NA FanFest Expectations?(Idea, or Hopes?)

[DiaDeem]

This person on another website, Paul Zanes, made this comment which I thought was very exciting if they move to physical based rendering for ray-tracing in the future if they ever drop PS4 support hopefully. He said...

"The particular example at the top of the article is specifically of Material rendering and production changes. The team is swapping to (from my understanding) a PBR or Physically Based Rendering system. This means that materials won't be produced with certain lighting and color expectations predefined in them, and instead be made as a neutral surface for various lighting conditions to act upon. This dramatically increases the realism of an object or character when it is placed in a variety of different lighting conditions instead of requiring specific lighting conditions to look best. The reason the second image has a background is because that background is casting colored light information onto the character which is being used to inform the character shaders. This is a huge step up. It also allows them to swap to a ray-traced lighting pipeline somewhere down the line if they want to and see even greater gains.

This isn't the only change they're making, it's just the one chosen for the example. They're also increasing world detail significantly (much more props and foliage apparently) and are going to be increasing texture detail significantly from where it currently is. Certain gear sets are being remade to look much nicer, character models and textures are getting upgraded (cross your fingers that they give characters actual feet instead of cheese blocks) and I wouldn't be surprised if they reimplement physics for tails and hair. The latter would be really big for allowing more freedom when designing hairstyles and gear because hair could rest naturally on gear and not clip horribly the way it currently does. Right now we're restricted to primarily short hairstyles for this reason."

That sounds mostly great.
Currently I'm not a fan of ray tracing at all though. The changes, I feel, are barely noticeable in motion throughout prolonged play sessions, and it comes at a rather heavy cost to performance. That said, these are all improvements in the right direction. XVI apparently is using some weird tech for its shadows that could be rooted in some form of it.

We also need support for FSR, DLSS and XeSS.