I really wish the PS1 and PS2 era games were available via emulation on PS+, but I'm sure it would be an absolute licensing nightmare to re-release those games due to all the real world aircraft manufacturers involved
@boarderbro88 I recently played the PS2 emulated versions of the Sly Cooper games and Skygunner, which were more recently added to PS+ and they seem fine to me. There’s not too much in terms of enhancements, but they do seem to be well upscaled and have save state and rewind functionality and that’s nice.
@nessisonett The “agenda” of people wanting to play games they paid for? Sure a Windows update broke it, but why didn’t it break other games? Probably because Ubisoft’s launcher, anti-piracy, or anti-cheat measures were mucking around at a low level in the OS that they shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.
Microsoft officially acknowledged the issue and paused the automatic update for any PC which had the affected games installed, but they did not say that they are going to make a change to fix it, they essentially implied it’s up to Ubisoft to patch their games, which lends more credence to the guess that this is due to bad practice by Ubisoft in the first place. It’s likely there was a kernel access security hole that MS patched which Ubisoft was exploiting for one of the aforementioned reasons, hence it’s Ubisoft’s responsibility to fix, not Microsoft’s.
"Sigourney Weaver famously shaved her head for Alien 3, for example; last year’s critically acclaimed Furiosa saw Anya Taylor-Joy sport a similar look"
Not the best comparisons as there are meaningful and unpleasant story justifications for the baldness in both of those.
Alien 3 is set in a dirty prison and the doctor specifically mentions they have a lice problem and recommends Ripley shave her hair. There's also the fact that its a men's prison and a particularly feminine appearance could be dangerous.
Furiosa is in a post-apocalypse, which generally isn't the kindest times for women, and a shaves off her hair specifically due to an incident in her youth where she was grabbed by it.
Both are arguably metaphors for the character having to unwantingly give up their femininity so they could survive in harsh environments.
Who knows if there's a story justification for this character's shaved head or it's just a stylistic choice. I suspect the latter, as there seems to be a trend of making female characters in games intentionally unattractive by traditional standards as an overreaction to feeling guilty about pandering, sexualized characters in games over a decade ago.
I know this only because I too got curious about how people were even doing this and I just looked it up. Apparently you can get to a Google search page in the PS5's hidden internal browser in a fairly convoluted way. First you go to the User's Guide from the system menu, which Sony serves you as a web page on their site via the PS5's hidden browser. From there, there are links that take you tutorial videos on YouTube which open on YouTube's site in the browser, not the YouTube app. From YouTube, following a series of links you can get to Google search page. Once on Google, you can just use the search and effectively get to any website.
Way more effort to get to porn than I'd ever want to go to, but then again I'm not a 15 year old trying to circumvent safeguards on the family PC or my school laptop, LOL.
@Ainu20 It's crappy that console gamers have to be the beta testers for it though. Usually new rendering methods get introduced on a PC first, where you can generally count on such things being an option that can you disable. Once bugs are worked out on PC, then they trickle down to console.
PSSR is seemingly AMD's first stab at doing at an AI upscaler. Making a console the test bed for that was a questionable choice.
Digital Foundry said that when DLSS was new, nVidia was only allowing it to be implemented in games where they worked closely with the developer to ensure it was working correctly - lest a bad implementation by a developer make their new proprietary tech look bad in consumer's eyes.
Clearly Sony/AMD should have had a similar policy until the kinks got worked out. Allowing developers to use what is effectively experimental tech on their "premium" console without keeping a closer eye on their implementations during the this critical early period is really souring the Pro "narrative".
I have to say I really don't understand what people see in Dino Crisis.
I never played it originally, but I am old enough that I was in my teens when the PS1 came out. I played it last month when it came out on PS+ and even trying to do my best to judge it from a historical perspective (which I admit is more easily said than done), I just don't think it's a good game. I can only assume that people's feelings about it were tied into lingering zeitgeist around Jurassic Park.
I agree with the 1 and 2 picks. I've replayed Metal Gear Solid recently and can still appreciate it even from a modern perspective. Simply having camera relative controls instead of character relative controls (aka "tank controls") goes a long way towards making it feel modern.
The notable absence from this list for me is Colony Wars. They made a space "sim" feel and play well on a digital gamepad, that is quite the feat.
@SuntannedDuck2 PS1 memory cards are 128KB. The blocks are 8KB - yes that makes 16 blocks. Only 15 blocks are useable because 1 block was reserved for the file system data, not because of hexidecimal...
Called it and this won’t be the last game with PSSR problems. Sony really needs to get out in front of this. Even if developers aren’t doing due diligence in their testing, Sony is giving them a tool that either doesn’t work as advertised or is too difficult to use. They need to put out a statement saying they will work with developers to stop these problems.
