Since E3 came and went, a lot of crazy buzz has been thrown about with varying degrees of awesome. Microsoft has proven that the Xbox One has a fighting chance with great looking upcoming games, Wii U not only showed its continued relevance but arguably won the entire show and Sony had a megaton of stuff to show, so much so that their conference was a massive two hours of announcements. But some levels of controversy have escaped the cracks of what was an otherwise amazing year at E3. The debate of how real the awesome will be on its disc.
No gamer likes CGI trailers. There, I said it. CGI trailers are nothing more than a short movie that serves little purpose than to show a lot of flare to advertise a game. They don't show gameplay, they don't show the engine, they really don't show anything. It may as well be the publisher flashing the game's title in your face and saying "You like this." That's kind of lame. Here is where things get interesting. I've noticed at least a handful of people now arguing whether or not a game is "gameplay" or "in-engine." Let's go over the differences between the two. I know you're smart enough to already know the difference, but please bear with me for just one moment.
Gameplay is obviously what the game looks like when being played. It's literally what you're going to get when you get the game on the disc (allegedly). In-engine on the other hand is, while technically not gameplay, is still basically the game in motion in its engine. It's akin to seeing a cutscene still rendered in the game's engine. Now apparently this latter aspect of a game trailer is a bad thing to some people. My question is this... why?
To be more specific, Uncharted 4's beautiful trailer was confirmed to be in-engine footage, basically confirming that the game will look the way it did in the trailer, if not better. A similar question mark was placed on top of the new Zelda game for Wii U. Both games had "in-engine" footage but people debunk this for not being actual gameplay, saying that the games could look worse in their final product. Here's why I think these criticisms are bogus.
Sony and Nintendo are not Ubisoft: Ubisoft has no stake in the console market other than trying not to piss off fans who don't play PC games, so it makes sense why they would allegedly lower fidelity of Watch Dogs on PC to make it look less like its E3 demo counterpart and create platform parity, which actually was gameplay but on a PC. Sony and Nintendo are not like this at all. They both have stakes in their own consoles and therefor all of their manpower is going into them. Does anyone seriously expect Uncharted 4 to look WORSE when it comes out? Or Zelda U? Of course not. What we saw in-engine reflects how the gameplay will look, if not better quality later on.
What we witnessed in those trailers is literally the gameplay engine running and having the camera follow the characters as they move in the in-game environment. The fact that people expect some sort of downgrade from either title is just silly. That's something I would expect from Ubisoft, maybe even EA. But not two of the bigwigs whose consoles they need to sell. Crying foul about a trailer's footage being in-engine is just such a lame argument to me. It's fine to be critical for not seeing gameplay because I think that's what we all really want to see, but to discount a game's presence at E3 because it was in-engine and not gameplay? I just don't get it.
A lot of the preemptive criticism feels like a knee-jerk reaction to me, a grasp at straws if you will, and I expect a lot of people to be proven wrong when we do see full on gameplay of both titles and how gorgeous they will both look, especially Uncharted. But of course, this is all just me and my oh-pin-yuns.
Blog hat off and discussion hat on. Do you agree? Disagree? Why?
EDIT: I wanted to add an additional section to this blog to further my point. Look at the very first trailer for Team Fortress 2 and then compare it to the final build. https://www.youtube.com/wat...
Notice how dated the characters look and how sloppy the animation is in comparison to what the game is like now? And all of that footage was "in-engine," save of course for the name graphics for the classes. The game came out looking gorgeous in comparison, so let's all keep in mind that seeing something in-engine rather than gameplay is most certainly not the end of the world.
The final game probably won't look like this.
That's in the game's engine. This is how the game is going to look!
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Completely agree, absolutely fantastic blog.
"They both have stakes in their own consoles and therefor all of their manpower is going into them. Does anyone seriously expect Uncharted 4 to look WORSE when it comes out? Or Zelda U? Of course not. What we saw in-engine reflects how the gameplay will look, if not better quality later on."
