This trailer got leaked a little early. Of all the video games out there, it should have occurred to me that Call of Duty would the first to sell ray traced versions of everything they make. Their games have been called so formulaic its pathetic, with the simplest controls possible, but this trailer illustrates their wildly popular cinematic approach. Corridor shooters limit your field of view and choices with the tradeoff that they can add more eye-candy to whatever is in front of you or give you more frames per second and, for the indefinite future, how many frames per second it costs to add things like explosions and ray traced reflections is going to be the burning question. How well Call of Duty does should give us some idea of what kind of frame rates we can expect for the next few years.
You can play it on PC, but just about every PC game made today is developed for console and even hardware like the Ryzen processor was developed specifically for consoles, helping to drive down the cost of PC gaming.
Open world games only became possible thanks to people developing corridor shooters like the original Doom and, in fact, Doom 2016 made so many technological advances that are applicable to any video game, people could easily get over 200 fps on a PC. That's higher than the human eye can discern, while you want at least 80fps for an open world game using higher resolutions and fast action. The better they can optimize the games, the more eye candy they can add. I don't play a lot of different kinds of games, but I keep up with the advancements in graphics to get an idea of what's coming in the near future. Current open world games are rather slow making driving vehicles in particular difficult to enjoy, unless they are designed specifically just for racing, but not forever.
Gameplay is solid too They mostly fucked up settingwise with a few of their games (they have a lot). I think it went to SF with modern warfare and fans didn't want that. But only played for like an hour myself at a friends. Observed more. I did play the zombie mode regularly at a friends place years ago. 'Kino des toten' is legendary In their latest they went back to the classic WW2 setting again. But a similar franchise (Battlefield) is also coming up with a similar setting and game. Battlefield s latest setting was more daring and original: it was set in WW1.
Yeah, id games really started the whole modern video game franchise business, by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. They literally went around to stores and told them they could put copies of the first level of Doom on their shelves without having to pay them, and the stores just printed whatever box art they wanted. They also included tools in the game to make it easy for anyone to modify it however they want, then collected the best mods that people made and sold "Ultimate Doom". It didn't take long for their level designers to figure out people were using classic medieval castle designs. Back then they would put trick staircases and other secrets into the castle design to help them repel invasions. Anyway, it means all id has to really focus on is making their engines fast and their games entertaining. Right now, id's newest Doom Eternal is coming on the market and is probably about as good as it will ever get for 3D video game run-n-gun mechanics and high speed graphics, and the burning question remains as to how to move around in VR. Id are among the few with a fast enough engine to seriously explore the possibilities in VR right now and it should prove interesting to see what they come up with. Battlefield is less of an arcade style game like id makes, and more of a simulator for massively multiplayer gaming. Their work merely expands on id's work, which is not to say it is any less important, because id can't possibly do everything and screws up like anybody!
Here's a breakdown of the new Call of Duty. A huge difference is they are using digital capture to photograph real settings, which is not cheap, but should become cheaper over time. They are bumping up the realism a good notch in every way, and we should see other games use different approaches to adding incredible detail and realism to different kinds of gaming engines. This is what 4k resolutions empower, is levels of detail that were unimaginable just five years ago in a shooter. Using a 1440p monitor with HDR10 its possible to emulate a 4k resolution without sacrificing as many frames per second, and such monitors are now coming down to competitive prices.
Here's a longer technical breakdown, if a bit boring. About all he adds is that the game has 5x the geometry, as well as incorporating digital capture, and runs on a PS4. That's a big deal, because they used an algorithm to "bake" a lot of that extra geometry and lighting into the game, and because they are using what is known as "physical rendering" where each texture represents the actual physical properties of something, such as how well it reflects light. Being able to add 5x the geometry and all those extra pixels and still run it on a PS4, means adding ray tracing is all that much easier. The Call of Duty series is not famous for being artistic or anything like that, but for spending money on improving the technology, so its a good indication of what we can expect from other developers over the next few years as the price comes down. The next consoles are already confirmed to come with up to 24gb of vram alone and have 8 core processors. They should make PC gaming all but obsolete, by providing almost the same graphics at half the cost. Often, they sell their hardware below cost at first, because they want you to buy their games and other hardware. Steam statistics indicate that some 40% of games people buy never even get played and, in a sense, they are subsidizing consoles for the rest of us.
