@@TheLurkerAtTheThreshold a fact is when you see the reviews this game got back then, you were probably too young to even know at the time there were gaming magazines, but a quick google search will show you how "good" this game was when it released.
Assassin's Creed 1 on the 360 was that jaw dropping next generation moment for me back then. I had never even conceived of being able to see so many people on screen. It was definitely more impressive then too, because I *wrongly* assumed each individual was much more complex in their simulation than they actually were. I thought I was looking at near legitimate virtual towns.
if you are interested, the number 65535 might seem arbitrary to you but actually isn't, it's ~2^16 and if you are sending and processing data typically you want to use the buffers as best as possible and due to how CPUs and GPUs and their power of two data structures it makes sense to use numbers like 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.
2^16 is 65536. The max number you can store in 16bits is 65535 but there are 65536 unique combinations of those bits. He's gotten mixed up as you start counting at 0 not 1.
@@emilioestevezz I know there's 65536 and not 65535 combinations, that's why I use "~" it means "approximately" because that one element missing could be for whatever reason that is impossible for us to know, I'm not going to pretend I know what that reason is. it could be that they also use the main character in that or that they are using it to identify an empty field. feel free to guess
It was hated but Lair on PS3 was trying to do so much. It was impressive to see you had large crowds battling it out on the ground and the air, and being able to land and see that those crowds on the ground were actually characters with a fair amount of detail to boot. This on top of the large terrain generation, a rudimentary but present fluid system, quicktime events closing on extremely detailed dragons when fighting one one-on-one in the air, particle systems, etc, etc, etc. The game was hated for the motion controls (I must be one of the few who managed to play it just fine with them), and being an early PS3 game it wasn’t visually the most refined, but there was a sense that the devs were shooting for the moon with their ideas and, which was fascinating to see.
Lair really does deserve another chance. Especially since they did remedy the control issues w/ a patch after release. It's basically Rogue Squadron with dragons and it's a shame it took down Factor 5. @@thefurthestmanfromhome1148Yes but it's not native 1080p. It's 800x1080 w/ MSAA which is then output at 1600x1080. The result is still fairly clean though especially for PS3.
Fascinating stuff, It's funny, it feels like this was also a time when there wasn't as much focus testing and optimization for engagement and all that stuff. Developers where like "This is _cool_ let's do it". Now with smaller indie titles I think we're kind of coming back to that, witch is pretty awesome
John, you gotta do a video on the Snow Blind engine games on PS2, specifically Champions of Norrath and its Sequel, Return to Arms. The visuals were absolutely remarkable, all the way down to the 3D models and animation during dialogue. It holds up very well for PS2 and the water physics are just .
@thestripedmenace I think that would be "Project Snowblind" the first person shooter that dropped in 2005. Champions of Norrath and it's sequel, Return to Arms are based off of a graphical engine called "Snowblind" that powered the original Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance 1 and 2. It was created by Snowblind Studios and they further modified and polished it when they did the Champions of Norrath PS2 Sony Exclusives. They visuals pushed the envelope of the PS2 in many ways while adhering to a mostly 60 fps experience. The special effects, sound design, overall visuals and aesthetics are top notch and the smooth polygons of the character models themselves are amazing. Some of the actual texture surfaces look almost Xbox 360 quality in some areas. They apparently used some type of super sampling on character models but the tech itself was remarkable and it's one of mysterious games that playstation 2 emulation still struggles to render correctly.
@@thestripedmenaceyou're thinking of Project Snowblind, that was the name of the game you're thinking about. It was powered by the snowblind engine which also powered the two games he mentioned.
When I think of large crowds I think of Dead Rising and Supreme Commander. Dead Rising was a revelation in comparison to the confined places in Resident Evil
Dead Rising 1 was such a fucking cool game. Would have trouble describing what was so special about it, my best attempt would be that it combined a simple but novel concept with a level of technical execution that was unbelievable for the era. All of the subsequent games in the series just lost that magic. The Willamette Mall was a special place.
I always wanted to love DR but it was never for me. I just found every task monotonous and similar to everything I did before. I guess the irony of that is im a huge RE fan and think it's still an inspired series.
@@Skeames1214 I wrote about a quarter of a script for a video about DR1. Indeed it is a special game. There were a few innovative ideas Capcom experimented with in it. 1. Things happen when you are not around: While this doesn't serve the most fun part of the game (messing around and exploring), the stress of having to consistently be at the right place at the right time in a massive mall full of events gives a tangible urgency to everything you do. 2. Unique game difficulty dynamics - You start out remarkably fragile, weak, and slow with no abilities. This makes beating the game extremely difficult on your first go. The intention of the developers was for players to attempt to beat the story after a number of restarts while raising key player stats with each attempt as skills and stats are carried forward. Aside from the above, the game had superb visual and audio design, a silly but compelling plot, and a photo taking mechanic that was narratively compelling.
I remember when I was in design college and a classmate showed this game, we were amazed how this was possible. And now almost twenty years later, on a lazy Sunday, I have all the answers!
3:13 Super Mario 128 is notable for being the foundation for what would become the first Pikmin game, with some leftover Mario assets still present in the files. In fact, I’m kind of surprised the Scornet Maestro fight from Pikmin 3 or at least Cavern of Chaos Sublevel 8 from Pikmin 2 weren’t mentioned as examples of pushing NPC limits for the consoles they’re on.
I still find Kingdom Hearts 2 1000 Heartless battle to be very impressive to this day, even if the enemy AI took a nosedive just to make it work on the PS2
Well actually there are like around 8 heartless active on screen since the 1000 heartless in the background are actually animated sprites giving the illusion that there's that many enemies. Still impressive that they manage to spawn in enemies smoothly after defeating them.