@SilentBluntman So from what little I've been able to gather about of how PSSR/DLSS works, the developers use "AI" to create a complex scaling algorithm by feeding the AI a frame rendered at their target internal real-time resolution and an equivalent frame offline rendered at 4k. Do that for many thousands of frames in different areas of the game and the AI essentially "learns" how to create a 4K image from a lower res one by inserting pixels based on precedence more or less. To put it in extremely simplified terms, it learns that if pixel A is next to pixel B in a lower resolution version of the image, pixel X is usually what's between them in the true 4K version. However, pixel X could be entirely different depending on the game and its particular art assets. This is how it can do things like reproduce legible text that is illegible at the internal render resolution - only because it was exposed to the clear version of that text in a 4K render and it "recognizes" the low res version of that text, it can reproduce the high res version.
At the end it spits out a scaling algorithm more complex than any human could create that the developer feeds into the dedicated scaling hardware.
That makes it very specific to each game and while it's up to AMD/Sony to enhance the quality of the training model and make the AI do its job better without hand holding, at some point it will still rely on the developers to make sure they do a good enough job feeding in sufficient source data and tuning the results to make sure it creates a good final scaling algorithm.
As far as I know, it's not something that developers will ever get for "free" - that is to say without putting their own work into it - work that will always be low priority for them because it only applies to a small percentage of the user base.
I got one and I'm pretty disappointed right now to be honest.
Two major reasons:
1. PSSR inclusion was a mistake. That sort of tech might be the future of rendering in general, but it shouldn't have been introduced in a half-step console. The PS5 Pro will only ever be owned by a small percentage of the PS5 user base if it's like the PS4 Pro (which Sony said was only 12% of the PS4 user base). Any new graphical capability that requires developers to go to extra effort to implement vs the base PS5 version of the game is destined to be poorly supported. If said feature can make the game worse than the base PS5 when implemented poorly as we've seen, it should have never been included.
I'm afraid we haven't seen the last of bad PSSR implementations and I may end up actively regretting ever getting a Pro if we continue to see problems. At best, right now I'm hoping developers don't even try to use it if they're not going to put the time into making it right.
Also, even if this is the fault of developers, I'm pretty peeved that Sony hasn't done any of their own messaging about it. It looks extremely bad from a consumer standpoint when Pro versions of games are worse than their base PS5 counterpart. I don't remember that being the case with any PS4 Pro game. Sony needs to get out of front of this problem and say that they are actively working with developers to fix their PSSR implementations and will make sure games with Pro modes go through more stringent approval in the future.
2. Sony's whole presentation for the console was "75% of you use the performance mode in games, so we're creating this more powerful console so you don't have to choose between performance and quality"...and yet every single "Pro enhanced" game has Pro specific performance/quality modes. So we do still need to choose and it completely subverts their messaging for the console. They should have established a standard that "Pro" mode must be 60fps at the highest graphical fidelity they can get away with, period. If you want unlock the framerate of the existing quality mode or make it a 40fps mode on the Pro, then ok, but there shouldn't be Pro specific quality modes. Who the hell is getting a Pro to run games at 30fps?
I thought it was a weird choice to give Horizon the LEGO game treatment as soon as it was announced. Like make more Horizon themed actual LEGO sets - absolutely - but a kids version of what is already a T rated video game - who wanted that? No one, apparently.
Also, having recently spent 80 OCD-driven hours to 100% the absolute mind-numbing, egregiously-padded collectathon that is LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga, I don't want to play another LEGO game for at least like 5 years
Not that anyone is still looking at this article anymore, but FWIW, I just discovered that Jedi Survivor did not actually get a new patch upon the PS5 Pro's release. I thought it did, but that was because I hadn't launched the game in so long.
The last patch released for that game was actually back in September so they already had the Pro support built in at that point - and who knows just how much earlier they did that work. That does suggest that it may have been using a somewhat immature/unfinalized PSSR implementation.
@SystemAddict It is definitely Pro "enhanced". Digital Foundry confirmed it's using PSSR upscaling which is the source of the problems. It has the same flickering/image stability issues as Jedi Survivor.
The pro "enhancement" must have been already built into the release version or stealth included in one the early patches.
Maybe the devs were messing around with Pro version of the game (timeline-wise they would have had access to dev kits a few months before release), ran out of time to finish it, and then forgot to disable that functionality.
It's also worth nothing the patch that added Jedi Survivor's Pro "enhancement" was actually released back in September. The game did not get a new update upon the PS5 Pro's release. They clearly did that work months ago.
That aligns with both these games probably using early versions of PSSR training models which are obviously not good.
@Balaam_ There was never any expectation set for Pro games looking worse or having minor visual glitches that a base PS5 doesn't have, but possibly getting better after time - such a notion is absurd. Also how do the games get better? By Sony pushing firmware updates or by the developer having to change their implementation?
