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PlayStation acquires Haven, the new studio led by Jade Raymond

That's fair. I hope they know what they are doing like you think they do.

On topic, I remember a ND dev talking about how it took him 18 months to finish the Museum level in TLOU2. Thats a level with no combat encounters. One real building with two floors and maybe 3-4 large rooms and it took 18 months to iterate and complete. ND actually finished that game in under 3 years despite the hack, the reshoots and delays so they are very productive. I just thought it was interesting just how much iteration every level takes. Thats manual intervention after notes from directors and play testers. I dont know how AI is going to reduce that iteration time, but Metro devs have talked about how using realtime GI has saved them a lot of time that wouldve otherwise been spent on baking lighting and we all know what nanite can do for creating 10 different LODs for every object in the game. I hope Sony devs switch to these realtime GI and reflections next gen for the sake of reducing dev time even if it means a bigger hit on the GPU.

Realtime GI solutions for fast iteration on art asset production and lighting scenes already exist in many engines across the industry. It's not specific to Unreal... like at all. It's not new technology.

Nanite is bleeding edge. But devs already have polished studio workflows for generating and authoring assets for LOD. So while a Nanite-equivalent technology would save them more time in the future, as you even acknowledge, they've already optimised their workflows to be as efficient as possible under the existing development paradigm.
 

Daneel Elijah

Gold Member
I covered this in the other thread, but the reason why I think they dont have anything equivalent to UE5 is because its been 2 years and we havent seen a single Sony game come even remotely close to Epic's UE5 demos. The first of which was released over 2.5 years ago. First party studios typically get first dibs on devkits and we know devkits were sent out in April 2019. In almost 4 years, we havent seen anything from Sony that looks as good as UE4 demos from 2019 like Rebirth. Hell, Unity's Enemies demo and the lion demo which runs on a PS5 looks three generations ahead of what sony studios have produced this gen. And that includes, Ratchet, Demon Souls, TLOU and Returnal.
I can see why someone would think that 2.5 years is a long time but when you see how games are harder and harder to make it should help to put it into perspective. Epic themselves do not have a game like the demo and probably won't do it for the foreseeable future. the Unreal 3 demo was in 2011 and even now some AAA games do not have that level of quality. TLOU 1 was on 2013. TLOU2 launched on 2020 and can be arguably not much better than the Unreal 3 demo. Do you believe that if Naughty Dog used Unreal 3 they would have made better games ?
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I can see why someone would think that 2.5 years is a long time but when you see how games are harder and harder to make it should help to put it into perspective.
But thats my entire point. UE5 has made things so easy that they were able to create an entire city in the Matrix demo with just 80 people in just under 8 months. Including an amazing chase sequence. 8 months. PS5 devkits went out in 2019. We are 3.5 years or 56 months later and Sony studios havent even come close to matching those visuals. Forget the open world, the chase scene is mind boggling. You cant have a small teaser ready in 3.5 years? September came and went and they had nothing to show.

UE5 is doing exactly what Jade Raymonds studio is trying to do.... make game dev faster. She doesnt have to figure it out. Epic has already figured it out. They dont make games anymore because they are laser focused on improving the engine. They took all the fornite money and poured it into UE5. Sony doesnt have a cash cow like Fortnite. They dont need Jade Raymond to make engines or tools or have AI learn how to make tools. They need her studio to make games. Next gen games. They were bought last year and she has nothing to show?? Epic had 80 people make an entire fully simulated city with a chase scene in 8 months.
 
I covered this in the other thread, but the reason why I think they dont have anything equivalent to UE5 is because its been 2 years and we havent seen a single Sony game come even remotely close to Epic's UE5 demos. The first of which was released over 2.5 years ago. First party studios typically get first dibs on devkits and we know devkits were sent out in April 2019. In almost 4 years, we havent seen anything from Sony that looks as good as UE4 demos from 2019 like Rebirth. Hell, Unity's Enemies demo and the lion demo which runs on a PS5 looks three generations ahead of what sony studios have produced this gen. And that includes, Ratchet, Demon Souls, TLOU and Returnal.
We haven’t seen any UE5 games that look like that either
 
Yup, but making the first car ever is more significant with all its flaws, right? She was there with AC2 as well.
But she didn’t make the first car since it’s not the first game or the first open world game. It’s like making a car 50 years after the first car but still requiring people to turn the car with a tiller.
 
2007, 15 years ago…

Also AC2 is way better in all aspects.
But she didn’t make the first car since it’s not the first game or the first open world game. It’s like making a car 50 years after the first car but still requiring people to turn the car with a tiller.