As useful as Unity and Unreal are, the downside is you don't see custom engines built specifically to achieve a vision anymore. Edit: Comment got popular now i need to evolve it, there's always exceptions, Rockstar absolutely build their own tech to realise GTA and Red Dead, DICE and Battlfield, Ubi and Assassin's Creed etc... But if you aren't the top of the budgets there's so many reasons to use the industry standard engines instead that will get you most if not all the way there, it's less of an issue now but there's plenty of early Unity games that would have benefitted from being on something else, PUBG pushed Unreal to its multiplayer limits and suffered for it, having previously been on the ARMA engine designed for (laggy) large scale battles. You can make these engines do things they haven't done before to varying degrees of success, but in the past you were making or modifying that engine yourself to get the results you wanted.
For the video subject, both engines are fine. Unreal 5 demo even had countless rats, it has a module for huge counts of NPCs control. A similar thing is there in Unity. But game developers do not like to use it as it forces to lower the quality of the main characters/monsters in games. So maybe in PS6 or something.
This is unfrotuantly the biggest downside even of bespoke in house engines such as frostbite & snowdrop. I miss the days where a vision usually started with the creation of new tools in house to create the vision in a far more optimized manner. All these extraction and API layers in engines designed to develop software on a one size fits all hardware basis is absolutley crushing.
There's plenty of demos with Unreal Engine doing crowd simulations with vertex animation for distant enemies and only swapping to skeletal animation for the closest enemies.
The locked 60fps is honestly just absurd. I'm floored by what they were able to accomplish here. Such a shame that we never saw this game come to the Americas. My 10 year-old self would probably have loved it, haha.
What a deep cut! I remember getting the demo disc as a reward(!) after playing it at TGS; the game was pretty hyped for its technical achievement at the time but it got forgotten as soon as it came out. Funny that John doesn’t mention Pikmin as an example of crowd control even though Pikmin 4 comes out soon. I thought that was the reason behind this choice but seems to be just a coincidence!
PS2 had some amazing abilities things that were unpresidented at the time, GPU instancing was super cheap (as you say basically mini meshlet's). Alpha blend had no extra cost over normal opaque rendering, and fill rate / texture access rate was super impressive for the time. So much so sometimes not doing backface culling or using mips (normal to reduce shimmering but also memory bandwidth issues) was a win. As such you could do things that brought the other platform GPU's to their knees - lots of blended multipass was possible for basic pixel shader like effects - dot product per pixel lighting for example. and other heavier bespoke effects that were basically impossible to replicate on the GF3 like Xbox HW, due to so much less fill rate, alpha being much more expensive and the very limited pixel shaders of that generation (shaders were a few lines of 'assembly' that basically got converted to register combiners (a limited set of math operations/ops applied to texture fetches -- from memory 4 textures max, with around 7 ops?).
The last hurray I remember for big crowd sims was actually in Gears of War 2. I remember them pushing massive amounts of Locust enemies being a feature but it didn't really manifest itself as a major part of the game. Which makes sense in retrospect considering Gears was a claustrophobic cover shooter.
This was a super interesting episode. I always love seeing how game developers adapted to system limitations/features in creative ways! Never heard of this one. Great stuff!
The game I recall surprising me for the amount of enemies on screen was Kameo on the Xbox 360. To this day I still like the visuals of the game on my XSX
When I was in Japan in the early 2000s, I saw these types of games everywhere, even in the arcades. There was an entire floor at Sega World dedicated to them. Some of them were really fancy with giant monitor tables and a bunch of people strategizing.
This is amazing! I would also mention the crowd in Hitman Blood Money during "the murder of crows" mission, it looked amazing for the time and still impressive
Speaking of "a million troops" you can now easily achieve that in a little game called Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 on Steam Early Access, they somehow managed to get it running at over 60 fps with more than 1 million entities on screen.
- How did they pull it off? - No doubt they had a genius programmer doing most of that work. And PS2 was an incredibly powerful machine ... if you were a genius like that guy.
@@teapouter not exactly true though, only the main PPE core can be considered as a CPU, the 7 SPEs are more like basic GPGPUs, which is why it can assist the GPU, and why multiplats don't make much use of it. In PS4's case, yes the CPU is weak but the idea was that it is more efficient to offload and parallelize many stuff to the GPU, like sound processing, physics, particles and some bits of the AI but it would need a major overhaul of the code. For example early on Ubisoft's physics ran slower on PS4 than PS3, but they rewrote it for the GPU and bam, PS4 has 1000x physics performance over PS3. Like it or not it that era of GPU compute benefitted the PC space too, else many games would still run like GTA4.
the PS2 had 2 giant vector cores, think of it as the grandad of modern GPGPUs. A lot of physics, geometry and particles can be passed to them. The 50GB/s VRAM of the PS2 also helps despite only being 4MB, that's like having HBM2 back then.
OOH!!! I saw this game mentioned in a magazine years ago but could never find any info on it at the time. So happy to see it pop up again and with some detailed poking around. THANK YOU!
Last mission in :Zone of Enders: 2nd Runner: was jaw-dropping for me. Sooooo many Enemies on the Screen also an honorable mention is Dead Rising 3 on the VCR X-Box One. That was alot of Zombies in the Start-Area.
I'm surprised there was zero mention of Dead Rising. That game really made waves for it's enemy count back in the day. I remember forum warriors pointing to ikusagami to disparage the Wii version's lack of on screen enemies
I remember finding this game for my ps2 HDD and looking in aw as it ran in 60fps while having all these enemies on the screen I was blown away and the fact it ran on a PS2 was crazy. I thought why has barely anybody found this game yet?