Giving the PS5 Pro a capability that the base PS5 doesn't have, and which actually makes games worse if implemented poorly, was a mistake. Because the Pro will inevitably only be owned by a small fraction of the market, reality being what it is, most developers will never put in the time and effort needed to utilize PSSR well.
The Pro should have just been a faster PS5. PSSR was a mistake.
@DennisReynolds Indeed, but if <10% of the market has a Pro and you're a developer with limited time, are you going to go to the trouble of making your PSSR implementation look good or are you going to use a "default implementation", call it good, and slap a "Pro enhanced" sticker on the box?
History has proven that graphical tech which is uncommon is not well supported. If many developers already struggle to optimize their games well for a base PS5, why the heck do we think they will go to the trouble of doing a good job implementing a feature that only a fraction of PS5's have?
That's why it was a mistake for Sony to give the Pro a capability that the base PS5 doesn't have and which, if poorly utilized, actually makes a game worse. It's completely ignorant of the quite imperfect realities of game development. PSSR should have only been included if developers basically didn't need to do anything extra to use it and it didn't have downsides.
@DennisReynolds There are visual artifacts to varying degrees of severity in all games that use PSSR, and some games are straight up busted. Silent Hill 2 remake is another one with major issues. Most of the games don't have major issues, but at the same time, ideally there should be nothing about a game that looks worse than a base PS5. The issue that manifests most commonly is shimmering on the edges of specular surfaces (metallic surfaces). Pro games shouldn't look better in most aspects, but worse a in few. There should be no tradeoffs.
PSSR is seemingly underbaked tech - hopefully they can sort it out, but right now it's very disappointing. Sony perhaps should have stuck with just making the console faster and giving it more RT performance and not introducing a feature that is completely unavailable on the base model - specifically because of the likelihood that developers will not go to the effort to well utilize a feature that only a fraction of the market has - as has been well established by history. Adding a new capability to the Pro instead of just making it faster may very well prove to be major blunder.
Right now I'm actually hoping that developers don't try to use PSSR and I just get a slightly higher base resolution or more consistent performance on a Pro.
For those wanting to play the blame game, I think it's on both Respawn an Sony. The problem is caused by PSSR. Silent Hill 2 has similar significant problems with it. However, even games that mostly look ok with it have visual artifacts on some surfaces.
According to an unverified developer account, there are multiple "versions" of PSSR. Earlier versions have these issues.
It's entirely possible that these developers were promised by Sony that the implementation of PSSR they were using would be fixed on the system side with a firmware update...and then it never was.
It's also possible that Sony did not promise such a thing and these developers "turned on" PSSR without verifying whether it looked good in all areas of their games. That said, Sony still shares some blame for making a "so broken/underbaked that no one should really use it" version of the tech available to developers to implement.
It is not hard to believe that Sony incentivized developers one way or another to have Pro enhancements available for the Pro's launch and this has backfired, leading to bad Pro versions.
The (second) worst part of this is simply the lack of acknowledgement and communication from Sony or developers. I work in business software dev, simply giving the customer a "yup we know about it and are working on it" does wonders for customer satisfaction and is never harmful as long as you're not lying about the "working on it" part.
-edit-
In retrospect, the lack of communication isn't actually the worst part. The actual worst part is that in several of the games, Jedi Survivor included, you can't revert to to base PS5 version of the game. So even if you're willing to forego the Pro "enhancements" to play the regular version of the game without visual bugs, you cannot. That I would say was extraordinarily shortsighted on the part of developers, especially if the scenario was that that PSSR issues were known, but Sony promised they'd be fixed. You never trust promises from outside companies. They should have made the Pro mode a togglable option.
I got one and rather unfortunately the first PS5 Pro enhanced game I tried, Jedi Survivor, is rather disappointing. The quality mode is still a locked 30fps and the performance had some massive graphical bug with what appears to be the ambient occlusion implementation that makes the entire environment flicker. It's distracting to the point of being unplayable.
That game has been a technical mess since the beginning, so that's par for the course I guess.
Luckily subsequent games have faired better, but Jedi Survivor was the one game I was really looking forward to getting a boost because the RT lighting in the original version was quite nice, but 30fps was too big a trade off.
Hopefully they can fix the bug, but even then it's still disappointing that there's still a 30fps mode in the Pro version. IMO Sony should have made a mandate that any Pro enhanced game must run 60fps minimum. I mean their dang presentation for the thing started off by saying 75% of players user performance modes. There should be no 30fps mode in Pro games.
I tried playing Nikke after Stellar Blade, it is sadly very stereotypical mobile game trash.
No real gameplay, an interface that overwhelms you with a hundred different things to level up, each with their own currencies. A "spreadsheet" game where you sink in ludicrous amounts of time or money just to make numbers go up and ogle some barely animated 2D waifus.
It's a shame this kind of garbage is overtaking the popularity of proper video games in east Asia.