Jade Redmond was a producer on AC1. She's a glorified project manager. Her creative input then and now is close to zero. So any discussion about Jade with respect to the potential quality of this game is completely fucking inane. Please give it a rest, chaps.
 
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Daneel Elijah

Gold Member
But thats my entire point. UE5 has made things so easy that they were able to create an entire city in the Matrix demo with just 80 people in just under 8 months. Including an amazing chase sequence. 8 months. PS5 devkits went out in 2019. We are 3.5 years or 56 months later and Sony studios havent even come close to matching those visuals. Forget the open world, the chase scene is mind boggling. You cant have a small teaser ready in 3.5 years? September came and went and they had nothing to show.

UE5 is doing exactly what Jade Raymonds studio is trying to do.... make game dev faster. She doesnt have to figure it out. Epic has already figured it out. They dont make games anymore because they are laser focused on improving the engine. They took all the fornite money and poured it into UE5. Sony doesnt have a cash cow like Fortnite. They dont need Jade Raymond to make engines or tools or have AI learn how to make tools. They need her studio to make games. Next gen games. They were bought last year and she has nothing to show?? Epic had 80 people make an entire fully simulated city with a chase scene in 8 months.
If Unreal 5 was so easy Epic would have made a least one full lenght game in my opinion. From what I understand Jade Raymonds studio is made with ex Ubisoft employees and was created during or just before the pandemic. So the talented(I hope) people they have took the organisation they already had at Ubisoft and tried to make it even better. It seems that the results interested Cerny. Different objectives so I am not so sure that Unreal already have what they are doing at Haven.
This year had no Sony conference yet that is a choice made by Sony. The cross gen games too is a choice they made. When the UE5 games will begin to appear we will see if Epic claims are true.
In the meantime the matrix demo is what, a 10 minutes game? Can you imagine GTA6 compete with it ? Probably not. But that do not mean that Rockstar should use Ue5 to make GTA6, just that they have different goals when they are making their game.
 
If Unreal 5 was so easy Epic would have made a least one full lenght game in my opinion. From what I understand Jade Raymonds studio is made with ex Ubisoft employees and was created during or just before the pandemic. So the talented(I hope) people they have took the organisation they already had at Ubisoft and tried to make it even better. It seems that the results interested Cerny. Different objectives so I am not so sure that Unreal already have what they are doing at Haven.
This year had no Sony conference yet that is a choice made by Sony. The cross gen games too is a choice they made. When the UE5 games will begin to appear we will see if Epic claims are true.
In the meantime the matrix demo is what, a 10 minutes game? Can you imagine GTA6 compete with it ? Probably not. But that do not mean that Rockstar should use Ue5 to make GTA6, just that they have different goals when they are making their game.

Ubisoft Montreal and Google Stadia/Cloud devs
 
Jade Redmond was a producer on AC1. She's a glorified project manager. Her creative input then and now is close to zero. So any discussion about Jade with respect to the potential quality of this game is completely fucking inane. Please give it a rest, chaps.

Her "talent" is in her connections in the industry to recruit top tier talent, especially in the city they are located in.
 
Her "talent" is in her connections in the industry to recruit top tier talent, especially in the city they are located in.

And its pretty telling how many people love working for her. Theres a reason she’s been able to poach so much talent from the companies she’s worked at, she’s good at managing her studios and treating her employees right. The fact that Hermen said the project is coming along far faster than they thought means she’s good at managing deadlines and scope also.

She’s not gonna be the creative director or writer or whatever for the game, shes gonna be the one that makes sure the right people are working on it and it hits its deadlines. She seems to have a pretty clear vision for what she wants the studio to be and the type of games they make.

She’s brought more people over from Ubisoft and Google than Kojima did with Konami.
 
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She’s brought more people over from Ubisoft and Google than Kojima did with Konami.

To be fair, Kojima only worked with a small team within Konami, i.e. Kojipro, and basically brought his whole team. Meanwhile, Ubisoft teams are humongous by comparison and as a producer, Jade worked with far more than just her immediate local dev team at Ubisoft. So it's not a fair comparison.
 

Daneel Elijah

Gold Member
To be fair, Kojima only worked with a small team within Konami, i.e. Kojipro, and basically brought his whole team. Meanwhile, Ubisoft teams are humongous by comparison and as a producer, Jade worked with far more than just her immediate local dev team at Ubisoft. So it's not a fair comparison.
But Konami do not want to make games like they were doing before so going with him( and Sony) was paradoxaly better than to stay for most of his staff. Jade had to ask people to leave the certainty of their jobs for something a lot more uncertain. But yes the comparison is not really fair.
 
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