Topic: PlayStation 5 --OT--

@Ravix Bloodborne TV show confirmed.

HDR on PS5. Anyone know which settings to tweak (TV or Console) when in some games really dark scenes can have a kind of shiny grey quality in areas that are supposed to be black or more natural looking dark, dark grey. It's kind of like an reflective shimmer rather than grey or black at times.

Or are some games just badly tuned for HDR?

It was kind of driving me loopy trying to fix it within tbe PS5 HDR menu so I just gave up and turned the black level down a touch and adjusted gamma on the tv itself, but there must be another solution 🤷‍♂️

@Ravix Not sure if it will fix your specific problem, but I used something like dis.

And yeah some game don't have great HDR optimisation.

@JohnnyShoulder weird thing is, I'd seen a similar video by Vincent Toh. And I just think it's wrong for some reason. And I've seen other people saying how actually setting black to 0, even on an OLED is leaving them with poor results too. It certainly didn't fix anything when I tried it (I think it was already set up like that from a while back) so it was set like that when I noticed the issue in AC Shadows. And I was switching HGIG on, Tone mapping on, changing tv settings, changing in game values, and PS5 values and nothing really made that specific thing go away 🙈

It may actually be certain games though, but since changing the third HDR to maybe 5 or 6 up from 0 black, it has looked noticeably nicer in night time or shadowy gameplay. Haven't had a really dark curscene yet to see if the weird grey shimmer has been removed though. But it does seem lesser in regular play.

@Ravix yeah the one from Vincent Toh is the one i used I think, but is was about 20 mins so didn't wanna share it lol.

I don't recall noticing anything like you've explained with my TV, but it is not an OLED.

I remember HDR being a pain to get right when I had my old 4K TV with my OG PS4 (so no 4K just HDR). It took me an age fidling round with settings to get it right, and even then some games looked a bit dodge. When I got my PS5 all that seemed to be ok for me.

@JohnnyShoulder yeah, I've not really noticed it for a while, so it might just be AC Shadows. And it's mostly in cut scenes at night with little to no candlelight, just natural light. Scenes where there are numerous blacks and grey tones, I guess.

I don't know if it's crush or something else (feels more like an unnatural shimmer where the grey is malfunctioning, so no idea what its called) but I find it hard to care about technical things unless it's glaringly obvious and I have to try and sort it 😅

What I will say is, apart from that initial small issue, the advanced Ray Tracing mode for that game is glorious. And I can't justify using performance mode or even balanced, yet 😱 never seen reflections so crisp on console.

Does anyone know if Mafia: The Old Country is officially Mafia 4, or are they still planning/making a Mafia 4 alongside this prequel. I feel like a bunch of rumours did the rounds, but my latest search makes it seem like everyone (the general community of gamers) is referring to this release as Mafia 4, regardless, when I'm not sure it was ever really revealed as such with it being a smaller scale prequel.

I know it's the hope that kills you, but I do hope that this game does well, and helps them to fund/keep funding a larger scale Mafia game, too.

9 years between games to release a small scale prequel does seem a bit of a long cycle, considering its supposed to be less challenging to develop, but then they were struggling at one point, so maybe that is fair enough.

I always say it's strange how in cinema Crime is such a huge genre, and it hasn't really translated to gaming in quite the same way, with Rockstar mostly cornering the market. Compared to genres like fantasy, horror and sci-fi their is nowhere near the same amount of releases in gaming, and it just seems like a weird imbalance conpared to cinema releases.

@Ravix I don’t know about the Mafia situation but thought I’d comment on the wider observation you brought up about low representation of organized crime drama in games. It does seem like the genre is underrepresented compared to movies and TV, as opposed to fantasy, Sci-Fi, and horror which tend to be over-represented in gaming. Historical fiction is probably slightly over-represented in gaming also.

I do think it all goes in cycles. Developers jump onto bandwagons and saturate a genre before moving onto the next popular setting. I think there was a run of crime drama in the PS3 and early PS4 era. The Rockstar stuff (GTA, and RDR/LA Noire although those are also historical drama, but so is Mafia), Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs, the continual deluge of Yakuza games, the Watch Dog games, even the Hitman games and Just Cause games are kind of in the ballpark, and random games like The Saboteur seemed to try to get that narrative driven open world crime essence but with the war backdrop. Of course I’m talking out of my rear about these because I’ve played very few of them, as the crime genre isn’t one that interests me, especially those in a modern urban setting.

Despite all those I listed off the top of my head, most are older series and dormant, like you mentioned. There’s been a drop off of crime games and it looks like all developers have conceded the ground to Rockstar now. The latest Saints Row colossal failure only deepened the divide between GTA and everything else.

With Mafia dipping its toes back on the pool of crime drama games, maybe we’ll see a resurgence. For now the hot genre is Feudal Japan and Sci-Fi. High Fantasy will probably always be a top genre in the gaming Universe. Norse mythology and Greek mythology has been put on the shelf for now, and comic book superheroes appear to be on the way out, with Wonder Woman cancelled, complete radio silence on Wolverine and any Spider-Man spin-off, and the underperformance of Suicide Squad, Midnight Suns, etc. I guess Rivals is a thing keeping it going though.

Pontifications aside, this is a reminder that I need to play the Mafia games. 😅