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DigitalFoundry: Destiny 2 PS4 First Look + Frame-Rate Test

oneils

Member
For someone that never tried destiny, does it feel anything like halo co-op?

The enemy ai seems pretty dumb compared to what little i played of halo coop. Coop is fun, but wasn't nearly as fun as playing halo ce with a buddy. But that might be just nostalgia talking as that was quite a while ago.
 
You should definitely give it a shot. The collection for D1 is pretty cheap now.

To me, Destiny (gameplay wise) in a lot of ways feels like where Bungie would've taken Halo if they still had the reigns. Also, co-op is a ton of fun. They still have the Bungie touch. There were moments that I encountered that felt Halo-ish to me (like facing a Hunter in Halo for the first time) etc. If there is an open beta later on, I'd definitely recommend that you try it.

Yeah, a beta sounds like a good option for a try out. I just miss halo co-op campaigns so damn much :(
 

Gator86

Member
Yeah, a beta sounds like a good option for a try out. I just miss halo co-op campaigns so damn much :(

Destiny strikes kind of have that feel to them because they're more linear experiences. Just order the game on Amazon right now and then cancel it the second you get the beta code. Costs nothing.
 

napata

Member
lol the framerate is higher, but I don't think the visuals look better than Destiny.

I don't think this video shows what you think it does... better framerate yes... better visuals? Nope.

It's crazy how much a bias can influence the subjective perception of graphics. Battlefront looks photorealistic at times while Destiny 2 by comparison looks to be full of low res models and textures yet you'll still find people who think Destiny 2 look better.

I think Battlefront easily fits in the top 10 best looking PS4 games so I'm baffled when someone says they think Destiny 2 looks better. Just compare the rocks on Tatooine with the rocks in Destiny 2. Looks like a generation of difference.

I think Destiny 2 looks fine btw.
 
Well, it's not out of the realm of possibility, but it seems like Bungie has already stated they are only shooting for 30fps on consoles.

At this point, what I would expect is 4K 30fps on Scorpio, with Significantly improved image quality. Assuming the PC port has some great visual options, Bungie should be able to crank the settings up on Scorpio quite easily.

On the other hand, I'm kind of expecting Bungie to keep parity for PS4 Pro and Scorpio. Either both will have cranked visual settings, while PS4 Pro uses 4k checkerboarding and Scorpio is native 4k, or both will be Native 4k, and have almost the same visual settings as X1, while Bungie leave a huge amount of resources to waste on Scorpio.

Would only seem fair. XB1 got an identical looking game in D1 and the ps4 is a lot more powerful. Didn't hinder my enjoyment of the PS4 game all that much, especially considering I wanted all the exclusive stuff as soon as it came out (I'm a sucker for it, even if it is just cosmetic or irrelevant to the meta--hawkmoon being ps4 exclusive for y1 was hilarious though--xbox guys have no idea what they were missing on that one)
 
It's crazy how much a bias can influence the subjective perception of graphics. Battlefront looks photorealistic at times while Destiny 2 by comparison looks to be full of low res models and textures yet you'll still find people who think Destiny 2 look better.

I think Battlefront easily fits in the top 10 best looking PS4 games so I'm baffled when someone says they think Destiny 2 looks better. Just compare the rocks on Tatooine with the rocks in Destiny 2. Looks like a generation of difference.

I think Destiny 2 looks fine btw.

Battlefront not getting a Pro patch was criminal from an underutilized perspective but the audience just wasn't there anymore, sadly.

Near 4k checkboarded up would have been glorious. Some people don't like the hyperrealism of the battlefield series, so battlefront looking just as good on Pro would have been ace.
 

