Madden NFL 16: New 'Be the Playmaker' Screenshots

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by nuckles2k2

I don't want to continuously beat this dead horse, cause it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but... Madden 15 (and 16 looks very similar to 15) was 18gigs and change on the PS4, and around 9 gigs on the PS3. The 360 used DVD-9, and the game was made to the most restricting specs so ports could be made for which ever console wasn't the dev focus. Nothing wrong with that. Madden on the "next gen" consoles seem to just be double in size of "last gen". *Almost* as if they're just uncompressed PS3/360 games with a little touching up to render a bit prettier on the new consoles. It's undeniable that the shading, lighting, and textures in Madden don't mirror what we see as being possible on these machines. A game like Killzone Shadow Fall was reportedly almost 300GB before compression down to 40GB+. There's probably some exaggerations in those claims, but I would like to know what Madden is being compressed down from to get the game all the way down to 18GB+. And why is 18GB+ even necessary when that leaves over 30GB seemingly unused? Sure, the screenshots look alright. Nothing glaringly wrong with them, and they're perfectly passable/acceptable. But even with 22 players on the field, why does that prevent them from loading up the blu-ray with better textures & lighting to use on those 22 players?

On the whole hard-disc space thing because it comes up every single year without fail here:

1 - There are hard-bound limits on how many assets may be loaded at once.

A modern video game console has 8GB of RAM. On XBOX One, at least a quarter of that is reserved for the operating system. So the developer is down to 5 or 6 GB of usable memory before he writes a line of code. That's all the space the developer gets everything he wants to render at once - HD-textures, geometry, and animations being the big-ticket items here - and also any audio you want to play (audio can be streamed from disc, and I assume that this is how commentary and in-game music is handled). Just because one makes a ton of HD assets for a game doesn't mean he gets to use them all.

2 - More importantly - Madden doesn't have a large disc footprint because it doesn't need to have a large disc footprint. The specific technical challenges it faces don't require using a ton of space to solve.

Open-world games use a lot of tricks loading and unloading assets in background to maximize the level of detail in the things closest to the player and minimize the amount of detail in assets farther away from the player. This primarily involves having textures of various sizes and geometries of varying qualities, and the duplicate larger / smaller assets are swapped in and out as needed depending on distance from the camera. This can result in a ton of duplicate assets on disc for the various quality levels of each asset. Madden NFL doesn't really do a whole lot of level-of-detail swapping - some, yes, but definitely not to the extent of an open-world game or a first-person shooter.

Another thing - games with large environments will also use tricks for faster and better lighting which require disc space. An example of such a trick is "baked" lighting, where the effects of a set of lights on a 3D environment are calculated beforehand and saved to a set of light map texture files. Depending on the complexity of the environment, a single level of a game can have a TON of light maps. Baked lighting is faster to render than real-time lighting, but the trade-off is - you guessed it - the disc space required to store the baked lighting information, which can be massive. Madden as far as I can tell doesn't use or have a reason to use baked lighting anywhere in the game; if it does have baked lighting anywhere, there isn't much; I would guess maybe the stadiums? That'd really be it, though, the lighting and shading for players is definitely real-time.

3 - One of Madden's weaker points is its commentary. NBA 2K and MLB The Show in particular have a ton of audio - not only for commentary, but also for their single-player campaign modes - and a very robust system to play various audio clips in a staggeringly wide variety of situations. Madden doesn't have dedicated single-player modes with extensive audio requirements, and its commentary system is not as extensive as other sports games so there aren't as many commentary audio files in the first place; thus, smaller disc footprint. Madden also doesn't have a feature like NBA 2K Real Voice, thus giving NBA 2K another reason to be a larger game.

There's no correlation between disc footprint and game quality, anyway, and the idea that Madden would be better if they simply filled more gigabytes is silly. The game doesn't automatically get better if EA decides to fill the remaining 10 GB or whatever with NFL Films footage, for example.

[MossMan84]

Dude, these are so totally radical! My god, who cares about screens? These look terrible imo! But my opinion doesnt really matter now does it, as some smart guy will probably point out! Lets see the game in motion or is this the bait-n-switch game like the last 10 madden games! They do a great job marketing the game but its not that hard really; its the only NFL football game in the whole-wide-world! I will pray for all my fellow sim guys that madden is not just another roster update. You have waited long enough!

[4thQtrStre5S]

Essentially, Madden will never get any better, at least in regards to appearance, than it is right now?

Then EA/Tiburon better bust their rear-ends to make the fundamentals of football shine...

And darn Microsoft for wasting so much memory on the operating system...Of course, Microsoft has a tendency to waste too much of a systems power on supporting their bloated operating systems..smh

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by 4thQtrStre5S

Essentially, Madden will never get any better, at least in regards to appearance, than it is right now? Then EA/Tiburon better bust their rear-ends to make the fundamentals of football shine... And darn Microsoft for wasting so much memory on the operating system...Of course, Microsoft has a tendency to waste too much of a systems power on supporting their bloated operating systems..smh

Oh I'm sure that they'll push more rendering horsepower out of the consoles incrementally - there are always people finding clever tricks to subtract like a hundredth a second of rendering time, which allows for a few more triangles or a few more shader program instructions.

That said, given that the baseline knowledge of computer graphics is higher now than 2000 or 2005 (when the PS2 and XBOX 360 launched, respectively) and that the new systems were middle-of-the-road gaming hardware at best upon launch in fall 2013, I don't think you'll see a leap in graphical quality anytime this console generation in the Madden NFL series, no. Not any more than the leap from M25 to M15, anyway.

[DeuceDouglas]

Just to kind of reiterate how much better the game could look in my opinion if they adjusted the colors and lighting. As with the others I made, these aren't perfect by any means but they just show the issues with colors and vibrance in-game.

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[Dr Death]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

There's no correlation between disc footprint and game quality, anyway, and the idea that Madden would be better if they simply filled more gigabytes is silly. The game doesn't automatically get better if EA decides to fill the remaining 10 GB or whatever with NFL Films footage, for example.

All that you wrote may be true, but they just ported the game over from PS3 and X-Box 360 to the new-gen systems. If they actually made the game to take advantage of the X-Box One and PS4... what kind of game could we have then???

It really doesn't matter though, because as much as you Mods want to deny that Montana 16 exists, it does, and it will be at E3 and everything that I have learned, it will blow Madden away! So we won't have to deal with all the problems that have plagued Madden the past decade... we'll now have a CHOICE to play another, much better game. And that is all people have wanted since 2005.

[ShaiLeGran]

What's the point in showing screen shots that are exactly the same as Madden 15?

[ShaiLeGran]

Quote: Originally Posted by ShaiLeGran

What's the point in showing screen shots that are exactly the same as Madden 15?

Sorry for being so cynical. Maybe just wait and see how the gameplay pans out..