@captain-surgee said in SoT is Limited By Microsoft's Cross Platform, Iterative Console Strategy:
@realstyli Nope. There are plenty of xbox one games that look heaps better, run better and have tons of physics happening, lot's of good AI and way more players per server. These games scale amazingly well depending on the platform. Sea of thieves physics are close to none, AI is on a level of pacman (or even worse, no joke..those ghosts were pretty clever). Sea of Thieves is a pretty game and it can be much prettier. Hell, they could even make it run close to 60 fps on OG xbox (look at halo 5 warzone mode, battlefield) It's just that Rare doesn't have the resources to focus on improving the graphics and performance.
Game engines (especially UE4 which sot runs on) are very scalable from the get go.
You do realize that all the examples you mentioned are just a small segmented off worlds right with loading screens between every section. Sea of Thieves is completely open world and multiplayer in which you can move through the entire world freely without any loadingscreens after the initial one (ferry not included).
@lucid-stew said in SoT is Limited By Microsoft's Cross Platform, Iterative Console Strategy:
This is and probably always will be the issue for Sea of Thieves. CPU and GPU time is limited to what the original Xbox One can accomplish. Hear me out because this is not the case for most xplay titles.
For most crossplay titles, their single player mode can be scaled to architecture by switching to stupider AI routines or lowering graphical fidelity, etc. Multiplayer parity can be achieved because multiplayer for most games doesn't involve a lot of CPU time beyond what the players are doing. Graphics fidelity can be adjusted for things that impact gameplay, like draw distance. So, you leave in draw distance and scale down everything else. Less powerful platforms get an ugly game, but a level playing field.
This is not the case with SoT because the game IS the multiplayer map, and it contains the "single player" component that draws CPU time that multi alone would not. Because of this, all platforms must adhere to the technical abilities of the weakest platform. Because of this, graphical fidelity must be equivalent across all platforms. In the case of SoT, anything beyond level of detail gives more powerful platforms an advantage, so issues like pop-in have to be equal. A lot of games are built around restricting sight lines because that allows the rendered area to be contained and well defined, or it allows for polygons that are occluded to be bypassed in rendering. But SoT is an open map and long sightlines are actually part of the game. You must be able to see ships on the horizon. You must be able to see storms from a distance. You can still have occlusion, but its essentially irrelevant unless you spend the whole game staring at the side of a mountain because most of the map is open water. This is why draw distance and pop-in are particularly vexing for SoT.
The bad part is that, beyond a few optimization tweaks, because the game is bounded by the original XB1 hardware, this will likely never significantly improve.
While I agree that everything related to balance will be limited to the lowest hardware delimeter (which actually isn't the orignal Xbox One, but a low-end PC that can run the game on Cursed settings), I fail to see why this would limit graphical fidelity.
The balance limitations like the draw distance are to make sure that nobody has the advantage of seeing further than others. Then you have the amount of ships, players or complex AI's that you can show at the same location which should be the same for all hardware as well. However resolution, FPS, graphical details and even pop-ins are already very different on different configurations of the game. The graphical settings in game, graphical settings of your videocard and your hardware are all very influential in the graphical fidelity and performance of the game.
There's still a lot of optimization improvements that could be done to improve quality for high-end PC's even further, however I disagree with your general statement that such a thing would be impossible because of it being cross platform. If your story would be that Rare would be less willing to focus on improving PC graphics because the majority of players play on Xbox One, it would probably be more believable to me.
I'm open for reason though so if you can supply me with a source that backs your story up, I'd gladly take a look.