Gestault

Member
I have a feeling the zone shown off at this event just wasn't a particularly impressive one, because otherwise I think it it comes across a bit underwhelming. I probably hoped for a more obvious bump to optimization/improvements because they aren't needing to design around cross-gen implementation anymore. I may end up feeling totally different with the game in front of me, but until then...?
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
I have a feeling the zone shown off at this event just wasn't a particularly impressive one, because otherwise I can't understand the appearance. I think I also hoped for a more obvious bump to optimization/improvements because they aren't needing to design around cross-gen implementation anymore. I may end up feeling totally different with the game in front of me, but until then...?
We only really got a good look at the strike which was in a Vex zone so those are mostly going to be straight polygonal angles. Hopefully stuff like the European Dead Zone looks more complex.
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Really hate how DF never writes articles anymore. I can't stand watching videos to gleen technical data.
We do though! Most videos get articles these days. Have been trying really hard to do both.

It's just not possible to have an article for every video, unfortunately.
 
Honestly compared to other games like BattleFront, BF, UC4, HZD etc this looks disappointing to say the least. I don't buy their argument that Pro could not have handled 60fps. Yeah with this kind of shit it could have easily handled it. I mean look at UC4 or Battlefront or Battlefield games on even PS4, they look better than this game in SP and MP with more online players at 60fps. It could have easily handled 1080/60 on pro.
 

Symbiotx

Member
It's crazy how much a bias can influence the subjective perception of graphics. Battlefront looks photorealistic at times while Destiny 2 by comparison looks to be full of low res models and textures yet you'll still find people who think Destiny 2 look better.

I think Battlefront easily fits in the top 10 best looking PS4 games so I'm baffled when someone says they think Destiny 2 looks better. Just compare the rocks on Tatooine with the rocks in Destiny 2. Looks like a generation of difference.

I think Destiny 2 looks fine btw.

It's not that bias is affecting it, it's just subjective. I never said Destiny is the best looking game out there, and I don't think it tries to be.

I can see mostly where you're coming from, but saying Destiny 2 looks to be full of low res models and textures would be a stretch.
 
Honestly compared to other games like BattleFront, BF, UC4, HZD etc this looks disappointing to say the least. I don't buy their argument that Pro could not have handled 60fps. Yeah with this kind of shit it could have easily handled it. I mean look at UC4 or Battlefront or Battlefield games on even PS4, they look better than this game in SP and MP with more online players at 60fps. It could have easily handled 1080/60 on pro.
Agreed. I'd even go as far as saying that Battlefield 1, Battlefront, HZD, UC4 makes Destiny 2 look like a last-gen game.

The fact they couldn't get this thing running at 50fps at least on the Pro is baffling. The game's graphics are nothing to write home about.
 

napata

Member
It's not that bias is affecting it, it's just subjective. I never said Destiny is the best looking game out there, and I don't think it tries to be.

I can see mostly where you're coming from, but saying Destiny 2 looks to be full of low res models and textures would be a stretch.

Imo graphics comparisons aren't that subjective. You can compare all sorts of things: textures, models, shadows, LOD, particles, etc. Battlefront pretty much wins in all of these things. That's why I specially referred to the rocks because both video's feature easily comparable materials.

I'd say for a current generation AAA game the textures, rocks and ground especially, in Destiny 2 are on the lower end.
 

Gator86

Member
Agreed. I'd even go as far as saying that Battlefield 1, Battlefront, HZD, UC4 makes Destiny 2 look like a last-gen game.

The fact they couldn't get this thing running at 50fps at least on the Pro is baffling. The game's graphics are nothing to write home about.

Well, it still remains to be seen how large the patrol areas are, how many enemies you'll encounter in strikes, what's planned for the raids, etc. Those things could be the reason why it only runs at 30.

Alternatively, Bungie probably just doesn't give a shit about 60fps at all. The general market doesn't, D1 was at 30, and so forth. It simply wasn't and isn't a priority for them so they focused on other things.

Bungie's gonna Bungie
 
Well, it still remains to be seen how large the patrol areas are, how many enemies you'll encounter in strikes, what's planned for the raids, etc. Those things could be the reason why it only runs at 30.

Alternatively, Bungie probably just doesn't give a shit about 60fps at all. The general market doesn't, D1 was at 30, and so forth. It simply wasn't and isn't a priority for them so they focused on other things.

Bungie's gonna Bungie

Has Bungie ever made a 60fps game?
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1wW2Kv1AhA

This vid seems to compare a lot of the animations/effects which have been re-used too.