Near the end of the PS2 lifespan, I traded in my second revision "fat" PS2 for one of the later revision slim models. Apparently there were hardware changes in later revisions of slim PS2s that introduced compatibility problems in a small number of PS2 games.
Beyond Good and Evil was one of those games. A few years back I wanted to try replaying the original version of BG&E only to find that it basically unplayable on the slim PS2 due to numerous issues.
I was pretty pissed about that. I knew the PS2 slim was less compatible with PS1 games, but had no clue that it even had some compatibility issues with PS2 games. I wish I had kept my original model PS2.
I agree a developer should be able to make the game they want. However, the discussion gets a little murkier when you consider that a person may have spent $70 for the game and doesn't find out that they're incapable of beating it until they are past the refund period of the game.
I platinumed Bloodborne and Sekiro, and yet I firmly believe Souls games should absolutely have "last resort" in-game difficulty options. Disable trophies and online play when activated. If a person wants to trivialize the experience to see the single player content and play out the story, why shouldn't they be able to? Are they ruining the game for themselves, maybe, but who cares, it does not affect other players at all. There is no rational argument against this except the developers not wanting to spend whatever time it would take to implement such options. However, literally all that you'd need to make most Souls games "easy" is just a simple global damage reduction percentage (i.e. being able to set enemies to do XX% less damage to the player) and I can't imagine that would be that difficult to implement.
I have the game on PS5, but I don't know how so many people can be defending Sony on this.
Had the requirement actually been enforced on release, and had the game not been sold in countries where creating a PSN account isn't officially supported, I see no issue.
However, turning this into a true requirement this 3 months after the game is out is pretty bad, particularly because the reason why it wasn't being enforced is because their account system wasn't ready for prime time, by their own admission. It's not the consumer's fault their system was broken when the game was released, but the consumer is now inconvenienced by their decision to start enforcing it.
That's no good and no one should be supporting a company doing something like that. Sony just need to take the L on this one, because it was their fault it wasn't ready, and keep it as an optional requirement.
What they should do instead is find ways to make people want to create a PSN account. I.e. Let's say people who have linked to PSN account (and PS5 owners obviously) get 100 free super credits per month or something like that. Or perhaps limit "full" functionality without straight up preventing you from playing the game, like you can only cross-play or use the in-game voice chat if you have a PSN account - I think that would be a lot easier to swallow for many.
There are ways for them to drive people to creating a PSN accounts without making a hard requirement. Then, maybe after 6 months of those incentives being place, you find that 90% of the active player base has PSN accounts - at that point you make it a hard requirement and it's met with much less resistance.
@Sil_Am There's no basis to assume an "inside job". Hundreds if not thousands of companies have been hit ransomware attacks in the last few years. The company I work for was hit in 2021 but we make boring and not especially important business software so no one cared when the hackers tried to sell our info.
Intrusion is usually via network security holes, which many companies have, or social engineering (phishing).
1.7TB of network traffic is not a lot on the scale of a corporation - especially one that would be transferring large game development files all over the place and not necessarily just internally.
The hackers will always hit a company during their night hours so no one is working and you can transfer a lot of data in a just a few minutes from a fast corporate internet connection.
Word of warning for those interested in Sable, once you get out of the intro area, it has massive performance problems on PS5. It has a ton of stuttering as areas are loading in and will inexplicably drop to sub-20fps in some areas...in a game that has like PS2 era poly counts.
It seems to have been abandoned by the devs as they've never made any statement about addressing the performance.
Seems almost like an insult for one of the "subscriber benefit" (it's not free!) games to be nigh unplayable.
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Re: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown Sales Reach New Heights as Game Celebrates Sixth Anniversary
I really wish the PS1 and PS2 era games were available via emulation on PS+, but I'm sure it would be an absolute licensing nightmare to re-release those games due to all the real world aircraft manufacturers involved
Re: PS3 Games Could One Day Get Emulated on PS5
@boarderbro88 I recently played the PS2 emulated versions of the Sly Cooper games and Skygunner, which were more recently added to PS+ and they seem fine to me. There’s not too much in terms of enhancements, but they do seem to be well upscaled and have save state and rewind functionality and that’s nice.
Re: Random: Assassin's Creed Origins Catching Strays as Ubisoft Review Bombing Gets Underway
@nessisonett The “agenda” of people wanting to play games they paid for? Sure a Windows update broke it, but why didn’t it break other games? Probably because Ubisoft’s launcher, anti-piracy, or anti-cheat measures were mucking around at a low level in the OS that they shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.
Microsoft officially acknowledged the issue and paused the automatic update for any PC which had the affected games installed, but they did not say that they are going to make a change to fix it, they essentially implied it’s up to Ubisoft to patch their games, which lends more credence to the guess that this is due to bad practice by Ubisoft in the first place. It’s likely there was a kernel access security hole that MS patched which Ubisoft was exploiting for one of the aforementioned reasons, hence it’s Ubisoft’s responsibility to fix, not Microsoft’s.