Great DF Retro! Another moment like this (though definitely not as many enemies) was in the early days of PS3 with Heavenly Sword. First facing an army of hundreds of enemies with the cannon and then your sword, and then after a cutscene going back with what looks like maybe a couple of thousand enemies on screen when the Heavenly Sword fully unlocks followed by the final fight with King Bohan and army. I still haven’t seen anything quite like it since.
If you want to see another contemporary to these titles look at Hitman Blood Money on the PlayStation 2, specifically the New Orleans map. Amazingly that has 100-1000s of bump mapped NPC characters on screen with collision at the same time. It was generated with a particle system!
Love this kind of content, especially where you use emulation to remove certain rendering constraints in order to 'peek under the hood', and I hope much more is on the way!
Surprised at the lack of mention of Dead Rising towards the end. The crowd tech was huge for 360, and you could really see the corners cut for the Wii.
Oh man, I remember this game. I didn't have an inkling on what was going on (since it was all in Japanese) but the feeling of batting away hundreds of enemies with one hit was one I've yet to re-experience with modern games.
Proof that PS2 was a far stronger/more complex console than people make it out to be, also MGS3, MGS2, Zone of the Enders 2, Silent Hill 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Matrix: Path of Neo, Jak, DMC3 running at 60 FPS are notable hallmark achievements.
Let's not forget about Champions of Norrath either! That game was a real powerhouse. Dynamic water ripple effects, super sampled anti-aliasing, dynamic lighting and bump mapping all at 60fps.
@@VergilHiltsLT You just named several games in one sentence and finished it by saying "running at 60FPS are notable hallmark achievements". Your comment is either poorly worded or you're now trying to correct your mistake.
@@salt-upon-wounds9909 No, just poorly read by you and now you're trying to project the blame on me. I never said those games "all run at 60 FPS". That's why I finished the sentence with DMC3 specifically.
If this was released now it would run at 20-30fps unstable and be apologised for by the gaming media citing the "ambition" and "creative decisions" of the dev team.
Agreed. Smooth performance should be considered a fundamental part of a dev's "ambition". It's a slippery slope excusing a lack of optimisation because once the bar is lowered publishers will happily increase margins by cutting it down. See what's happened with QA once they realised they could digitally pipe the finished game to you weeks/months after taking your money.
I sometimes wonder if Tak Fujii meant 1,000 and not 1,000,000. There is some international confusion between languages relating to the whole mil/mille quantity.
Even if that was the case, it had less troops than the original. I think the game just got released a bit half baked unfortunately. I was a fan of both regardless. Always hoped to see a reboot one day.
Nice episode! I have this game, I bought the "Best Price" Yellow Label version of the game on Play-Asia when it came out so long ago. What attracted me to the game back then was the sheer madness of it. I bought so many imports back then because the games were so original and never came stateside, now I buy imports because they only come out digitally in the US.
The PS1 SDK came with demo code showing off that the PS1 could do. I don't know if any of these are public but there was a "infinite sprite demo" to show off the PS1 2D power. It wasnt really infinite but so much that basically even small sprites would fill the screen until they started to overlap
Another game with large armies that isn't strictly an RTS (so I don't have to include Supreme Commander) is Mount & Blade Warband, although that's a PC game. Still, it's insane how many units these guys managed to put on the screen.
Sorry bud but youd be wrong as many games with crowd generation tech showcased on Xbox Kingdom Under Fire, Dead Rising, Dynasty Warriors, Gears of War locust swarm tech demo, Pikmin on GameCube all showcased massive crowds this game would easily be done on either console.
Thanks for this video John, you make the world a fun and better place with these deep dives into retro games that I’ve never heard of. Admittedly I will be emulating this game, but oh what fun!
The 6th generation of consoles was the best because the technology was impressive but also it was still a period of much experimentation. Before all gameplay was refined to such a degree where it feels like every game controls and runs more or less the same. Even across genres. Which started to happen in the 7th gen.
I have heard of this game in my hunts for obscure PS2 action games to play. I knew it was a musou thing but I didn't know it was a kind of technical showpiece. It being from Genki is another thing that makes it interesting too. There seems to be quite a few weird little PS2 action games like this that were only released in Japan and Europe as well.
The PS2 in general feels like devs were able to squeeze so much out of the hardware over time. Just compare the first Burnout to Burnout Revenge. Total upgrade on every front with no compromises made to achieve so.
3:13 You ever heard of Pikmin? Even Miyamoto himself said: "When people ask what became of Mario 128, I'm at a loss for words, because they had already seen what it became: Pikmin!"
Usage of impostors/sprites for far away units is amazing trick and used for pretty much every game with huge amounts units. Allows better performance and quality as impostors can be prebaked with high quality. Interestingly it was also used in the movie Starship Trooper.
This makes me crave a DF Retro on Kingdom Hearts 2 (meme potential aside), it's still a fantastic looking game on ps2 and it'd be fun to analyze how the battle of 1000 Heartless works
I'd imagine it's similar to what's going on here. There's only a handful of enemies with any real AI at a time while the rest of the crowd is just a lower detailed graphical effect and the game cleverly switches them in and out as you fight. The execution of it in KH2 is done really well, so it feels pretty natural while you're playing through it.
Spartan: Total Warrior was a really good crowd-control action game. I haven't been back to it in a while, but I feel like I remember it being pretty impressive.
PS2 had so many games. 4400 in total. Thats a lot. When comparing to Xbox which had 998 and 600 on gamecube. So many games I never played but likely would have loved
I remember The Rogue leader games had an insane amount of enemies and it was running at 60fps. Nothing compared to IKUSAGAMI but it was still impressive.
I remember seeing this game in gaming magazines and being sad that it'd never get an English translation. I really wanted to know how they pulled off the huge battles, so - thanks!