Seems like they haven't utilised the extra juice well.
I honestly couldn't tell the difference. If it wasn't for the text telling me the difference I honestly wouldn't have known Destiny 2 and Destiny were being compared here.

I'm not trying to shit on the game but this is pretty embarrassing especially when you consider Destiny 1 was a cross-gen game.
 

border

Member
I think Battlefront easily fits in the top 10 best looking PS4 games so I'm baffled when someone says they think Destiny 2 looks better. Just compare the rocks on Tatooine with the rocks in Destiny 2. Looks like a generation of difference.

Good art design goes a really long way for Bungie.

If your idea of what makes a game look good or bad is "Look at the high-resolution texture on that rock!", Destiny will probably not cut it for you.
 
This is an old build right? My guess is a lot of visual polish will take place at the end of development. That said, you can't polish 30fps unfortunately. PC or bust. I'd play this thing on a 300 dollar rig with settings all the way down 720p to get 60fps. My priorities lie in gameplay.
 

DeviantBoi

Member
Everyone talking about visuals between D1 and D2, but I'm really interested in hearing how they've improved their tools to give us regular updates for the next two years.

Their D1 tools (which had to include PS3/XB360) were always blamed for what they could and couldn't do.
 

Gator86

Member
Good art design goes a really long way for Bungie.

If your idea of what makes a game look good or bad is "Look at the high-resolution texture on that rock!", Destiny will probably not cut it for you.

Bungie's art design is generally good. That said, given the high tech route like Battlefront or Horizon or the low-power route, but a reliance on a stand-out style like BotW, Destiny manages to split the difference and just sits at "fine, I guess." It's not bad-looking, but I'm not going to spend time talking about how great it looks at any point.
 
https://youtu.be/BaAgKqTOCY4

1) 4:10min mark, the shafts are visible with lightsource completely out of view and the shafts seem to have 3 dimensional volume.

2) 4:54 mark, when the player enters the neon lit area the green lighting is very "volume-y" typical of volumetric lighting.
Yeah defintely look like spot light volumetrics from individual lights @ the 4:10 mark. I do not think it is global though like stuff you would see in frostbite though, so on a per light basis because it was not evident at all in outdoor scenes.

There was also evidence everywhere of them using rectangular - or at least cylindrical area lights:
rectangular_tube_areauipmn.png


One thing that I had trouble seeing anywhere was SSR on non-water surfaces. It seems to be only limited to water atm? And not based upon the surface gloss?

Also, it looked like particle bildboards are unlit / not integrated with the world lighting as they glow in the dark:
partle_lightzupe8.png

Btw regarding off loading AI and simulations:

Here is something interesting I have been thinking about, I am pretty damn sure that the AI and simulations don't actually usually run on every console at the same time but rather specifically on the hosts machine. Now Destiny changes hosts every minute or so seamlessly, so every console from time to time would have to do the simulation. So in essence the AI and simulation is offloaded to the hosts machine.

What this would mean is that this point that the Titanfall network engineer talked about regarding offloading AI and simulation might already be in place except instead of offloading it to dedicated servers it's offloading it to another console (so basically P2P)...which has the CPU bottleneck meaning it has to run at 30FPS because of those calculations.
That could be true, but I personally have never heard of games switching hosts in P2P so often. Did you read about that somewhere?
 

RefigeKru

Banned
Okay I know this is probably an unpopular opinion but why would they change the way the guns and the player character handled and animated if that's like one of the only things people universally loved in the first game.

I see what you're getting at, but keeping so much similar seems to only benefit those receiving money, not us willing to fork it out.

A distinct visual identity you think would be reason enough, even if only effects/animations would were to change. Funnily enough you can keep the handling of the guns the same, just alter what we're seeing on screen a little.

Worse yet, this isn't just limited to animations and effects from the player. Enemies seem to animate close to Destiny 1 and I only played 125 hours of that yet the similarities are already too stark, texture work seems close, even the much improved lighting is reminiscent of what was already available, you know? UI is similar and one thing I always loved about Halo was it's ability to renovate and reimagine itself. Still have the same helmet UI throughout the games yet altered, new. Literally the same weapons yet clearly a different interpretation of how to represent that same weapon.