Re: Naughty Dog Turns Off Intergalactic PS5 Trailer's Comments As Discourse Turns Nasty
"Sigourney Weaver famously shaved her head for Alien 3, for example; last year’s critically acclaimed Furiosa saw Anya Taylor-Joy sport a similar look"
Not the best comparisons as there are meaningful and unpleasant story justifications for the baldness in both of those.
Alien 3 is set in a dirty prison and the doctor specifically mentions they have a lice problem and recommends Ripley shave her hair. There's also the fact that its a men's prison and a particularly feminine appearance could be dangerous.
Furiosa is in a post-apocalypse, which generally isn't the kindest times for women, and a shaves off her hair specifically due to an incident in her youth where she was grabbed by it.
Both are arguably metaphors for the character having to unwantingly give up their femininity so they could survive in harsh environments.
Who knows if there's a story justification for this character's shaved head or it's just a stylistic choice. I suspect the latter, as there seems to be a trend of making female characters in games intentionally unattractive by traditional standards as an overreaction to feeling guilty about pandering, sexualized characters in games over a decade ago.
Re: PS5, PS4 Users Over-Represented in 2024 Pornhub Console Traffic Share
I know this only because I too got curious about how people were even doing this and I just looked it up. Apparently you can get to a Google search page in the PS5's hidden internal browser in a fairly convoluted way. First you go to the User's Guide from the system menu, which Sony serves you as a web page on their site via the PS5's hidden browser. From there, there are links that take you tutorial videos on YouTube which open on YouTube's site in the browser, not the YouTube app. From YouTube, following a series of links you can get to Google search page. Once on Google, you can just use the search and effectively get to any website.
Way more effort to get to porn than I'd ever want to go to, but then again I'm not a 15 year old trying to circumvent safeguards on the family PC or my school laptop, LOL.
Re: Star Wars Outlaws Patches in PS5 Pro PSSR Toggle, Lets You Turn It Off
@Ainu20 It's crappy that console gamers have to be the beta testers for it though. Usually new rendering methods get introduced on a PC first, where you can generally count on such things being an option that can you disable. Once bugs are worked out on PC, then they trickle down to console.
PSSR is seemingly AMD's first stab at doing at an AI upscaler. Making a console the test bed for that was a questionable choice.
Digital Foundry said that when DLSS was new, nVidia was only allowing it to be implemented in games where they worked closely with the developer to ensure it was working correctly - lest a bad implementation by a developer make their new proprietary tech look bad in consumer's eyes.
Clearly Sony/AMD should have had a similar policy until the kinks got worked out. Allowing developers to use what is effectively experimental tech on their "premium" console without keeping a closer eye on their implementations during the this critical early period is really souring the Pro "narrative".
Re: Star Wars Outlaws Patches in PS5 Pro PSSR Toggle, Lets You Turn It Off
@Jrs1 No. It basically has the worst PSSR issues of any game and they haven’t even put out a patch so you can revert it to the base PS5 mode yet.
Re: Best PS1 Games
I have to say I really don't understand what people see in Dino Crisis.
I never played it originally, but I am old enough that I was in my teens when the PS1 came out. I played it last month when it came out on PS+ and even trying to do my best to judge it from a historical perspective (which I admit is more easily said than done), I just don't think it's a good game. I can only assume that people's feelings about it were tied into lingering zeitgeist around Jurassic Park.
I agree with the 1 and 2 picks. I've replayed Metal Gear Solid recently and can still appreciate it even from a modern perspective. Simply having camera relative controls instead of character relative controls (aka "tank controls") goes a long way towards making it feel modern.
The notable absence from this list for me is Colony Wars. They made a space "sim" feel and play well on a digital gamepad, that is quite the feat.
Re: How Well Do You Know the PS1?
@SuntannedDuck2 PS1 memory cards are 128KB. The blocks are 8KB - yes that makes 16 blocks. Only 15 blocks are useable because 1 block was reserved for the file system data, not because of hexidecimal...
Re: Fans Frustrated with Avatar's Disappointing PS5 Pro Patch
Called it and this won’t be the last game with PSSR problems. Sony really needs to get out in front of this. Even if developers aren’t doing due diligence in their testing, Sony is giving them a tool that either doesn’t work as advertised or is too difficult to use. They need to put out a statement saying they will work with developers to stop these problems.
Re: Talking Point: What Do You Think of the PS5 Pro, Three Weeks Later?