Any Musou style game still pushes on for the massive crowds of people attacking the character and that's something the series still has kept to this day
I think Sega wanted to try it too with Dreamcast. Sonic Adventure had a room in the level “Final Egg” with a bunch of robots flooding the ground that just kept regenerating. They weren’t much threat so I think they were meant to show next-gen number of models on screen for the time. Don’t forget they made a big deal (at least in Japan) for the title “Hundred Swords” which was meant to have 100 characters on screen at once. Came out at the end so it only came out on PC outside Japan. I tried a demo of the PC version and recall it having a lot of fog, probably more than was necessary, even for the Dreamcast.
I'd forgotten about that- Sonic Adventure was a really early example! Much smaller numbers, of course, but each robot was a 3D model (two different LODs, as I recall, but no switching to sprites).
If I remember well, the reason for not having massive battles on ps2 was koei/tecmo filing a patent on that type of gameplay, I guess to avoid any potential competence on their dinasty warriors series, which prevented many devs from trying anything similar, in fear of them getting sued, or to avoid paying a royalty to koei/tecmo, in any case, that patent seems to have since expired. I'm not sure, but those are the rumors
I think the biggest reason we don’t have massive crowds in games anymore is that tastes have changed. Audiences don’t care about technical trickery as much as they do a constant feed of content. Fortnite has trained younger players to expect weekly updates and you just cannot deliver that while also rendering tens of thousands of enemies at once.
@@flameshana9I don't think anyone's proud of that, though I would not be all that surprised if I'm wrong. People seem to be able to feel superior over the most ridiculous things. You're right otherwise.
2:56 Actually, that technology that powered the Super Mario 128 demo did end up being utilized for another GameCube game called Pikmin. Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that Pikmin is basically the result of the Super Mario 128 technology experiment; and when you consider that Pikmin on the GameCube can have up to 100 Pikmin onscreen (plus Captain Olimar and all the enemies and objects onscreen) being able to follow you, do all sorts of stuff like fighting enemies, carrying objects, etc. with no frame rate drops is very impressive.
This is incredible and awesome and beautiful... This is what Pikmin 4 should strive for. Also, no mention of Dead Rising or Days Gone? Or Left 4 Dead, perhaps?
I hope the programmer of this game watches this video and feel proud.
This is an astounding technical achievement.
I hope game devs nowadays look at this game and are ashamed of themselves.
@@DarkWarlock6838 Or 90% of the devs back then...
@@DarkWarlock6838 yea those bastards woking 100 + hour weeks, with no holidays and low pay. what are they thinking.
@@robertlaidlaw4592 No excuse. They had less back then but still put out more and had more creativity. Despite garbage working hours.
@thomasboob559sometimes, yes, actually.
The PS2 is such a treasure trove of hidden games, I want to give this game a try, looks really fun
Its actually a mediocre game
@@DJBVDidn't realize your opinion is the same as everyone else's.
@@TheLurkerAtTheThreshold its not an opinion its a fact
@@DJBV It's a fact you don't understand what a fact is
@@TheLurkerAtTheThreshold a fact is when you see the reviews this game got back then, you were probably too young to even know at the time there were gaming magazines, but a quick google search will show you how "good" this game was when it released.
Assassin's Creed 1 on the 360 was that jaw dropping next generation moment for me back then. I had never even conceived of being able to see so many people on screen. It was definitely more impressive then too, because I *wrongly* assumed each individual was much more complex in their simulation than they actually were. I thought I was looking at near legitimate virtual towns.
if you are interested, the number 65535 might seem arbitrary to you but actually isn't, it's ~2^16 and if you are sending and processing data typically you want to use the buffers as best as possible and due to how CPUs and GPUs and their power of two data structures it makes sense to use numbers like 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.
As soon as I saw the number, I was instantly reminded of the row limit in 32 bit era excel
2^16 is 65536. The max number you can store in 16bits is 65535 but there are 65536 unique combinations of those bits. He's gotten mixed up as you start counting at 0 not 1.
@@emilioestevezz I know there's 65536 and not 65535 combinations, that's why I use "~" it means "approximately" because that one element missing could be for whatever reason that is impossible for us to know, I'm not going to pretend I know what that reason is.
it could be that they also use the main character in that or that they are using it to identify an empty field. feel free to guess
@@kebrus Thats true
The unit count was limited by the 16kB of memory on VU1 vector unit, which they used for simulating/ai the units.
It was hated but Lair on PS3 was trying to do so much. It was impressive to see you had large crowds battling it out on the ground and the air, and being able to land and see that those crowds on the ground were actually characters with a fair amount of detail to boot.
This on top of the large terrain generation, a rudimentary but present fluid system, quicktime events closing on extremely detailed dragons when fighting one one-on-one in the air, particle systems, etc, etc, etc.
The game was hated for the motion controls (I must be one of the few who managed to play it just fine with them), and being an early PS3 game it wasn’t visually the most refined, but there was a sense that the devs were shooting for the moon with their ideas and, which was fascinating to see.
Early 1080P PS3 title as well I believe?
Lair really does deserve another chance. Especially since they did remedy the control issues w/ a patch after release. It's basically Rogue Squadron with dragons and it's a shame it took down Factor 5.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148Yes but it's not native 1080p. It's 800x1080 w/ MSAA which is then output at 1600x1080. The result is still fairly clean though especially for PS3.
Fascinating stuff,
It's funny, it feels like this was also a time when there wasn't as much focus testing and optimization for engagement and all that stuff. Developers where like "This is _cool_ let's do it".
