping). I'm not sure if I'll be able to fix that without a complete reimplementation of the model/mesh. SOLVED

EDIT:
Crashing is solved! update to the latest Obvious Cleanup Utility, above v1.0.3

Remember the first gameplay reveal for the TCR version?

https://youtu.be/f4sMrH_o8Js?t=1m42s

It definitely had first person shadow casting, like a Starbreeze/machine games game, or CP2077. Kinda odd it got disabled, especially because their lighting choice is so dramatic and neo-noire and the first person body being fully animated.

example: props do cast shadow, player character doesn't

Now that the TCR wrapped up development, I can't really hope for an official patch adding that in, and i'm low on Unreal modding skills, but it would be neat if there could be a mod out there enabling it. Don't know why, but it really helps with my sense if immersion and making you feel grounded in the world.

Any unreal modders on here with some know-how? Appreciate it