Uncharted- I think the only debate is if it'll be 60FPS or not. ND clearly said they aren't using pre rendering at all and what we saw was in engine. That pretty much translates to in game, which I'm pretty sure they said aswell.
Zelda - Looks fantastic aswell, relative to the hardware of course. The Wii U is more capable system than most give it credit for and Nintendo does a great job of stylizing to make up for it's weaknesses. Mario, MK8 and Zelda all are very beautiful games.
"if not better quality later on." I highly , highly highly doubt that .. in-engine cutscene will always be able to push it past what in-game footage can do, simply because it does not require the same amount of compute
but i still favor in-engine trailers vs anything else beside actual gameplay footage
i am sure there won't be a huge difference leap between how nate looked in that scene vs in-game
In-engine can get away with pushing a lot more on-screen, because they're not using the full game engine for the vast amount of what you see on screen. They're using the graphics engine, sure, but there are no unknowns in the cutscene. They no with about 99% certainty how much legroom they have per frame. There is no possibility of the player swinging the camera around to see things from a different, more taxing angle, there are no AI subroutines running, all of the animations are canned and do not require extra physics calculations, they could can all the physics too if need be. But most importantly, you can shut off vast portions of the game loops that keep track of things like enemy/player status.
You can know exactly how many pixels need to be on screen at any time and you can optimize for that. For instance, pushing the geometric detail on character faces and animations up way higher than in gameplay while the camera is close up and the background is blurred. There is a big difference between in-engine and in-game in many cases, and always be sure to know if it's running in-engine in real-time on a production home console unit, and not "in-engine" on three development units then pre-recorded.
In-engine is still better than CG, but not better than or as good as in-game.
I'd be more impressed with Uncharted 4 being in-engine if he did more than get off the ground and walk away.
In engine is just a way of saying we used the same engine to create this cinematic. It never has and never will mean "This is how vibrant and amazing the game will look during interactive gameplay.
There was even an article recently with Witcher 3 footage by CD projeckt Red that showed their engine and how it scales rendering of objects in the field of view back and still does rudimentary shapes, placement, outlines, and geometry in the game world, but the "SHARP and detailed" graphics don't get shown on objects that are say, around the other side of a building, etc, they get drawn in when the game's camera/FOV gets close enough to need to stream the textures into the game engine fully.
This was done with many Unreal Engine 3 games last gen, which is part of why sometimes you wouldn't see the details on Characters until the game had a chance to buffer them in to the game world. Also known as texture pop-in.
I'm not saying Uncharted won't look amazing, I'm sure it will. But the fact that an in engine cinematic is shown in a controlled environment from a very specific angle, with very pre-scripted animations and events, is not even close to having a fully interactive camera, random events, animations, and variables that are actually WAY more taxing to implement, regardless of the console or gpu it's being run on (Within reason of course, I'm not saying we could show that kind of thing on a PS2". Basically, that same "In engine footage" could be shown on an xbox one, or even a Wii U I'm sure, because it's got nothing going on besides a specific set of events and a very specific amount of rendering is being done per frame/per second, not buffering ALL THE POSSIBILITIES in real time like gameplay.
A few other comments hit the nail on the head as well, but what Naughty Dog showed was no better than what was shown for any other pre-rendered trailer in all honesty.
Just because they said it was running on a PS4 doesn't mean anything either. Running on a PS4 could mean a many different things, like they could mean, a HD video script that uses the engine to render the info was being played through the PS4's hdmi port. Or they could mean, "the cinematic you are seeing is being shown in-engine, and it looks great, and smooth, but the actual gameplay is nowhere near capable of looking like this yet, but it's our overall goal to reach." They could even be saying that the "in game cutscene engine is being used to render the cutscene in real time, but the gameplay engine is completely different, and when one launches, the other closes, and they connect seamlessly, but they aren't indicative of the quality of actual gameplay"
That is where the issue lies in trusting the phrase "In game footage" and instead ONLY trusting GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE.