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Uncharted 4 preview thread. New footage/info
- Thread starter zsynqx
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Net_Wrecker
Member
I'm not really concerned with what a weapon sounds like to human ears in real life conditions. I just want a game to capture this. Loud, sharp, echos/reverb, powerful.
The closer a shooter is to being that, the more thumbs up I give it.
That's definitely understandable, and I don't mean to come across like I'm trying to say you're wrong if you don't like Uncharted's gun audio or if you don't prefer an accurate recording over a dramatized one. I just have seen that Uncharted complaint pop up several times over the years, but have never had anyone explain why they felt that way. I definitely get what you're saying, and I can appreciate satisfying, visceral sound design. I think there's a sweet spot between accurate attention to detail and a gut punching mix. Like Gran Turismo has super detailed and accurate sound design, but it leaves some cars feeling incredibly unsatisfying and disappointing to drive.
As much as I appreciate the attention to detail with the gun audio in Uncharted 2 and 3, my favorite gun for sound is still the T-Bolt sniper in 3, because it's largely a custom audio set. It's a an accurate bolt and firing sound, but it's embellished with tweaked audio from the games 12 gauge, and a lion's roar. I think that's a good balance of "hey let's make this accurate and then punch it up because it's not badass enough". I love it, that kind of attitude is great in sound design, when used in moderation.
Net_Wrecker
Member
I get what you were saying, and I appreciate the detailed post you made about the AK sound. For me though, it's usually not an issue with the sound clips themselves, but the lack of punch and environmental response (sounds and echos that match your surroundings), as well as the sound mix in general. As much as real world recordings don't matter to me with 1:1 weapon realism, I do pay attention to volume, directional sound, post-gunshot audio, etc. That's what gives the weapons life, and pulls the soundscape together resulting in a more believable environment. There should be a clear distinction between a sharp handgun pop in a small room vs. automatic rifle fire hanging in the air in the jungle/mountains. Most shooters really don't have varied enough sound design to give the action scenes that kind of energy and ambiance. And the mixes, don't get me started.
In that regard I think the series definitely has gotten better with each installment. Unfortunately the problem with that kind of audio work comes down to memory, and some games work better within those limitations than others that's for sure. I think Uncharted 2 only has three distinct soundscapes for its guns, 3 has 5, so it's certainly limited considering the amount of different environments encountered over the course of the game. And the multiplayer for both only uses two of soundscapes in favor of giving slightly more emphasis to the directional audio. The directional audio was decent for the campaigns, but the series tends to incorporate heavy musical score during the action, so any impact the weapons may have tends to get overshadowed.
You're right though, not a lot of shooters have varied sound design for the guns... It's rare you see a shooter that considers echo and carry over thin cold air and dense humid air, open spaces and closed chambers. It takes a lot of work to simulate acoustics, and unfortunately, with how varied the audience's at home audio set up may be, at times it's just not worth dealing with the headache.
Uncharted 4 seems to be making a marked improvement for the series in this regard though, from what we've seen. Even just in the beta the environmental audio and the way the environment worked with the gunfire's attenuation both local and distant sounded much better to me. And the gameplay videos for last week have also shown promise.
Damn, I need to watch Heat again.
Net_Wrecker
Member
Memory constraints are a totally acceptable excuse btw, I get that there are more expensive parts of a game that are higher in the pecking order than sound, but it just means I'll remain disappointed until more devs figure out how to get it right.
And yeah music/dialogue taking precedence over weapon sounds during a shootout is another issue I have, but I guess that really comes down to tone, specifically with music. Uncharted is a pulp adventure and that rousing score with lots of strings and horns is a mainstay. That's why I've always been drawn to games trying to emulate action-thrillers where action sequences should be more intense, more mean, more raw. One of the reasons I thought The Last of Us was Naughty Dog's most satisfying game yet in terms of combat.
Good point about the sounds. I think all the feedback is good, but sounds were definitely a weak point.
Did you play TLoU? Seriously good gun feedback in that; even if you don't use them too much. I reckon Uncharted 4 is going to have killer shooting.
Heck, we already know it does from the beta. Just shooting the 4-5 AI goons in the tutorial was satisfying and responsive as fuck. Great particle effects, great animations, great gun-sounds, great feedback and shootfeel.
