Darksiders Warmastered Edition is among the lineup of games that Nordic Games will be showcasing at this year’s Gamescom, which is set to take place later this month in Cologne, Germany. Darksiders Warmastered Edition is an upgraded and remastered version of the original Darksiders. It is in development for multiple platforms, including Wii U, and will be able to run in native 1080p resolution.
Darksiders Warmastered Edition Will Be At Gamescom 2016
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So the Wii U version will be in 1080p, but at 30fps… I guess it’s not bad. They give their best shot.
Or would you rather have 720p with 60fps?
Well hey, at least they didn’t lower to 900p for Wii U.
I don’t think the Wii U version will even run at 1080p, I think that was a mistake in how Nordic worded it. Yeah, it was a kinda unfortunate slip-up on their end that will probably earn them some distrust from fans, but my current knowledge is that the Wii U version is only targeting 720p. 1080p seems kinda unrealistic to me.
Why not? Look at Super Smash Bros. 4 even with a lot of content and 8 players simultaneously we got a native 1080p with a solid 60fps.
You’re comparing two very, very different games with each other, though. In Smash Bros., every level consists of basically just a single screen with not much else happening around that screen. Darksiders on the other hand is an Action Adventure with a number of dynamic elements and some unpredictability and it certainly takes place on more than just one screen, and parts of the level are actually streamed during gameplay – something Smash Bros. probably never does. An Action Adventure really has a lot more to process than a fighting game. Even then, you just can’t compare two different games with each other when it comes to performance. Even with similar games it’s only possible to a certain degree, but with two completely different games it basically isn’t possible at all. Unfortunately game development doesn’t work that way. Games and gaming hardware aren’t just some numbers, they’re very complex systems and all very different from each other, that’s why, for example, you can’t just say “game x does this, why can’t game y do this” or “hardware x can run this, why can’t hardware y run this when it has a better GPU/RAM/CPU/whatever”. I haven’t worked on the Wii U version myself much, but from what I know, it doesn’t currently look like it’s going to run on 1080p.
It does not makes sense to me. You talk like you know exactly how the data is processed at this specific game, I’m afraid to disappoint you but I’m pretty sure SSB4 uses the WiiU hardware better than Darksiders II, for comparison AND Darksiders Warmasteres Edition may use the hardware much better too. From my POV the WiiU can handle that without problem.
Well, of course I know. I work at KAIKO after all. :P
Darksiders II runs at 720p, sub 30 fps. Not the best example.
Other than that, Smash isn’t really that performance heavy at all. There’s a reason why it’s one of the few Wii U games that can run at 1080p, 60fps in the first place.
How can you know Samsh isn’t heavy? Maybe they really know how to work with their own hardware…
I work as a game programmer, so naturally, I have some experience with estimating how much performance certain types of games need. Fighting games usually require less performance since the only action happening in them is usually limited to just a single extended screen. This makes it quite easy to optimize them. This has nothing to do with “Nintendo knowing their hardware”. If you think so, just take a look at Breath of the Wild. It only runs at 30 FPS and even has various framedrops, even though it’s a game by Nintendo themselves (and and one of their core teams, mind you). The game being from Nintendo really wasn’t the main reason Smash Bros. ran at 1080p and 60 FPS. The main reason was just the fact that fighting games are rather simple in nature.
Let’s wait and see… I may point that fighting games requires a lot of processing due to the control scheme, it’s not restricted to the “single-screen”, each character has a lot of moving set, and even each screen has a lot of content interacting. I don’t think Zelda is a comparable game even, it’s far from finishing and what we have seen is a “beta” only for demonstration, also, Zelda is far bigger the Darksiders, A LOT, Breath of the Wild is a true open world, you see… Lets wait and see. I think WiiU is totally capable of rendering this game at 1080p.
That’s why I said “extended screen”. I know that fighting games scroll, but they never really get out of the bounds of a small rectangular area. The CPU and GPU don’t need to do much culling work since certain areas of the world just aren’t ever shown at all (like the back of the camera) and therefore don’t even need to be rendered, and besides that, the levels are really small and can pretty much be rendered all at once without much penalty. This isn’t comparable to a game with open and dynamic maps. One of the things that actually takes most of the time in those games isn’t even rendering the map, it’s determing what parts of the map NOT to render. Something that doesn’t even happen in fighting games, since they’re always limited to just the same area and can just render everything they have without even caring about any culling.
Control schemes, on the other hand, dont’t require much performance (especially not GPU performance – controls basically have nothing to do with rendering at all). All you need to do is poll the gamepad’s state, check which buttons are pressed and then set certain states depending on that. This is incredibly simple and can be done in a really short time, and usually you need to do it only once per frame for each player (eight times per frame for eight players, which is still nothing in terms of modern CPU speeds). Input really doesn’t require much performance. Other things require way more performance than that, most of which are related to rendering in some way.
