I became a serious game development hobbyist when I was a kid and I’ve worked as a professional game developer for the past 18 years. I’m now the Chief Technology Officer at Crystal Dynamics, where I am working with a brilliant and passionate development team on Marvel’s Avengers.
Throughout my life, there has been little that excites me as much as getting my hands on a next-generation video game console — and PS5 is no exception. I have had the tremendous pleasure and privilege of having a PS5 development kit on my desk for some time. When we received our first few kits, I rushed to put an engineering team on the task of creating a PS5 version of Marvel’s Avengers as quickly as possible. I wanted to push Foundation, our proprietary game engine, to its limits on PS5 and see what it could do. Take a look at what we’ve accomplished so far!
PS5 greatly lifts the performance and graphics bar for consoles. The new GPU allows us to increase our texture resolution, push a higher level of detail farther from the player, enhance our ambient occlusion, improve our anisotropic filtering and add a variety of new graphics features such as stochastic screen-space reflections with contact-aware sharpening.
If you’re a technophile like me, you enjoy having a bit of choice in how you leverage your cutting-edge console’s capability. As gamers, we sometimes want every ounce of power put into extra graphics features to achieve the highest image quality possible. For this, Marvel’s Avengers will offer an enhanced graphics mode on PS5. At other times, we want the most fluid gameplay experience possible. For that, Marvel’s Avengers will offer a high framerate mode on PS5, which targets 60 FPS with dynamic 4K resolution.
The GPU and CPU improvements on PS5 are exciting, but even more exciting is the introduction of an ultra-high speed SSD with lightning fast load speeds. This is a transformative improvement in consoles that will reduce load times down to one or two seconds and enable real-time streaming of massive worlds at ridiculously fast speeds. Without any optimization work, the loading and streaming of Marvel’s Avengers improved by an order of magnitude on PS5. When optimization is complete, loading content will be nearly instant, allowing players to seamlessly jump into missions anywhere in the game world. And as Iron Man flies through content-rich levels, higher resolution textures and mesh will stream in instantly, maintaining the highest possible quality all the way to the horizon.
The new PS5 DualSense controller offers advanced haptics and resistance triggers, and the console itself offers enhanced 3D audio and new platform features that allow you to jump straight into the action. We have great ideas on ways to leverage these features in Marvel’s Avengers and are looking forward to seeing our players’ reactions.
At Crystal Dynamics, we are gamers and we have a gamer-first mentality. We want to make it easy for Marvel’s Avengers players to enjoy the additional features PS5 brings to the game.
Therefore, we’re happy to announce that when you purchase Marvel’s Avengers for the PS4 platform, either digitally or on disc, and later upgrade to a PS5, you get the PS5 version of the game with all of its enhancements free of charge!
In addition, PS5 gamers can play Marvel’s Avengers online with PS4 gamers, so anyone can upgrade at any time and continue playing with friends on both platforms.
Marvel’s Avengers launches on September 4, 2020 and will be available on PS5 when the console launches Holiday 2020!