No one is denying that the upper pic looks better. However, if I'm not mistaken, your argument for The Order was that the gameplay model does not look as good as the cutscene model. The comparison pic I posted shows that geometry and shaders of the models are identical. However, lighting was tweaked to make it look more dramatic and cinematic. Hence, why the upper pic looks "better". Now we don't know if it will be the same for Uncharted 4, so don't jump to conclusions just yet.
Of course I played TLOU! mechanically the game is awesome, and has one of the best gunplay of all time, everything you do in this game regarding combat felt extremely satisfying, hopefully U4 will feel the same, the beta was very prmising in that regard.
Fair enough, just shared what I currently see, but we'll wait before any conclusion, game looks marvelous regardless.
Dictator93
Member
"Lighting" was tweaked to make him actually have shadows on the details of his face. To have such detials they probably put like a 2048X2048 shadow casting spot light right next to the model for the cutscene, you can even see how the rivets and metal holes in the structure behind him have shadows being cast from said light, while in gameplay they do not. It is a smart way to make the details of models much more visible.
Tons of games' cutscenes do this, and there are very few (cheap) ways to have good micro shadow detailing in gameplay. This Crytek presentation has some good ideas how to maintain micro-shadow detail even in gameplay (slide 16 and 41), but even then, their games rarely used this stuff on release. hah.
potatohead
Member
The biggest difference as far as I can tell between cutscene and gameplay quality is the lighting, not the model. You can have the same model look worse, or much worse, simply by virtue of a different lighting model or lighting quality.
We saw it in one of the GIFs 1 or 2 pages ago lol, the face looked terrible because of unfortunate gameplay lighting, that should be expected to happen sometimes though.
But pretty sure we knew that already. There's no way to throw all the GPU budget to the lighting model as in cutscenes while the gameplay is going on.
The devs have the privilege of manipulating the camera directly for close-ups during cutscenes, something that isn't going to happen often in gameplay/firefight situations, so there is a big reason to throw a lot of power into making the lighting model very detailed and high-resolution in cutscenes compared to gameplay.
We saw it in one of the GIFs 1 or 2 pages ago lol, the face looked terrible because of unfortunate gameplay lighting, that should be expected to happen sometimes though.
But pretty sure we knew that already. There's no way to throw all the GPU budget to the lighting model as in cutscenes while the gameplay is going on.
The devs have the privilege of manipulating the camera directly for close-ups during cutscenes, something that isn't going to happen often in gameplay/firefight situations, so there is a big reason to throw a lot of power into making the lighting model very detailed and high-resolution in cutscenes compared to gameplay.
Yeah, I noticed that. Self shadowing is very evident on Galahad's face in the cutscene shot. It's still there in the gameplay shot, but not as refined. Anyway, the comparison pic was meant to prove that the geometry and shaders work on the models are identical. I myself have acknowledged that the cutscene pic looks better, as it should.
OfTheOverflow
Member
I was JUST about to say this. It's absolutely criminal how overlooked Siege is. It's details are a marvel to behold.
Dictator93
Member
Oh yeah definitely. Yours was a good point to make.
Thanks, your post was pretty informative too.
Fordfx2
Member
Marketing is ramping up. I see this at work every 3 minutes or so:
28 more days of commercials at your work bruh!
Wishmaster92
Member
Holy shitThese are the pictures Frank's talking about:
Only difference one is closer than the other.
Yeah i just cropped it so everyone could see the crazy details in the realtime character model even though he is nowhere near as close to the camera.
How??? Even arm hair?
If it was only stills.. The trailer plays and they show the Uncharted Ps4 as well. And it plays on a wall with 60 tvs....
Oh wow, you can shoot your primary weapon while swinging. In MP you could only use your pistol.
That's it. So many people seem to be ignoring this.
It's the same model but the shadow rendering method will be completely different. Going from gameplay to cutscene will see a leap in definition and complexity during cutscenes.
Wishmaster92
Member
No way that face is realtime it looks too detailed and perfect maybe it's the render model from the e3 2014 teaser?
nycgamer4ever
Member
All you have to do is play Driveclub to see how much of a difference JUST lighting can do to the overall image. In those two pics one is drake indoors with a lamp light and the other is him outdoors with sunlight. Two totally different lighting situations and enironment. Of course it will look different. one is also closer than the other.