It's shocking how close they are if you ask me, doesn't even feel like much has to be said. I played Black Ops 3 at release and thought it a looker at the time yet playing through IW now I see the improvements in a more tangible manner than what has been shown for Destiny and the gap between those two isn't even across generations. Call of Duty is known for being derivative retreads of the same formula, yet I feel it a deviates enough not to just be labelled DLC.
 

Reallink

Member
Which brand/model tablet uses PS4 CPU? Just curious.

Few to none cause it was trash fire even when it first released, soundly outperformed by Intel and ARM alternatives. The OG console variants most closely mirror the configurations used in lowcost notebooks, think 2013 $199 black Friday laptop.
 
The game still looks the same. Someone could post a pic of d2 and say it's d1 and I bet 99% would believe it. That's not our fault. If you gotta work so hard to show what's different is it really that different?

There is an improvement in visuals, sure. But it is not a massive jump and mainly boils down to improved effects here and there. The people who consider this game the same as the original are not wrong because it is easy to confuse both if you have no interest in the technical breakdown.

Stone cold truth.

Sorry Nooblet16, but you're wrong. D2 looks almost identical to D1
 
The enemy ai seems pretty dumb compared to what little i played of halo coop. Coop is fun, but wasn't nearly as fun as playing halo ce with a buddy. But that might be just nostalgia talking as that was quite a while ago.

The AI in Destiny doesn't usually get much time to shine. The combat arenas are smaller than the ones in Halo and the gameplay is faster— the AI doesn't usually have time to go looking for you before you've blown them up. The other week I watched a bunch of bad guys suppress my last known location, though, which I thought was very Halo-like and fresh in Destiny despite having played for 1000+ hours.
 

Spoo

Member
*mild shock*

Yeah, this is a pretty lame argument overall, especially when there are actually good arguments to make for why D2 isn't some generational leap.

Shooting guns in Destiny 2 looks a lot like shooting guns in Destiny 1. If this is a troubling fact, then I have *real* bad news for people concerning Destiny 3.
 

Zarth

Member
Btw regarding off loading AI and simulations:

Here is something interesting I have been thinking about, I am pretty damn sure that the AI and simulations don't actually usually run on every console at the same time but rather specifically on the hosts machine. Now Destiny changes hosts every minute or so seamlessly, so every console from time to time would have to do the simulation. So in essence the AI and simulation is offloaded to the hosts machine.

What this would mean is that this point that the Titanfall network engineer talked about regarding offloading AI and simulation might already be in place except instead of offloading it to dedicated servers it's offloading it to another console (so basically P2P)...which has the CPU bottleneck meaning it has to run at 30FPS because of those calculations.

Generally most of the Simulation still runs on every client.

This is often referred to as Client Side Simulation and its the reason when you press "Forward" you move instantly and don't have to wait for a response from a server. Because you too are running the physics and can simulate what will probably happen.

Thats not to say there aren't some pieces that can be offloaded but lots of stuff still runs on the client in modern MP games.
 

Lady Gaia

Member
Dude knows what he is talking about, but it is definitely speculative of whether it would help them hit 60+ fps. There would be no way to know for sure until profiling the game.

Dude has no idea what he's talking about. Even a zero-work ping is considered within Xbox Live certification standards at 150ms, and to do cloud physics and AI you'd need to be sub 16ms every single frame. I'd fire someone who pushed for a solution like this in a heartbeat.

You can hide that latency but you pay for it with lag. Having ten frames of input lag would be flat out unacceptable.
 
Stone cold truth.

Sorry Nooblet16, but you're wrong. D2 looks almost identical to D1
And you know what, I am also skeptical about the gameplay in D2 as more of a rehash of D1... same uninspired enemies, same bullet sponge bosses and higher level enemies, same old dumb AI., repetitive gameplay elements ... of course this is from the recent videos and things might be different when released but I am not hopeful at this point.
 