Calling Zelda “far from finished” is also an overstatement. Nintendo does a very careful job at choosing what games to show at events and Nintendo Directs and they wouldn’t present a game if it wasn’t stable enough and didn’t represent the final game well. I can give you a 100% guarantee that Breath of the Wild won’t run at a stable 30 FPS everywhere and all the time. How do I know? Well, just name a single console open world game that uses modern rendering features and actually DOES run at a stable 30 FPS everywhere. There is none. Open world games just aren’t that simple and predictable. I mean Xenoblade Chronicles X was already one of the most stable open world games I’ve ever played, and even that had frame drops plus major compromises to even make this possible (the game had extreme pop-ins).
Maybe, with a lot of optimization (which would probably require a lot of major reprogramming and therefore additional development time that we don’t have), the game could actually run at a stable 1080p 30 FPS, but right now that’s just not the case and I kinda doubt that that’s going to happen with the time we have. Stable 30 FPS at 720p, yes, totally. And that’s already more than can be said about Darksiders II on Wii U (and I think even Darksiders on PS3/XBOX 360). But 1080p, I currently don’t see that happening. I think Nordic really just worded that press announcement poorly and didn’t inform us about it to double-verify. Either that, or it was a spontanous decision that I don’t know anything about yet (which is totally possible, since I’m just a programmer and don’t work on the Wii U version much, but it would still be surprising, since this isn’t how it usually goes – our communication usually works quite well).
I see Darksiders as Monster Hunter in terms of rendering… not a trully open world game, there are some 3D areas that mold the world… Although the areas in Darksiders are more extensive, oh and obviously we are talking about a game that can run at about 30 or 60 fps, it’s not that mark consistently. Nordic Game as a publisher (I don’t know how far they engage with developers) brought The Legend of Kay Anniversary, a 3D game that runs in a 900p resolution plus 60 fps to the WiiU.
I understand when you say maybe there’s no time for this achievement but Nordic Game didn’t stablish differences about resolution, maybe they’ve put some effort on this version what could be considered a really smart move. WiiU is not a PS4 but yet a great and unique machine.
Nordic Games didn’t port Legend of Kay themselves, they only published it. We ported Legend of Kay, just like we are porting Darksiders. And the reasons we could make Legend of Kay run at 900p and 60 FPS were (among others)
a) because a few of the original developers of that game were involved (who obviously knew the game very well) – Darksiders, on the other hand, was originally developed by other people, who basically had no involvement in the port so far
b) Legend of Kay was much simpler in nature (it was originally a PS2 game with a comic look, few graphical effects and smaller worlds – Darksiders on the other hand is a PS3/360 era game and it also used a number of (for the time) quite advanced rendering techniques and effects – Legend of Kay never really did that
c) the engine from Legend of Kay is much more barebones than the engine from Darksiders, which actually helps the performance – Darksiders was originally developed by a way larger team than Legend of Kay and larger teams usually require engines that are bigger and easier to make development more efficient (which unfortunately usually makes the engines slower since they have to perform way more tasks that simpler engines don’t need to perform).
And overall, Legend of Kay just didn’t have the same scale as Darksiders. As already started, you can’t use one game to argue that x or y would also work in another game. Games just aren’t comparable on such a scale, they’re all too different for that. Monster Hunter is also a very different case. I have only played a few of them, but they all basically consisted of just a number of small, closed areas, separated by loading screens. This again isn’t comparable to a game like Darksiders, which streams the major parts of its world.
As I said, I’d love if we could actually make the Wii U version run at 1080p/30FPS or at least 720p/60FPS, but right now, we just aren’t there and I don’t know of any plans to actually make this happen, so if this is actually planned, it hasn’t gotten around to me yet.
Ok, so where’s the point when you stated that “can’t use one game to argue that x or y would also work in another game” but claims that Darksiders would be 720p beacuse Zelda (a larger and probably heavier game) is also running 720p? They’re different, aren’t they? Since Zelda is a trully open world games that may not use any loading screen (we don’t know yet), I think its structure must involve more processing…
Honestly I still believe that Darksider could be genuinely ported to WiiU with FHD resolution depending on team effort, more than this, a lot of people hope it, maybe it will be decisive for them to buy the game. By the way, Nordic Games specified the FPS and that was very honest, why not saying politic.
You are correct, yes, Darksiders and Breath of the Wild aren’t directly comparable, either. But that was my whole point, anyways. That was exactly what I was trying to say.
And as I mentioned, I think it was simply a slip-up by Nordic, not them trying to trick anyone.