Now with smaller indie titles I think we're kind of coming back to that, witch is pretty awesome
John, you gotta do a video on the Snow Blind engine games on PS2, specifically Champions of Norrath and its Sequel, Return to Arms. The visuals were absolutely remarkable, all the way down to the 3D models and animation during dialogue. It holds up very well for PS2 and the water physics are just .
Oh yeah, those are insane. I do want to cover them!
Didn't those start out development as Deus Ex sequels (specifically, sequels to Invisible War, AKA DEx 2)?
@@dark1x お願いします
@thestripedmenace I think that would be "Project Snowblind" the first person shooter that dropped in 2005.
Champions of Norrath and it's sequel, Return to Arms are based off of a graphical engine called "Snowblind" that powered the original Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance 1 and 2. It was created by Snowblind Studios and they further modified and polished it when they did the Champions of Norrath PS2 Sony Exclusives. They visuals pushed the envelope of the PS2 in many ways while adhering to a mostly 60 fps experience. The special effects, sound design, overall visuals and aesthetics are top notch and the smooth polygons of the character models themselves are amazing. Some of the actual texture surfaces look almost Xbox 360 quality in some areas.
They apparently used some type of super sampling on character models but the tech itself was remarkable and it's one of mysterious games that playstation 2 emulation still struggles to render correctly.
@@thestripedmenaceyou're thinking of Project Snowblind, that was the name of the game you're thinking about. It was powered by the snowblind engine which also powered the two games he mentioned.
When I think of large crowds I think of Dead Rising and Supreme Commander. Dead Rising was a revelation in comparison to the confined places in Resident Evil
Dead Rising 1 was such a fucking cool game. Would have trouble describing what was so special about it, my best attempt would be that it combined a simple but novel concept with a level of technical execution that was unbelievable for the era. All of the subsequent games in the series just lost that magic. The Willamette Mall was a special place.
@@Skeames1214it still holds up with all those zombies particularly in the garage where there thousands of them.
I always wanted to love DR but it was never for me. I just found every task monotonous and similar to everything I did before. I guess the irony of that is im a huge RE fan and think it's still an inspired series.
@@BreadCatMarcusyeah same here. Imo the games just look boring.
@@Skeames1214 I wrote about a quarter of a script for a video about DR1. Indeed it is a special game. There were a few innovative ideas Capcom experimented with in it.
1. Things happen when you are not around: While this doesn't serve the most fun part of the game (messing around and exploring), the stress of having to consistently be at the right place at the right time in a massive mall full of events gives a tangible urgency to everything you do.
2. Unique game difficulty dynamics - You start out remarkably fragile, weak, and slow with no abilities. This makes beating the game extremely difficult on your first go. The intention of the developers was for players to attempt to beat the story after a number of restarts while raising key player stats with each attempt as skills and stats are carried forward.
Aside from the above, the game had superb visual and audio design, a silly but compelling plot, and a photo taking mechanic that was narratively compelling.
I remember when I was in design college and a classmate showed this game, we were amazed how this was possible. And now almost twenty years later, on a lazy Sunday, I have all the answers!
3:13 Super Mario 128 is notable for being the foundation for what would become the first Pikmin game, with some leftover Mario assets still present in the files. In fact, I’m kind of surprised the Scornet Maestro fight from Pikmin 3 or at least Cavern of Chaos Sublevel 8 from Pikmin 2 weren’t mentioned as examples of pushing NPC limits for the consoles they’re on.
Good pull
The last part of Skyward Sword was also pretty impressive. I think the massive army made the Wii chug.
I still find Kingdom Hearts 2 1000 Heartless battle to be very impressive to this day, even if the enemy AI took a nosedive just to make it work on the PS2
Well actually there are like around 8 heartless active on screen since the 1000 heartless in the background are actually animated sprites giving the illusion that there's that many enemies. Still impressive that they manage to spawn in enemies smoothly after defeating them.
That is just a sprite in the backgground lmao
@@hahalolz4512 What about the Playstation 3 Version? Does that at least have all 1000 Heartless without sprites or reduced AI?
04:48 - music: Samanosuke Theme (Onimiusha: Warlords - Track 03)
Edit: We need an Onimusha remake (unlikely to happen).
Glad to saw this game got mentioned after all these years. Such a technical marvel for the PS2.
As useful as Unity and Unreal are, the downside is you don't see custom engines built specifically to achieve a vision anymore.
Edit: Comment got popular now i need to evolve it, there's always exceptions, Rockstar absolutely build their own tech to realise GTA and Red Dead, DICE and Battlfield, Ubi and Assassin's Creed etc... But if you aren't the top of the budgets there's so many reasons to use the industry standard engines instead that will get you most if not all the way there, it's less of an issue now but there's plenty of early Unity games that would have benefitted from being on something else, PUBG pushed Unreal to its multiplayer limits and suffered for it, having previously been on the ARMA engine designed for (laggy) large scale battles. You can make these engines do things they haven't done before to varying degrees of success, but in the past you were making or modifying that engine yourself to get the results you wanted.
For the video subject, both engines are fine. Unreal 5 demo even had countless rats, it has a module for huge counts of NPCs control. A similar thing is there in Unity. But game developers do not like to use it as it forces to lower the quality of the main characters/monsters in games. So maybe in PS6 or something.
Agreed
This is unfrotuantly the biggest downside even of bespoke in house engines such as frostbite & snowdrop. I miss the days where a vision usually started with the creation of new tools in house to create the vision in a far more optimized manner. All these extraction and API layers in engines designed to develop software on a one size fits all hardware basis is absolutley crushing.
There's plenty of demos with Unreal Engine doing crowd simulations with vertex animation for distant enemies and only swapping to skeletal animation for the closest enemies.
100% everything ends up looking and feeling the same.