@SilentBluntman So from what little I've been able to gather about of how PSSR/DLSS works, the developers use "AI" to create a complex scaling algorithm by feeding the AI a frame rendered at their target internal real-time resolution and an equivalent frame offline rendered at 4k. Do that for many thousands of frames in different areas of the game and the AI essentially "learns" how to create a 4K image from a lower res one by inserting pixels based on precedence more or less. To put it in extremely simplified terms, it learns that if pixel A is next to pixel B in a lower resolution version of the image, pixel X is usually what's between them in the true 4K version. However, pixel X could be entirely different depending on the game and its particular art assets. This is how it can do things like reproduce legible text that is illegible at the internal render resolution - only because it was exposed to the clear version of that text in a 4K render and it "recognizes" the low res version of that text, it can reproduce the high res version.
At the end it spits out a scaling algorithm more complex than any human could create that the developer feeds into the dedicated scaling hardware.
That makes it very specific to each game and while it's up to AMD/Sony to enhance the quality of the training model and make the AI do its job better without hand holding, at some point it will still rely on the developers to make sure they do a good enough job feeding in sufficient source data and tuning the results to make sure it creates a good final scaling algorithm.
As far as I know, it's not something that developers will ever get for "free" - that is to say without putting their own work into it - work that will always be low priority for them because it only applies to a small percentage of the user base.
Re: Talking Point: What Do You Think of the PS5 Pro, Three Weeks Later?
I got one and I'm pretty disappointed right now to be honest.
Two major reasons:
1. PSSR inclusion was a mistake. That sort of tech might be the future of rendering in general, but it shouldn't have been introduced in a half-step console. The PS5 Pro will only ever be owned by a small percentage of the PS5 user base if it's like the PS4 Pro (which Sony said was only 12% of the PS4 user base). Any new graphical capability that requires developers to go to extra effort to implement vs the base PS5 version of the game is destined to be poorly supported. If said feature can make the game worse than the base PS5 when implemented poorly as we've seen, it should have never been included.
I'm afraid we haven't seen the last of bad PSSR implementations and I may end up actively regretting ever getting a Pro if we continue to see problems. At best, right now I'm hoping developers don't even try to use it if they're not going to put the time into making it right.
Also, even if this is the fault of developers, I'm pretty peeved that Sony hasn't done any of their own messaging about it. It looks extremely bad from a consumer standpoint when Pro versions of games are worse than their base PS5 counterpart. I don't remember that being the case with any PS4 Pro game. Sony needs to get out of front of this problem and say that they are actively working with developers to fix their PSSR implementations and will make sure games with Pro modes go through more stringent approval in the future.
2. Sony's whole presentation for the console was "75% of you use the performance mode in games, so we're creating this more powerful console so you don't have to choose between performance and quality"...and yet every single "Pro enhanced" game has Pro specific performance/quality modes. So we do still need to choose and it completely subverts their messaging for the console. They should have established a standard that "Pro" mode must be 60fps at the highest graphical fidelity they can get away with, period. If you want unlock the framerate of the existing quality mode or make it a 40fps mode on the Pro, then ok, but there shouldn't be Pro specific quality modes. Who the hell is getting a Pro to run games at 30fps?
Re: Sony's Latest First-Party Release Is Struggling to Do Concord Numbers on PC
I thought it was a weird choice to give Horizon the LEGO game treatment as soon as it was announced. Like make more Horizon themed actual LEGO sets - absolutely - but a kids version of what is already a T rated video game - who wanted that? No one, apparently.
Also, having recently spent 80 OCD-driven hours to 100% the absolute mind-numbing, egregiously-padded collectathon that is LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga, I don't want to play another LEGO game for at least like 5 years
Re: PS5 Pro Image Quality Issues Reported for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Not that anyone is still looking at this article anymore, but FWIW, I just discovered that Jedi Survivor did not actually get a new patch upon the PS5 Pro's release. I thought it did, but that was because I hadn't launched the game in so long.
The last patch released for that game was actually back in September so they already had the Pro support built in at that point - and who knows just how much earlier they did that work. That does suggest that it may have been using a somewhat immature/unfinalized PSSR implementation.
Re: Silent Hill 2 PS5 Pro Issues Are Being Worked on, Dev Confirms
@SystemAddict It is definitely Pro "enhanced". Digital Foundry confirmed it's using PSSR upscaling which is the source of the problems. It has the same flickering/image stability issues as Jedi Survivor.
The pro "enhancement" must have been already built into the release version or stealth included in one the early patches.
Maybe the devs were messing around with Pro version of the game (timeline-wise they would have had access to dev kits a few months before release), ran out of time to finish it, and then forgot to disable that functionality.
It's also worth nothing the patch that added Jedi Survivor's Pro "enhancement" was actually released back in September. The game did not get a new update upon the PS5 Pro's release. They clearly did that work months ago.
That aligns with both these games probably using early versions of PSSR training models which are obviously not good.
