Sorry for the delay on my reply, SixWays, I sat at length and wrote a reply last night, but when I clicked post, the escapist forums had gone down, and EVERYTHING that I'd sat for almost an hour writing and editing was lost.
Six Ways said:
Twinrehz said:
Okay, time to drag people through a quick brain storm, based a little on guesswork and assumption, but it shouldn't be that far off the mark. (Feel free to check facts, though, I love corrections).
Prepare to get them
I can assure you, I'm thrilled to get such a good reply. ^^
Six Ways said:
You're right about 24fps being chosen for technical reasons back in the day (although it has as much to do with sound as visuals). To clarify some other points in your post - films are almost always shot at their output frame-rate, which in the vast majority of cases is 24. Almost the only reason to shoot at higher (or lower) rates is to slow down (or speed up) action after the fact by running it at the output frame rate. There's a technology called Showscan which advocates shooting at 120 and downsampling to lower rates, but that's not actually been used in any films yet.
24FPS is not chosen nowadays because of technical reasons, nor is that ever quoted as a factor. Shooting at higher frame rates is easy, but people generally don't want to. Put simply, it is an artistic choice. Films look very different at different frame rates. The general consensus as I'm aware is that 24fps, compared to say 48, intentionally looks less realistic. Suspension of disbelief is much harder when your brain thinks you're just looking at something real - the slight jitter of 24fps provides a buffer between you and the fictional world which counterintuitively can aid immersion greatly. In my experience I certainly found The Hobbit at 48fps to look like a stage play, with obvious costumes, lighting and makeup, and I'm pretty sure it's because my brain was more convinced it was real.
Well it seems I have very little to say on this, since it turns out I watched the hobbit in regular boring old 24fps, it's something I'll have to correct later. Let me just say that on the few occasions that I've seen higher frame rates in action, be it on Discovery HD or a demo on a TV in a store, I've always thought to myself "damn, that looks good, why doesn't everything look like that?". Because while I don't really think about the regular frame rate while watching TV or movies, whenever something is running at faster fps, I think it looks appealing, and I like the more fluid movement in the shots. That said, I'll have to see what it looks like when I see 3 hours worth of movie with it.
I'd say I'm a contender for higher frame rates simply because I personally think it looks good. The suspension of disbelief has always been a weird thing for me, because when watching a movie, I've never, and I mean NEVER, been able to immerse myself to the point that I forget the world around me, though it seems basically everyone else is able to. My attention span isn't so much short as it is all over the fucking place all the time, and I have to focus to remain on a single subject. My mind also tends to wander and meander around a subject, for no other reason than to distract me, it seems. It seems to me though that this all boils down to a subjective thing, though I only have your word for it that people find higher frame rate a little unsettling and weird.
Six Ways said:
If it is done to please the elitist or retro crowd, then we have basically failed. We've practically stopped technological advancement because it doesn't suit a minority that thinks everything must stay the same, because of a crowd that thinks that's how it was done, that's how it should be done. Old-fashioned thinking for old-fashioned world.
I don't think that's a minority when it comes to film-goers. Gamers, I've noticed, tend to prefer higher fps in films because that's what they're used to. But that doesn't mean it's the right choice. Besides, I could make the counter-argument that if you increase frame-rates in films, you're just doing it to satisfy a minority who think that because we can do it, we should do it.
As is the case with games, presentation only goes so far, and I've always felt that Hollywood movies focus way to little on making the story as engaging as the action. It seems the only kind of movies that get the storywriter's love is chick flicks. In itself not bad, but I wouldn't mind seeing a proper narrative coupled with an action movie. While I enjoy the woosh-bang-crikey of action movies and the funny one-liners, it would be nice to see the story get some real love too. I'm not good at watching movies though, since even with the liberty of the internet I can't be bothered to, ahem, acquire them anyway, in fact I find some satisfaction of actually buying films (and series, if I like them), though that doesn't happen very often either.
Six Ways said:
But games are a very different medium, and the almost ubiquitous drive to make them more "cinematic" generally undermines efforts to find gaming's unique strengths as an art form. Lower frame rates in games are almost universally detrimental given the interactive nature of the medium, and although a genuine limitation-free decision to lock a lower frame rate is a totally valid artistic choice, I think jamming it into a game (almost certainly to cover up technical issues) which isn't specifically designed around it will most likely result in a poorer experience.
Agreed. I don't understand this persistence with the thought that games need to be cinematic. Now, Yahtzee is very much my point of view in why games SHOULDN'T be cinematic, so I wont start going into detail on that, instead you can just watch his reviews of Bayonetta and other games labeled as cinematic (I don't remember which ones, there's way more than 200 of his videos by this point).
As for why The Order is getting so much hate for the choice of frame rate, I think it has just as much to do with the clamoring of up to date technology from Sony and MS, as with the developer's attempt to lamp shade the decision by calling it an artistic choice, saying it will make for a more cinematic experience. Whether or not they're ACTUALLY lying to us or not, I won't speculate in, because at this point it could go either way. Suffice to say that this was supposed to be a next gen title for the PS4, an anticipated one at that, and they're already showing signs of having to restrain something to give us something else.
Personally I don't see why it's so anticipated, it just looks like a generic first person shooter set in a steam punk environment, but what gamers apparently have been wanting for years is a new console generation and a game to show it off with, since the old generation was apparently getting too old and wrinkly, and the hardware limitations weren't going to go anywhere. Yet it seems the new generation still manages to be too weak to serve the gamer expectation of what they would like the new console generation to be. The strides forward made by console generations in the past (see the gap between N64/PS1 and GC/PS2 for that particular eyesore), is going to be harder and harder to bridge, because it's now gone down to such fine detail that they've needed to ramp up the lighting and shading, two of the things that GPUs have nightmares about, to make the step forward worth it.
As it then turns out, the step forward isn't big enough, and the limitations that were thought to go away with a new console generation are still there, and are still going to be roadblock for future development, unless game designers decide to ditch the console market and aim for the PC crowd with the beefiest of cards. However, that's not the solution either, because you'll be alienating not only the console gamers, but also the players on PC with a not-so-very beefed up GFX card. As always, there's optimization, there's adjustable settings, and the problem could be that the developer of The Order is just bad at optimization, or they've run out of time, in itself not unlikely given that each new generation of consoles means new developer tools to get used to.
Actually I'm running out of ideas at this point, the point I think I'm trying to make is that with the message that The Order will run at 30fps, it seems almost like the developers could be suggesting that this generation of consoles has already failed, a message that console gamers will most certainly not take lightly, and will angrily defend, because that's what we've been doing for the last 20 years. We look at differing opinion with distrust and hate, because that's what we're used to, we must defend the honor of the things we support. We're like footballers, only more passive-aggressive, arguing over it on forums instead of going at each other in fist fights.
I am of course NOT saying the new generation has failed, I'm just contemplating over what the statement from developers might make gamers think and say in response.
