DF Direct Weekly #46: Call of Duty's Future on PS5, Crysis 4 Reaction, Uncharted Collection

What's going on with Call of Duty on PS5 following the Microsoft acquisition of Activision? What actually happened when Alex Battaglia discovered that Crysis 4 is in development? Just how good does the Resident Evil 4 HD mod look? The answers to these questions and many more are to be found in DF Direct Weekly #46 with Rich Leadbetter, Alex Battaglia and John Linneman on mic duties.

00:00:00 Introductions
00:00:31 Activision/Microsoft + The Future of Call of Duty on PS5
00:08:12 Crysis 4 announcement
00:12:57 DF Bonus Supporter Q: Crysis 4 get its own "parallax sand" moment? If so, what are your predictions on what Crytek will bring to the table?
00:16:13 New Black Myth Wukong dev diary
00:20:27 Resident Evil 4 HD Project will see release Feb 2
00:24:18 Epic Games Incubates New Studio in Poland
00:28:00 DF Content Discussion: Uncharted PS5
00:39:41 DF Supporter Q1: Would Sony be able to shrink the PlayStation 4 into a handheld form and have it play the entire PS4 library?
00:43:23 DF Supporter Q2: If Nvidia released an RTX 40xx series graphics card tomorrow, which games or tech demos in your current library would you want to test first?
00:52:54 DF Supporter Q3: Rich, when can we expect more 4K on a budget?
01:02:23 DF Supporter Q4: I've seen rumors that Sony is looking to add backwards compatibility of some sort for PS1, PS2, and PS3 to the PS5. How would you like to see Sony handle this?
01:09:28 DF Supporter Q5: With our move to a post-resolution future, what are some games that you think *do* benefit from a native resolution?
01:12:06 DF Supporter Q6: Do you think another player could (or even should) enter the console market as it is today?

[postjm]

I love when Rich agrees with himself and ends the discussion.
43:11

[Dac_vak]

It’s always a great DF Direct when we get multiple “bespoke”s. 😌

[jakemee]

The first PS3 fat’s actually ran PS2 games exceptionally. They had native PS2 hardware inside and the upscaling it did was very nice

[itsdnk]

For the Uncharted 4 upgrade path: I only owned the original PS4 Disc for just Uncharted 4: A thieves end. Never bought or played the DLC. I stuck in my disc, went to the PS Store and was able to pay $10 to get the full package. Great deal in that regard. I got the whole DLC plus all the nice upgrades for 10 bucks.

[HunterTinsley]

Very excited to see DF cover the RE4 HD mod! Perhaps a companion piece could be John and Alex playing the terrible PC port and GC versions side be side ala yesterday's Enter the Matrix?

[telsan]

I feel like Alex loves crysis so passionately that crytek should give him a cameo in crysis 4, it would awesome and well deserved, let’s start a petition 😄👌

[yellowbat]

On the subject of Crytek and environment interactivity, I'd like to kinda give a kodus to Remedy as another developer who is making strides in this matter, especially with Control you really felt like the room and the battlefield were at your mercy and everything was a variable. And a possible weapon.

Of course there are lots of games out there with full destruction and whatnot but mostly they are just tech demos. But what Crytek and Remedy do is to have it as an element in an already fun and well-established game.

[ArcanePath]

Destructions wasn't the main appeal of Crysis for me. It was the freedom to play any number of ways. You could go stealth, speed, armour, strength or combinations of these, and it allowed you to have replay value for wiping out entire areas. It was fun grabbing people by the neck and throwing them at a bunch of other people like skittles. Then cloaking up so their buddies couldn't find you, and ambushing them with super speed. Then there was the unfolding story with aliens. The game just kept on giving which is why I played through it more than once.

[thanksbetotap]

Rich got it 100% right about cost/transistor exploding over the last decade. GPUs especially are going to be crazy expensive for perf/$ rasterization improvements from now on unfortunately, it’s just a matter of physics.

[Gloamy]

I bought Hunt: Showdown for PS5 recently and I've been loving it! dripping with atmosphere and pretty deep too. That Crytek team is really talented :)

[unnoticedhero]

Thanks for covering the RE4 HD project as I've been loosely checking in on it over the years once I found out it was a thing, from what I've read on the website it seems as though all FMV content has had a mixture of AI upscaled video and some model replacement for the few scenes where it would be possible to overlay a model over the original video.

It's not perfect but honestly it looks way better than the original FMVs IMO. I think there was even a scene where they said was an FMV but had the cutscene camera data in the game that was fully recreated with the new assets which is awesome but obviously most FMVs weren't that lucky.

[adamthompson]

The boss is back 😀. Good to see Rich again legends keep it up ready for a big year DF ❤️ 🐐

[Taijifufu]

It's good to see big daddy Richard back in the podcast seat. I always look forward to what you all have to say about the here and now.

[pixelslaughter]

John is spot on with Spencer's words. His desire is to see it stay on playstation but with gamepass included. If they don't allow it then it'll go exclusive. It's literally that simple.

I'm still blown away people are even questioning this especially after Bethesda's deal

[MattShade]

I've played most FPS games since the early days ie., '97 - and CRYSIS was the only game [apart from QUAKE] that I got to the end and just started again..over and over and over again. What a great game!

[aberkae]

As a long time Crysis fan I would love to finally see an aliens vs humans ( with nano suits) Multiplayer game. They can use Crysis 4.0 to show off the modern Cryengine and hopefully they can show something as competitive to Unreal engine 5.0 but I will not hold my breath.

[RiasatSalminSami]

This Resident Evil 4 hd mod was made by just two people! Cris and Albert.

It's insane how much dedication these two guys had to keep working on this project for 8 years. And boy it ended up looking beautiful.

[Kenshin]

CoD makes way more money than it costs in development and marketing. They can easily take twice the amount of time they currently take to make a game hence spend twice on development and still be profitable.
Edit: I'll add some numbers. Warzone makes 5.2 millions per day. Quality might be the focus if Microsoft intends to sell more Game pass through CoDs. MW2 dev cost was around 50 millions and earned revenue were around 550 millions

[StatusQuo]

I absolutely feel that Crytek can take on the rendering juggernauts. They have always tried new, never before used techniques and innovated. They think outside the box.

[griffgames]

1:10:00 I agree, stuff like Tourist, Darwinia, Caster, Virtua Racing, etc. tend to look incredible at higher native resolutions. Very 'clean' more minimalist stylized visuals like that can look glorious in pin-sharp native.