The locked 60fps is honestly just absurd. I'm floored by what they were able to accomplish here. Such a shame that we never saw this game come to the Americas. My 10 year-old self would probably have loved it, haha.
What a deep cut! I remember getting the demo disc as a reward(!) after playing it at TGS; the game was pretty hyped for its technical achievement at the time but it got forgotten as soon as it came out.
Funny that John doesn’t mention Pikmin as an example of crowd control even though Pikmin 4 comes out soon. I thought that was the reason behind this choice but seems to be just a coincidence!
PS2 had some amazing abilities things that were unpresidented at the time, GPU instancing was super cheap (as you say basically mini meshlet's). Alpha blend had no extra cost over normal opaque rendering, and fill rate / texture access rate was super impressive for the time. So much so sometimes not doing backface culling or using mips (normal to reduce shimmering but also memory bandwidth issues) was a win. As such you could do things that brought the other platform GPU's to their knees - lots of blended multipass was possible for basic pixel shader like effects - dot product per pixel lighting for example. and other heavier bespoke effects that were basically impossible to replicate on the GF3 like Xbox HW, due to so much less fill rate, alpha being much more expensive and the very limited pixel shaders of that generation (shaders were a few lines of 'assembly' that basically got converted to register combiners (a limited set of math operations/ops applied to texture fetches -- from memory 4 textures max, with around 7 ops?).
The last hurray I remember for big crowd sims was actually in Gears of War 2. I remember them pushing massive amounts of Locust enemies being a feature but it didn't really manifest itself as a major part of the game. Which makes sense in retrospect considering Gears was a claustrophobic cover shooter.
also one of the few good series on the xbox one because it and sunset overdrive used its slightly better cpu to display massive crowds.
Kameo on 360 blew my mind with the high def graphics and a ridiculous amount of enemies on screen
Was origianlly meant for the OG xbox too.
So glad you briefly mentioned kessen, that was the game that got me into large scale strategy war games like total war
Spartan Total Worrier is a great example as well showing many enemies on screen at once in real time with every enemies has it's own AI
This was a super interesting episode. I always love seeing how game developers adapted to system limitations/features in creative ways!
Never heard of this one. Great stuff!
The game I recall surprising me for the amount of enemies on screen was Kameo on the Xbox 360. To this day I still like the visuals of the game on my XSX
When I was in Japan in the early 2000s, I saw these types of games everywhere, even in the arcades. There was an entire floor at Sega World dedicated to them. Some of them were really fancy with giant monitor tables and a bunch of people strategizing.
This is amazing! I would also mention the crowd in Hitman Blood Money during "the murder of crows" mission, it looked amazing for the time and still impressive
99 Nights was still a great game. But this game also blew me away at the time & still for quite some time after.
ah, the nostalgia
When the developers got there heads around the PS2's convoluted architecture it was and still is an incredible machine, still use mine to this day
Thanks for reminding the title of this game. Had some fun time with it back in the old days.
PS2 will always be my favorite time for gaming, it was a pure joy to play games at that time, it never repeated sadly :/
Speaking of "a million troops" you can now easily achieve that in a little game called Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 on Steam Early Access, they somehow managed to get it running at over 60 fps with more than 1 million entities on screen.
Yeah was going to say we do have a million troops in UEBSII
On what PC?
- How did they pull it off?
- No doubt they had a genius programmer doing most of that work. And PS2 was an incredibly powerful machine ... if you were a genius like that guy.
The secret is bandwidth, smart optimization let devs use a rather sizable amount of it to push 60fps in alot of games
PS2 had loads of ga,és running at 60fps. More than PS3 in fact which is crazy if you think about it.
@@doctorsilva1345 Especially when you consider that the PS3's CPU was more robust than its GPU, unlike with the PS4
@@teapouter not exactly true though, only the main PPE core can be considered as a CPU, the 7 SPEs are more like basic GPGPUs, which is why it can assist the GPU, and why multiplats don't make much use of it.
In PS4's case, yes the CPU is weak but the idea was that it is more efficient to offload and parallelize many stuff to the GPU, like sound processing, physics, particles and some bits of the AI but it would need a major overhaul of the code. For example early on Ubisoft's physics ran slower on PS4 than PS3, but they rewrote it for the GPU and bam, PS4 has 1000x physics performance over PS3. Like it or not it that era of GPU compute benefitted the PC space too, else many games would still run like GTA4.
the PS2 had 2 giant vector cores, think of it as the grandad of modern GPGPUs. A lot of physics, geometry and particles can be passed to them. The 50GB/s VRAM of the PS2 also helps despite only being 4MB, that's like having HBM2 back then.
OOH!!! I saw this game mentioned in a magazine years ago but could never find any info on it at the time. So happy to see it pop up again and with some detailed poking around. THANK YOU!
Last mission in :Zone of Enders: 2nd Runner: was jaw-dropping for me. Sooooo many Enemies on the Screen
also an honorable mention is Dead Rising 3 on the VCR X-Box One. That was alot of Zombies in the Start-Area.
I remember ''Viking: Battle for Asgard'' being a very impressive looking game during the War sequences, especially for a game from 2008 on consoles.
I'm surprised there was zero mention of Dead Rising. That game really made waves for it's enemy count back in the day.
I remember forum warriors pointing to ikusagami to disparage the Wii version's lack of on screen enemies
This is legit so cool! I love how you're able to squeeze stuff like this into the busy release schedule of new releases. Mad props John
I remember finding this game for my ps2 HDD and looking in aw as it ran in 60fps while having all these enemies on the screen I was blown away and the fact it ran on a PS2 was crazy. I thought why has barely anybody found this game yet?
Great DF Retro!
Another moment like this (though definitely not as many enemies) was in the early days of PS3 with Heavenly Sword.