Re: PS5 Pro Image Quality Issues Reported for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
@Khayl EA has thankfully acknowledged the problem via the EA Star Wars twitter account: https://x.com/EAStarWars/status/1858635462577172846
Re: Disgruntled PS5 Pro Owners Campaign to Disable Support After Slew of Shoddy Patches
@Balaam_ There was never any expectation set for Pro games looking worse or having minor visual glitches that a base PS5 doesn't have, but possibly getting better after time - such a notion is absurd. Also how do the games get better? By Sony pushing firmware updates or by the developer having to change their implementation?
Giving the PS5 Pro a capability that the base PS5 doesn't have, and which actually makes games worse if implemented poorly, was a mistake. Because the Pro will inevitably only be owned by a small fraction of the market, reality being what it is, most developers will never put in the time and effort needed to utilize PSSR well.
The Pro should have just been a faster PS5. PSSR was a mistake.
Re: PS5 Pro Image Quality Issues Reported for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
@DennisReynolds Indeed, but if <10% of the market has a Pro and you're a developer with limited time, are you going to go to the trouble of making your PSSR implementation look good or are you going to use a "default implementation", call it good, and slap a "Pro enhanced" sticker on the box?
History has proven that graphical tech which is uncommon is not well supported. If many developers already struggle to optimize their games well for a base PS5, why the heck do we think they will go to the trouble of doing a good job implementing a feature that only a fraction of PS5's have?
That's why it was a mistake for Sony to give the Pro a capability that the base PS5 doesn't have and which, if poorly utilized, actually makes a game worse. It's completely ignorant of the quite imperfect realities of game development. PSSR should have only been included if developers basically didn't need to do anything extra to use it and it didn't have downsides.
Re: PS5 Pro Image Quality Issues Reported for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
@DennisReynolds There are visual artifacts to varying degrees of severity in all games that use PSSR, and some games are straight up busted. Silent Hill 2 remake is another one with major issues. Most of the games don't have major issues, but at the same time, ideally there should be nothing about a game that looks worse than a base PS5. The issue that manifests most commonly is shimmering on the edges of specular surfaces (metallic surfaces). Pro games shouldn't look better in most aspects, but worse a in few. There should be no tradeoffs.
PSSR is seemingly underbaked tech - hopefully they can sort it out, but right now it's very disappointing. Sony perhaps should have stuck with just making the console faster and giving it more RT performance and not introducing a feature that is completely unavailable on the base model - specifically because of the likelihood that developers will not go to the effort to well utilize a feature that only a fraction of the market has - as has been well established by history. Adding a new capability to the Pro instead of just making it faster may very well prove to be major blunder.
Right now I'm actually hoping that developers don't try to use PSSR and I just get a slightly higher base resolution or more consistent performance on a Pro.
Re: PS5 Pro Image Quality Issues Reported for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
For those wanting to play the blame game, I think it's on both Respawn an Sony. The problem is caused by PSSR. Silent Hill 2 has similar significant problems with it. However, even games that mostly look ok with it have visual artifacts on some surfaces.
According to an unverified developer account, there are multiple "versions" of PSSR. Earlier versions have these issues.
It's entirely possible that these developers were promised by Sony that the implementation of PSSR they were using would be fixed on the system side with a firmware update...and then it never was.
It's also possible that Sony did not promise such a thing and these developers "turned on" PSSR without verifying whether it looked good in all areas of their games. That said, Sony still shares some blame for making a "so broken/underbaked that no one should really use it" version of the tech available to developers to implement.
It is not hard to believe that Sony incentivized developers one way or another to have Pro enhancements available for the Pro's launch and this has backfired, leading to bad Pro versions.
The (second) worst part of this is simply the lack of acknowledgement and communication from Sony or developers. I work in business software dev, simply giving the customer a "yup we know about it and are working on it" does wonders for customer satisfaction and is never harmful as long as you're not lying about the "working on it" part.
-edit-
In retrospect, the lack of communication isn't actually the worst part. The actual worst part is that in several of the games, Jedi Survivor included, you can't revert to to base PS5 version of the game. So even if you're willing to forego the Pro "enhancements" to play the regular version of the game without visual bugs, you cannot. That I would say was extraordinarily shortsighted on the part of developers, especially if the scenario was that that PSSR issues were known, but Sony promised they'd be fixed. You never trust promises from outside companies. They should have made the Pro mode a togglable option.
Re: Poll: Did You Buy a PS5 Pro?
I got one and rather unfortunately the first PS5 Pro enhanced game I tried, Jedi Survivor, is rather disappointing. The quality mode is still a locked 30fps and the performance had some massive graphical bug with what appears to be the ambient occlusion implementation that makes the entire environment flicker. It's distracting to the point of being unplayable.
That game has been a technical mess since the beginning, so that's par for the course I guess.
Luckily subsequent games have faired better, but Jedi Survivor was the one game I was really looking forward to getting a boost because the RT lighting in the original version was quite nice, but 30fps was too big a trade off.