Pretty sure it's real-time. It looked that good in the reveal trailer. Bear in mind that's only how good it would look during cutscenes when the game's lighting engine is focussing only on character models and environment and is rendered at far higher density and complexity. There's no AI, no physics, no player input or broader simulation in the background to suck up some of the GPU power. It's just the models, animations, and badass lighting/shading.
Wishmaster92
Member
hmm you're right, the model does seem like the reveal trailer one without the wet shaders of course:
edit: added higher quality
It's not 60 frames but incredible how close it got to the reveal in the end since it looks better than most 30 fps games currently out.
GribbleGrunger
Dreams in Digital
I hope someone Youtubes this.
I knew before I even clicked the link what the video would be. That shoot out is so great because of the sound design and it does highlight how lacking it is in many games.
When I played through the ND collection in November I was surprised at how much improved the weapon sounds were going from U2 to 3. Despite all of the shortcomings of that games combat (the worst of which is hit reactions) the weapons felt very punchy, even the basic pistol, from an auditory and recoil perspective. Hopefully 4 isn't a step back in that regard, because the soundscape is a very subtle way to grab people into the game.
If they got some twitch person who seems clueless about their game again I'm not watching it.
McMoneyman
Member
I must be easily impressed. But the fact you have to walk around the tree with the pull cord, in most video games it would just snap onto the tree automatically.
It's arne and 2 Naughty Dog game designers
https://twitter.com/_James_Cooper/status/720089616645132290
Argh, stop streaming it and just give us a damn demo!
For what it's worth, Quantum Break is really nailing this for me. The gunshot sounds and atmosphere is perfect.
UrbanDandy
Member
Cool. Hope they unlock some more stuff that the previewers forgot.
Multiplayer playable at PAX next weekend
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/04/13/pax-east-2016-play-over-20-ps4-ps-vr-games/
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/04/13/pax-east-2016-play-over-20-ps4-ps-vr-games/
This was a big detractor for me; the guns just didn't sound or feel impactful and the enemies barely reacted when hit. Most of the time it felt like I was just emptying clips into sandbags; the gunplay just wasn't that fun.I absolutely loved the Last of Us though and felt the gunplay was VASTLY improved. Hopefully we'll see it carry over to Uncharted 4.
vpance
Member
The Division is pretty good in that dept, IMO.
Net_Wrecker
Member
Have no means to play it right now or I would've been there day 1. I'll get to it eventually.
The Division is pretty solid in that area, yeah. But because I absolutely cannot get down with the RPG side of that game, the gunplay just doesn't do anything for me.
brickarts295
Member
If they are confident as last time with TLOU. I expect review copies to go out 2 weeks before release, and the reviews a week after, so starting during the first week of May.
I gotta be honest, I'm kinda excited for the review thread, I always found enjoyment reading the U3/TLOU Review threads, so many crazy posts XD
xenorevlis
Member
Hey! Sorry for missing your response to this. Glad you did!
As far as the water is concerned, most vast water systems these days are tessellated. This includes The Witcher 3 and Uncharted 3, but goes back as far as Crysis 1. This is important so that you don't have super-dense mesh from far away - it's modern LOD and extends to things like character and object silhouettes. (Extra: post with details about U4 from Edge)
Soft-body physics are definitely a part of the game, both in pre-defined manner and runtime. They even showed this in a recent presentation (about 34 min in) up in San Francisco at GDC where they showed vehicle deformation using this implementation. The physical impact of the vehicle traction and how it affects the characters is an extension of this, and deformation of rigid and soft-body elements are all over the Sam-Pursuit video from E3 2015.
The whole day/night cycle stuff I can't vouch for, but considering the vastness of the game they almost definitely have a GI system in place as it cuts down a LOT of time needed to make and place assets and with PBR it means weather changes wouldn't require a complete redo of all assets. It felt like GI in the multiplayer as well. Different time of day in the same location is also easily achieved this way, though baked lighting and predefined lighting setups make sense in cutscenes.
Always-honest
Banned
lol....
nelsonroyale
Member
hahah
hmm you're right, the model does seem like the reveal trailer one without the wet shaders of course:
edit: added higher quality
It's not 60 frames but incredible how close it got to the reveal in the end since it looks better than most 30 fps games currently out.
That looks like some brokeback mountain shit