First facing an army of hundreds of enemies with the cannon and then your sword, and then after a cutscene going back with what looks like maybe a couple of thousand enemies on screen when the Heavenly Sword fully unlocks followed by the final fight with King Bohan and army.
I still haven’t seen anything quite like it since.
This is my favorite video you've ever made for retro series. I'd love to see more like this!
fascinating to see the similarities between this and the 1000 heartless fight in kingdom hearts 2. absolutely resplendent work as always!
this is the kind of game i want to play now ... this look more interesting than most recent games
If you want to see another contemporary to these titles look at Hitman Blood Money on the PlayStation 2, specifically the New Orleans map. Amazingly that has 100-1000s of bump mapped NPC characters on screen with collision at the same time. It was generated with a particle system!
Hm not heard of this one but i'm always happy to see John back with DF Retro (easily my favourite series on the channel)
Hell yeah I loved Kessen. Very good example of how impressive the PS2 was right when it came out.
Love this kind of content, especially where you use emulation to remove certain rendering constraints in order to 'peek under the hood', and I hope much more is on the way!
That Konami 2010 presser was just arse-aching but also hilarious to watch. Not just for one mirrion twoops - the whole thing is just truly special.
Great video. Kinda surprised that you did not mention Dead Rising at some point ^^;
I still got this game. Nice that it finally gets some coverage.
Man, am I really that old to remember that the "particle cloud" mentioned is actually called a flocking system?
Jet Set Radio Future on Xbox is another example of games from that era that threw around large crowds of NPCs more or less for the hell of it.
Surprised at the lack of mention of Dead Rising towards the end. The crowd tech was huge for 360, and you could really see the corners cut for the Wii.
Oh man, I remember this game. I didn't have an inkling on what was going on (since it was all in Japanese) but the feeling of batting away hundreds of enemies with one hit was one I've yet to re-experience with modern games.
Very cool to see one of our intro templates being used in a familiar channel
Then: [65,000 enemies on-screen at 60FPS]
Now: [65,000 microtransactions in-game at 10FPS]
Wow what an incredible achievement for the PS2
Proof that PS2 was a far stronger/more complex console than people make it out to be, also MGS3, MGS2, Zone of the Enders 2, Silent Hill 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Matrix: Path of Neo, Jak, DMC3 running at 60 FPS are notable hallmark achievements.
Let's not forget about Champions of Norrath either! That game was a real powerhouse.
Dynamic water ripple effects, super sampled anti-aliasing, dynamic lighting and bump mapping all at 60fps.
MGS 3 and all Silent Hill games on the PS2 did not run at 60FPS, they were both locked to 30.
@@salt-upon-wounds9909 I never said they did. I only said DMC3 runs at 60 FPS.
@@VergilHiltsLT You just named several games in one sentence and finished it by saying "running at 60FPS are notable hallmark achievements". Your comment is either poorly worded or you're now trying to correct your mistake.
@@salt-upon-wounds9909 No, just poorly read by you and now you're trying to project the blame on me. I never said those games "all run at 60 FPS". That's why I finished the sentence with DMC3 specifically.
If this was released now it would run at 20-30fps unstable and be apologised for by the gaming media citing the "ambition" and "creative decisions" of the dev team.
Christ, that's so sad, I feel bad for developers that actually try to optimize their games because there will be a hundred others who don't.
Agreed. Smooth performance should be considered a fundamental part of a dev's "ambition".
It's a slippery slope excusing a lack of optimisation because once the bar is lowered publishers will happily increase margins by cutting it down. See what's happened with QA once they realised they could digitally pipe the finished game to you weeks/months after taking your money.
I sometimes wonder if Tak Fujii meant 1,000 and not 1,000,000. There is some international confusion between languages relating to the whole mil/mille quantity.
Even if that was the case, it had less troops than the original. I think the game just got released a bit half baked unfortunately. I was a fan of both regardless. Always hoped to see a reboot one day.
Nice episode! I have this game, I bought the "Best Price" Yellow Label version of the game on Play-Asia when it came out so long ago. What attracted me to the game back then was the sheer madness of it. I bought so many imports back then because the games were so original and never came stateside, now I buy imports because they only come out digitally in the US.
The PS1 SDK came with demo code showing off that the PS1 could do. I don't know if any of these are public but there was a "infinite sprite demo" to show off the PS1 2D power. It wasnt really infinite but so much that basically even small sprites would fill the screen until they started to overlap
Another game with large armies that isn't strictly an RTS (so I don't have to include Supreme Commander) is Mount & Blade Warband, although that's a PC game. Still, it's insane how many units these guys managed to put on the screen.
Kinda surprised there's no mention of Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2, a game that does actually have battles with millions of troops.
oh man, the fact that you're actually using soundtrack from Onimusha brings so much memory back to me :(
This is awesome, I didn't know about this game until now. Super interesting, thanks for sharing John!
This is one of those crazy PS2 games that probably couldn't be done on the generally more powerful Xbox and GameCube.
Sorry bud but youd be wrong as many games with crowd generation tech showcased on Xbox Kingdom Under Fire, Dead Rising, Dynasty Warriors, Gears of War locust swarm tech demo, Pikmin on GameCube all showcased massive crowds this game would easily be done on either console.
@poof69420 Xbox and GameCube would eat this game for breakfast and probably make it look better too
Thanks for this video John, you make the world a fun and better place with these deep dives into retro games that I’ve never heard of. Admittedly I will be emulating this game, but oh what fun!
Finally! A Retro DF-Retro. Please bring more of these kind of videos.