Stone cold truth.

Sorry Nooblet16, but you're wrong. D2 looks almost identical to D1

It does have newer graphical features, some of which are unobvious (area light or volumetrics, and to a certain extent more accurate surface shading). They definitely are not smashing the new graphical features into the face of the viewer in the scenes they showed off. The GPU particles are everywhere though and make the game look different in action.

I agree with the fact though that it is not exactly a *huge* visual difference in your average walking around scene. It is not like the difference between COD Ghosts and Andvanced Warefare (completely new engine there though).
 
Btw regarding off loading AI and simulations:

Here is something interesting I have been thinking about, I am pretty damn sure that the AI and simulations don't actually usually run on every console at the same time but rather specifically on the hosts machine. Now Destiny changes hosts every minute or so seamlessly, so every console from time to time would have to do the simulation. So in essence the AI and simulation is offloaded to the hosts machine.

What this would mean is that this point that the Titanfall network engineer talked about regarding offloading AI and simulation might already be in place except instead of offloading it to dedicated servers it's offloading it to another console (so basically P2P)...which has the CPU bottleneck meaning it has to run at 30FPS because of those calculations.

From what I understand AI and simulation are offloaded on dedicated servers called Activity Hosts

Want it 60fps? You're in luck! It will be on PC now. Enjoy.

Oh, you're PC is lacking? Yeah, that's unfortunate.

If there's a will, there's a way.

JEyhfXv.png
 
From what I understand AI and simulation are offloaded on dedicated servers called Activity Hosts

You can read all about it in this GDC presentation:
http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc2015/presentations/Truman_Justin_Shared_World_Shooter.pdf

EDIT: There was even an interesting bit about why they didn't use dedicated servers in Destiny 1:

At this point, I'm sure some of you are thinking – just use dedicated servers! If we
just never Host Migrate, because we put all our Physics Hosts in the cloud, we never
have to solve all these pesky problems. There's a couple strong reasons we didn't simply run dedicate servers
that were traditional Physics Hosts. For one thing, they need to be cost-feasible. To support our launch, we'd have
needed hundreds of thousands of headless PS3-Parity executables in the cloud, and that becomes a significant continuous
cost to maintain, especially if our playerretention continues to stay as strong as it has.

Additionally, peer-to-peer networking supports maximally responsive action
gameplay. In many cases we can match you with players that are in the same city as
you, and you get extremely low latency with your Physics Host – much better than
what we could do with Dedicated Servers. We don't want to increase our latency for
firing bullets and doing damage – that violates our ”Feels like a Single-Player Shooter"
goal.

...

We tick our Activity Hosts at 10Hz, which allows us to run almost 5000 per server [40
core, 256GB] Given that we typically have a bit over 2 players per Activity Host in real-world
conditions, that means our datacenter can handle a hypothetical 1 million concurrent
users with only a couple hundred servers, and that's with plenty of safety headroom
on each machine. That's dramatically better scale than trying to use a full dedicated server. With full
dedicated servers, that same hypothetical 1 million players would require half a
million headless PS3 processes, each running our full game simulation.
 
I feel like cross gen was the excuse for D1 being 30 FPS and now with D2 it's apparent that Bungie/Activision just didn't want to put the money/effort into making it 60 FPS on console. There certainly isn't an obvious graphical improvement going from D1 to D2. Maybe some subtle changes but nothing immediately noticeable.

Oh well. Will consider the PC version if it's stable and isn't infested with hackers (thanks, P2P)
 

ZehDon

Gold Member
The fact the differences are so subtle and virtually exclusive to non-model, texture, and geometry items such as particles, lighting and shaders, makes me wonder. Was the initial plan to just add to one game over the ten years, and that was abandoned after D1 failed to hit the mark? The best thing about D1 was TTK, and this feels closer to that than to a legitimate sequel. So, they changed up, moved to release this as a stand alone "sequel" to re-launch their franchise? It's so bizarre; there's gotta be a reason Bungie has recycled so much content with so few changes.

Here's hoping press sneak fuck delivers us a part two to his D1 article after D2 ships.
 

