Do you know how much money they would waste if they made the game look super ultra HD just to downgrade it?
Every game, from the very get go, is developed at its highest possibly fidelity. Teams of people will then have the role, mid-to-late development to
Optimise the title by enforcing lower poly meshes, removing detail objects, reducing memory consumption by simplifying behaviours and fixing memory management issues, adding visibility blockers to reduce performance cost and so forth.
This doesn't just happen on a port level, but in general. We always overstep and then reduce back.
What they really do is make a "gameplay" trailer with fake set pieces they scripted together with the most detail as possible to give the illusion the game looks really good before people buy it.
This practice is no longer encourage or used by most studios as it's too expensive to dedicate an entire team to building a chunk of game that won't actually be used. See: Halo 2, Killzone.
It's cheaper to make a super ultra HD trailer than it is to make a super ultra HD game. They don't downgrade the game for console, the game was always downgraded from the start.
Absolutely wrong. Rendering a film is relatively cheap, hence why most games with a marketing budget do CGI trailers nowadays.
Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to develop a game made for PS4 and then having to port it to a graphically inferior machine like the switch?
Um, not painful at all?
It's part of the port process. It's standard practice for every multi-plat game. No system works the same; every port of a game has its own codebase branch and they'll usually have different versions of the same assets. Generally speaking, a small team is assigned per console to focus specifically on dealing with optimisation/certification for that console.
A lot of videogames on PS4 require over 50GB of memory internally because there isn't anymore room on the blu ray disk. The switch by default has 32gb of memory, so do you know how much loving data they would have to reduce just to fit it on the stupid switch?
Absolutely wrong, otherwise what would be the point of selling retail disks if they didn't contain all the data?
The reason we install the games from the disc is because of the performance boost from running off a SATA drive. Disc media often incurs slow loading (see comparison between PS1 and N64 load times). Even a HDD (as opposed to an SSD) is faster because the bandwidth and process of getting data from the drive to RAM is quicker.
I don't need to be a triple A videogame programmer to know how badly coded a game is.
But you need to be a programmer to effectively understand what constitutes "code" and what constitutes other parts of the development process, and also lay blame correctly between the hardware or the software.
I don't need to be a triple A videogame designer to know how flawed the map design is.
But an appreciation for map design principles (which you don't have) is required to make valid, useful criticisms.
I don't need to be a triple A videogame sound engineer to know how stuffty the sounds are.
I don't even, mate.
