in the blog they said that 6v6 might cause problems in instability or yea the engine wasnt suppose to have 12 players in one game. wonder how that happened but yea i guess its a different engine than overwatch 1 was.
its also funny that the engine WAS SUPPOSE to be designed for a pve format but its something that never came about… only the 3 story pve archive type like missions i guess
i wonder if it just means only console will have problems? i mean i own a pc and my rig is pretty top notch with a 13th gen i9 processor and i have a 4090 but yea not everyone has that…
switch probably will be really limited or have problems?!?
Video games are typically designed within a specific hardware budget. The easiest way to explain this would be to think about consoles - they commonly have a fixed amount of memory (e.g. 8GB). This memory gets carved up into each subsystem - a certain amount goes towards textures and graphics, some for physics, some for gameplay simulation etc. Games are typically built right up into these limits. The game on xbox might literally be consuming 7.99GB of memory.
Adding another 2 players per match means they need to load more assets - possibly another 2 heroes, including two hero models, two model textures, 2 sets of animations, possibly scripts and resources for abilities, etc.
I’m of course simplifying, but largely what he’s referring to are these budgets. They need to make sure that enabling two more players per match doesnt degrade the experience on machines where the game currently works fine.
In some cases this could theoretically manifest as instability - if the game tries to load too many assets during the match, you might crash to menu, or even crash the game entirely.
OW1->OW2 did include a number of engine updates. I realize that for most people, things probably looked largely the same, but under the hood there were definitely a lot of improvements. I noticed this the first time I played the beta. Some of the changes were subtle, but even basic things like how lighting effects were baked into the map or rendered on your gun, even on lowest settings, was impacted. The system requirements from OW1 to OW2 definitely increased for sure, but you do have to remember that part of why that’s less apparent is because there’s 2 fewer players per match, and those resources went into the budgets for other engine technologies and art resources.
For what it’s worth, PS4 already routinely shows performance drops when they introduce new stuff, at least it has for me. Took a couple patches after they added the On Fire system, for example, before the game ran as smoothly as before.
Network quality definitely plays into how the game appears to be running, so what I see (coupled with years of dust buildup degrading cooling) may not be typical. But:
-Mirrorwatch ran worse than the normal game
-Juno’s weekend also ran a little more erratically than usual
It’s not a processing power issue on our end, the server architecture is only built to handle 5v5 now, and barely at that.
Even playing 5v5 in Total Mayhem is enough to bork the server and cause a restart mid match if too many ults go off at once.
No, the server code has been ‘streamlined’ to work with 5v5, so it’s going to require some bolt turning in order to make 6v6 stable.
There’s special code out there if you want to do 6v6 under the current engine, but it causes the game to pause when the server needs to ‘catch up’ to keep it from crashing. Not the most seamless gameplay experience, but if you want to find out what 6v6 is like when tuned, they’ve got it in the Arcade.
Yeah, a whole ton of them, and a new scripting engine as well. They’d have to tone down some things in order to make it work, I think. Probably have to bring in the sight lines a bit, maybe reduce FoV, tone down some textures/polys, get rid of some of the ‘flair’ from maps.
They would probably need to dumb down all the map geometry on 6v6 matches as well.
My PC was built almost a decade ago, so yeah i will feel the engine limitation. Even now whenever i start the game the models took a while to load, so i’m running around interact with floating redballs.
Junes already started causing problems with space laser and speed ring up with Kitsune Rush on PS5. That being said, the average PC player is probably running something vaguely similar. It would effect everyone.
Can you quote this bit? They didn’t say this. They said that with the new additions to the game graphically there could be performance issues on older hardware like older consoles. They never said it can’t handle 6v6 in the engine.
In fact there are already a 6v6 custom games with lots of balance patches and lots of discords and things around them for matchmaking and they are having no problems with 6v6 running in the new engine.
I made a comment in another post about this. Is a BS excuse.
Source: Am an indie game dev 5 months into my own project. If I can handle dynamic entity handling, Blizz can too.
We don’t really have to guess. Just use the community workshop 6v6 mode at code 7HSKW and test the performance on the older systems, if anyone is curious.
If you’re on better hardware you won’t notice a small hit to your fps but again, 2 extra players will be noticeable for someone playing at 70fps when they start getting like 50
It probably can handle it but peoples computers can’t handle it
Even last gen systems have an unbelievably high poly budget. I’d be more concerned about CPU limitations, which don’t really even seem to be much of an issue imo.
Nah, its plainly an excuse. The only way I buy a heavier CPU overhead is if they upped tick rates without telling us, and even that should be mostly Sever side. Client side rendering needs waaaaay less precision. You’re talking mostly hero global coordinates and animation states. The rest should be caluclated and distributed server side. For example, a client would need to calculate thier own cooldowns, but not the enemies, while the server would need to calculate, or at least account for, both.
I’m convinced platform parity with the switch was the reason for 5v5. They couldn’t get it running smoothly on the platform with all the new additions.
This is probably a bad optimization issue, then, or something server-side. PS4 had similar issues, not worse by the sound of it. The PS5 has north of 3x the CPU speed (I’d have to look up the IPC change and I’m too lazy for that now).
Only the past couple years of processors, and only the higher end ones with very aggressive clock speeds, are going to be faster than current gen consoles (esp. if it’s not something well threaded). (Or M-series Macs, if Single Thread perf is the bottleneck, but I digress…). It’s not a good sign if they can’t keep things going smoothly for PS5.
I’m hoping they’ll be able to iron things out by Juno’s release; a lot of the alternate-ability modes have shown similar performance issues from my experience on PS4 anyway.
Bottom line, I very much believe them when they say they have engine limitations to worry about.
Maybe you are a good indie developer and Blizzard is a bad indie developer .
Blizzard (and most third parties) considers the Switch an afterthought of an afterthought, they wouldn’t ever make such important decision because of it.
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