Gator86

Member
The fact the differences are so subtle and virtually exclusive to non-model, texture, and geometry items such as particles, lighting and shaders, makes me wonder. Was the initial plan to just add to one game over the ten years, and that was abandoned after D1 failed to hit the mark? The best thing about D1 was TTK, and this feels closer to that than to a legitimate sequel. So, they changed up, moved to release this as a stand alone "sequel" to re-launch their franchise? It's so bizarre; there's gotta be a reason Bungie has recycled so much content with so few changes.

Here's hoping press sneak fuck delivers us a part two to his D1 article after D2 ships.

They're probably saving tons of stuff for their interminable drip feed of information. So instead of opening with "here's the cool new stuff, get hype about this" they just show off some mundane mission and strike to save stuff for their coming 4958382 streams/events/blog-posts. If they showed a Lost Sector and it was interesting, people would be less concerned with the relatively unimpressive graphics and performance.
 

nOoblet16

Member
Yeah defintely look like spot light volumetrics from individual lights @ the 4:10 mark. I do not think it is global though like stuff you would see in frostbite though, so on a per light basis because it was not evident at all in outdoor scenes.

There was also evidence everywhere of them using rectangular - or at least cylindrical area lights:
rectangular_tube_areauipmn.png
Ah area lights, it's amazing how few games use it. And yes the volumetric lights seems local.

One thing that I had trouble seeing anywhere was SSR on non-water surfaces. It seems to be only limited to water atm? And not based upon the surface gloss?
Yes this is something I noticed in Destiny 1. But the metals in that game never really looked glossy in the first place. It could be the case that it's the same here but would need to see more.


That could be true, but I personally have never heard of games switching hosts in P2P so often. Did you read about that somewhere?
Yes you can read it here in their GDC paper for Destiny 1

Page 12:
"A typical Destiny player is Host Migrating between different PS4’s once every 160 seconds, without noticing any discontinuity in their simulation. So, that’s the player experience we ended up with today, but when I joined Bungie 5 years ago to work on Destiny, we didn’t have any of that."

The mission scripts are run on Bungie servers, while everything else like AI and stuff should be on the client side. By doing this they end up paying for only a few hundred servers while going full dedicated would mean half a million servers or more.

Page 88:
"Given that we typically have a bit over 2 players per Activity Host in real-world conditions, that means our datacenter can handle a hypothetical 1 million concurrent users with only a couple hundred servers, and that’s with plenty of safety headroom on each machine. That’s dramatically better scale than trying to use a full dedicated server. With full dedicated servers, that same hypothetical 1 million players would require half a million headless PS3 processes, each running our full game simulation."
 

nOoblet16

Member
From what I understand AI and simulation are offloaded on dedicated servers called Activity Hosts
No actually, if the AI and simulation was offloaded to Bungie server then the game would not be CPU bound and they should be able to hit 60FPS. What they do offload to Bungie servers or Activity Hosts as they call them are game scripts. This means spawn timers, stage transitions (mission begin/mission end etc), public events etc.

Check my post above. You can see the explanation on page 78-92 of the GDC presentation I linked there.
 

Zarth

Member
No actually, if the AI and simulation was offloaded to Bungie server then the game would not be CPU bound and they should be able to hit 60FPS. What they do offload to Bungie servers or Activity Hosts as they call them are game scripts. This means spawn timers, stage transitions (mission begin/mission end etc), public events etc.

Check my post above. You can see the explanation on page 88 of the GDC presentation I linked there.

What I dislike is Bungie makes it sound like their Activity Host system prevents them from having Dedicated Servers but theres really no good reason they give for that. It sounds like the Physics Host could just as easily be Dedicated as what they do now. Their excuse is "We have to run half a million PS3" executables is more like them saying "We didn't build a proper Dedicated Server".

I like the Activity Host system (though its led to some exploits like Network Pull Crota) but I'd prefer Dedicated Servers. Their answer here really seems to be more like "We're not willing to spend that much on the datacenters, look our datacenters right now can run way more people!"
 
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