Hopefully they can fix the bug, but even then it's still disappointing that there's still a 30fps mode in the Pro version. IMO Sony should have made a mandate that any Pro enhanced game must run 60fps minimum. I mean their dang presentation for the thing started off by saying 75% of players user performance modes. There should be no 30fps mode in Pro games.
Re: PS5, PS4 Indie Sensation Dave the Diver Takes a Titillating Twist in NIKKE Crossover
I tried playing Nikke after Stellar Blade, it is sadly very stereotypical mobile game trash.
No real gameplay, an interface that overwhelms you with a hundred different things to level up, each with their own currencies. A "spreadsheet" game where you sink in ludicrous amounts of time or money just to make numbers go up and ogle some barely animated 2D waifus.
It's a shame this kind of garbage is overtaking the popularity of proper video games in east Asia.
Re: Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition (PS5) - Cult Classic's Remaster Nearly Picture Perfect
Tangentially related anecdote:
Near the end of the PS2 lifespan, I traded in my second revision "fat" PS2 for one of the later revision slim models. Apparently there were hardware changes in later revisions of slim PS2s that introduced compatibility problems in a small number of PS2 games.
Beyond Good and Evil was one of those games. A few years back I wanted to try replaying the original version of BG&E only to find that it basically unplayable on the slim PS2 due to numerous issues.
I was pretty pissed about that. I knew the PS2 slim was less compatible with PS1 games, but had no clue that it even had some compatibility issues with PS2 games. I wish I had kept my original model PS2.
Anyway, I'll picking this up for sure.
Re: FromSoftware Boss Puts Elden Ring Difficulty Discourse to Bed, Once and For All
I agree a developer should be able to make the game they want. However, the discussion gets a little murkier when you consider that a person may have spent $70 for the game and doesn't find out that they're incapable of beating it until they are past the refund period of the game.
I platinumed Bloodborne and Sekiro, and yet I firmly believe Souls games should absolutely have "last resort" in-game difficulty options. Disable trophies and online play when activated. If a person wants to trivialize the experience to see the single player content and play out the story, why shouldn't they be able to? Are they ruining the game for themselves, maybe, but who cares, it does not affect other players at all. There is no rational argument against this except the developers not wanting to spend whatever time it would take to implement such options. However, literally all that you'd need to make most Souls games "easy" is just a simple global damage reduction percentage (i.e. being able to set enemies to do XX% less damage to the player) and I can't imagine that would be that difficult to implement.
Re: Helldivers 2 PC Players Blindsided by Seemingly Sudden PSN Account Requirement
I have the game on PS5, but I don't know how so many people can be defending Sony on this.
Had the requirement actually been enforced on release, and had the game not been sold in countries where creating a PSN account isn't officially supported, I see no issue.
However, turning this into a true requirement this 3 months after the game is out is pretty bad, particularly because the reason why it wasn't being enforced is because their account system wasn't ready for prime time, by their own admission. It's not the consumer's fault their system was broken when the game was released, but the consumer is now inconvenienced by their decision to start enforcing it.
That's no good and no one should be supporting a company doing something like that. Sony just need to take the L on this one, because it was their fault it wasn't ready, and keep it as an optional requirement.
What they should do instead is find ways to make people want to create a PSN account. I.e. Let's say people who have linked to PSN account (and PS5 owners obviously) get 100 free super credits per month or something like that. Or perhaps limit "full" functionality without straight up preventing you from playing the game, like you can only cross-play or use the in-game voice chat if you have a PSN account - I think that would be a lot easier to swallow for many.
There are ways for them to drive people to creating a PSN accounts without making a hard requirement. Then, maybe after 6 months of those incentives being place, you find that 90% of the active player base has PSN accounts - at that point you make it a hard requirement and it's met with much less resistance.
Re: Devs Weigh in on 'Disgraceful' Insomniac Games Data Breach
@Sil_Am There's no basis to assume an "inside job". Hundreds if not thousands of companies have been hit ransomware attacks in the last few years. The company I work for was hit in 2021 but we make boring and not especially important business software so no one cared when the hackers tried to sell our info.
Intrusion is usually via network security holes, which many companies have, or social engineering (phishing).
1.7TB of network traffic is not a lot on the scale of a corporation - especially one that would be transferring large game development files all over the place and not necessarily just internally.
The hackers will always hit a company during their night hours so no one is working and you can transfer a lot of data in a just a few minutes from a fast corporate internet connection.
Re: Three New PS Plus Essential Games Can Be Downloaded Now
Word of warning for those interested in Sable, once you get out of the intro area, it has massive performance problems on PS5. It has a ton of stuttering as areas are loading in and will inexplicably drop to sub-20fps in some areas...in a game that has like PS2 era poly counts.
It seems to have been abandoned by the devs as they've never made any statement about addressing the performance.
Seems almost like an insult for one of the "subscriber benefit" (it's not free!) games to be nigh unplayable.