Nowadays we get nice graphics and static worlds
What impressed me most was the PS2 debut game 《Kessen》
The 6th generation of consoles was the best because the technology was impressive but also it was still a period of much experimentation. Before all gameplay was refined to such a degree where it feels like every game controls and runs more or less the same. Even across genres. Which started to happen in the 7th gen.
I have heard of this game in my hunts for obscure PS2 action games to play. I knew it was a musou thing but I didn't know it was a kind of technical showpiece. It being from Genki is another thing that makes it interesting too. There seems to be quite a few weird little PS2 action games like this that were only released in Japan and Europe as well.
Gonna check on the availability and eBay prices of Demon Chaos to see if John did it again. 😂
The PS2 in general feels like devs were able to squeeze so much out of the hardware over time.
Just compare the first Burnout to Burnout Revenge. Total upgrade on every front with no compromises made to achieve so.
3:13
You ever heard of Pikmin?
Even Miyamoto himself said: "When people ask what became of Mario 128, I'm at a loss for words, because they had already seen what it became: Pikmin!"
I love DF Retro.
Hitman Blood Money "The Murder of Crows" was the first game with big crowd that blew my mind.
Usage of impostors/sprites for far away units is amazing trick and used for pretty much every game with huge amounts units.
Allows better performance and quality as impostors can be prebaked with high quality.
Interestingly it was also used in the movie Starship Trooper.
3:20 uh... It literally became pikmin. The idea of 100 or so moving entities became Pikmin and other games as well.
Dead Rising series is also worth mentioning, 3 pushed the limits to 21.000 zombies on screen
Peak japan in gaming there. They started to drop the ball in the 360 era and they've been gaining it back recently.
I had already heard about this game, but I never imagined that it had such a large number of enemies and at 60 FPS. 😲
60 FPS sempre existiu nos Consoles, sempre!
Never heard of that game! Crazy that you have access to such a unique demo too! Thank you for sharing
This makes me crave a DF Retro on Kingdom Hearts 2 (meme potential aside), it's still a fantastic looking game on ps2 and it'd be fun to analyze how the battle of 1000 Heartless works
It works by killing the AI and halfing the animation frames
I'd imagine it's similar to what's going on here. There's only a handful of enemies with any real AI at a time while the rest of the crowd is just a lower detailed graphical effect and the game cleverly switches them in and out as you fight.
The execution of it in KH2 is done really well, so it feels pretty natural while you're playing through it.
How could you forget Kameo, those crowds of orcs blew me away.
Spartan: Total Warrior was a really good crowd-control action game. I haven't been back to it in a while, but I feel like I remember it being pretty impressive.
PS2 had so many games. 4400 in total. Thats a lot. When comparing to Xbox which had 998 and 600 on gamecube.
So many games I never played but likely would have loved
This was my favorite super obscure game damn it DF
We need to bring back large crowds! Kinda sad that Serious Sam kinda tapped out after that intro of part 4.
I remember The Rogue leader games had an insane amount of enemies and it was running at 60fps. Nothing compared to IKUSAGAMI but it was still impressive.
I remember seeing this game in gaming magazines and being sad that it'd never get an English translation. I really wanted to know how they pulled off the huge battles, so - thanks!
That Polovstian Dance BGM, truly a cultured channel!
Any Musou style game still pushes on for the massive crowds of people attacking the character and that's something the series still has kept to this day
This made HEAVY use of object pooling. I love it.
I think Sega wanted to try it too with Dreamcast. Sonic Adventure had a room in the level “Final Egg” with a bunch of robots flooding the ground that just kept regenerating. They weren’t much threat so I think they were meant to show next-gen number of models on screen for the time.
Don’t forget they made a big deal (at least in Japan) for the title “Hundred Swords” which was meant to have 100 characters on screen at once. Came out at the end so it only came out on PC outside Japan. I tried a demo of the PC version and recall it having a lot of fog, probably more than was necessary, even for the Dreamcast.
I'd forgotten about that- Sonic Adventure was a really early example! Much smaller numbers, of course, but each robot was a 3D model (two different LODs, as I recall, but no switching to sprites).
If I remember well, the reason for not having massive battles on ps2 was koei/tecmo filing a patent on that type of gameplay, I guess to avoid any potential competence on their dinasty warriors series, which prevented many devs from trying anything similar, in fear of them getting sued, or to avoid paying a royalty to koei/tecmo, in any case, that patent seems to have since expired. I'm not sure, but those are the rumors
That new Warhammer 40k releasing later this year looks like it will have lots of enemies on screen.
I think the biggest reason we don’t have massive crowds in games anymore is that tastes have changed. Audiences don’t care about technical trickery as much as they do a constant feed of content. Fortnite has trained younger players to expect weekly updates and you just cannot deliver that while also rendering tens of thousands of enemies at once.
Being dripfed is like being an addict. You shouldn't be proud of always wanting things to be updated.
@@flameshana9I don't think anyone's proud of that, though I would not be all that surprised if I'm wrong. People seem to be able to feel superior over the most ridiculous things. You're right otherwise.
I remember Starship Troopers for PC with its SWARM engine that can hold up to 300 bugs on a screen. Third mission was a banger.
2:56 Actually, that technology that powered the Super Mario 128 demo did end up being utilized for another GameCube game called Pikmin. Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that Pikmin is basically the result of the Super Mario 128 technology experiment; and when you consider that Pikmin on the GameCube can have up to 100 Pikmin onscreen (plus Captain Olimar and all the enemies and objects onscreen) being able to follow you, do all sorts of stuff like fighting enemies, carrying objects, etc. with no frame rate drops is very impressive.
This is incredible and awesome and beautiful... This is what Pikmin 4 should strive for. Also, no mention of Dead Rising or Days Gone? Or Left 4 Dead, perhaps?