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Vanquish PC: 'Hidden' additional challenge from playing on higher framerates

Did you find Vanquish on consoles too easy even on hard? Try the PC version.

Apparently, the higher your framerates are, the higher you're taking damage from enemies. It's somewhat similar to Valkyria Chronicles' interception fire bug from back then.

All credits due to Wesker for finding this out.

I've tested this multiple times using the AR mode tutorial (the bit where enemies shoot at you a bunch in order to demonstrate auto AR) and you take much more damage when playing at higher framerates. If you lock the framerate to 30FPS AR mode will activate after 6-7 seconds of taking enemy fire but if you're playing at a much higher framerate, like 144FPS, it will activate in just 1-2 seconds.

30FPS
30fpsj2uuj.gif


144FPS
144fpszgu48.gif


Note the number of times Sam staggers.

This can be consistently reproduced.

From the looks of it, at 60fps (which the majority of PC gamers would play at) Sam would stagger after 3-4 seconds.

This is somewhat an interesting bug.
 

gngf123

Member
Did you find Vanquish on consoles too easy even on hard? Try the PC version.

Apparently, the higher your framerates are, the higher you're taking damage from enemies. It's somewhat similar to Valkyria Chronicles' interception fire bug from back then.

All credits due to Wesker for finding this out.



From the looks of it, at 60fps (which the majority of PC gamers would play at) Sam would stagger after 3-4 seconds.

This is somewhat an interesting bug.

Yeah, seems to be around 2.5 seconds on my machine at 60fps. Not that much slower than the 144hz one in the OP.

Not really an uncommon bug, similar bugs have shown up in loads of games that have gone from 30fps locked on console to uncapped on PC. I guess they just don't calculate properly with delta time or something.
 

David___

Banned
Now I know why I sucked last night and why I got one-shotted from a melee attack from one of the red grunts in the first mission
 

105.Will

Member
This actually gives me a clearer conscience when I'm jumping from head to head with a mouse and keyboard in what is clearly a way the game was never intended to be played

Edit: not defending the bug, just a fun way of looking at it.
 

gngf123

Member
This is important:

Edit: My mistake, the gif labeled 144FPS was actually running at about 68FPS. I didn't note the drop in framerate from recording with FRAPS. Luckily, the damage seems to stop scaling after 60FPS (it still takes about a second for AR mode to activate whether at 60FPS or 144FPS)

This would explain why my machine at 60fps was nearly as fast to get into the red as OP.
 
Oeaedny.gif



Sooo, somebody please tell me this is true for Bayonetta also so I don't need to feel bad for all those stone statues?

Not that I would have noticed, game was already 60 on consoles too (not locked but Vanquisch was always below 30 there)
If you get stone in Bayo, your own fault, sorry :)
 

Budi

Member
Not that I would have noticed, game was already 60 on consoles too (not locked but Vanquisch was always below 30 there)
If you get stone in Bayo, your own fault, sorry :)

I don't know, might be my controller. It feels a bit iffy!

Didn't know it was targeted at 60 fps on consoles, makes perfect sense though. But looks like PS3 wasn't quite up to the task =P
 

Paragon

Member
How did Digital Foundry not pick this up...
They never picked up on the awful mouse implementation where the sensitivity is constantly changing depending on what you're doing - no raw mouse input, or FOV issues with ultrawide displays either where "120" FOV on 24:10 is equivalent to only 90 on 16:9 - which is causing me motion sickness.
The HUD is not being scaled properly either, resulting in it being very pixelated.

I get that people are happy that Vanquish is now available on PC, but a lot of people seem to think that the only thing you need to do for a good PC port is to have it support high resolutions and run at a good framerate. That's certainly important, but not everything.
 

J_Viper

Member
Wait, is this why Sam is going down in two bullets?My FPS is over 100.

That would definitely explain my frustration lol
 

Brandon F

Well congratulations! You got yourself caught!
Yea, outside of Challenge 6, the console version was not a very difficult game to platinum. Haven't played the PC version yet, but this seems to be a recurring story for some remasters.
 
I feel like someone once told me that Japanese developers have a habit of tying game logic to framerate, which is what causes all these issues on later ports that go above 30. Is that what's happening here?
 

Zomba13

Member
I did wonder why it felt so much harder. Guess it's the same as with Valkyria Chronicles with animations and game logic tied to the frame rate meaning shots happen twice as fast at 60fps.
 

Hybris

Member
Oeaedny.gif



Sooo, somebody please tell me this is true for Bayonetta also so I don't need to feel bad for all those stone statues?

I think it actually is a bit harder. People have also reported more instances of enemies attack from offscreen. Which isn't supposed to happen. The game doesn't have frame skipping so you have less time to react to things in general.

This game appears to be the same case, but the effect is much more significant when going from 30 fps to 144 fps in vanquish vs going from 40-50 fps to locked 60 fps in bayonetta.
 
Okay, so it just wasn't me that noticed it. I booted it up last night for the first time. Playing on Normal I was thinking that I didn't remember it being that punishing on consoles.

I would wait for a patch....but after Nier, I'm not going to hold my breath.
 

Adnor

Banned
Now I have an excuse of why I died so much.

Okay, so it just wasn't me that noticed it. I booted it up last night for the first time. Playing on Normal I was thinking that I didn't remember it being that punishing on consoles.

I would wait for a patch....but after Nier, I'm not going to hold my breath.

That's SE's fault, not Platinum. Vanquish is published by SEGA so there are bigger chances of a patch.
 

gngf123

Member
I feel like someone once told me that Japanese developers have a habit of tying game logic to framerate, which is what causes all these issues on later ports that go above 30. Is that what's happening here?

Pretty much, yes.

This also because console focused developers only have one or two pieces of hardware to target and one fixed framerate that they can be 99% sure the game is going to be running at. Japanese development has been console focused for a long time so they never really needed to learn about uncapped framerates and using delta time to handle it, like western developers have.
 

Zomba13

Member
I never noticed if this was fixed or not in Valkyria Chronicles, but could it just be fixed by halving the damage when at 60fps or above? Would that be possible? Like, could you use Cheat Engine to like, double Sam's health as an unofficial fix?
 
Welp, I guess it's a good thing I can't play this for a couple of weeks....hopefully this gets patched, I'd love to play this at a full 120fps.
 
Their pretty garbage at games if you still haven't noticed by now, either they died a ton or threw it on Daddy can I play Difficulty so they can actually have a video.

And that's fine, one can't expect them to catch, or be good, at everything.
 

gngf123

Member
Okay, so it just wasn't me that noticed it. I booted it up last night for the first time. Playing on Normal I was thinking that I didn't remember it being that punishing on consoles.

I would wait for a patch....but after Nier, I'm not going to hold my breath.

Bayonetta had some small problems that have already been patched.

Platinum are fine with patching, as are Sega. Square Enix are the problem.
 

Nyoro SF

Member
Exact same problem that Valkyria had. They had to jury rig a patch and solution for it. Make sure to let SEGA know through all the channels.
 

Hybris

Member
Welp, I guess it's a good thing I can't play this for a couple of weeks....hopefully this gets patched, I'd love to play this at a full 120fps.

I would be really surprised if they patch this. It's not an easy task to separate the game logic from the fps if the game is already completely programmed this way. I doubt they would rewrite the game for a port this late.
 
After Valkyria Chronicles, can't say this is surprising.

Sooo, somebody please tell me this is true for Bayonetta also so I don't need to feel bad for all those stone statues?
The Jeanne QTE's (with a flurry of punches or kicks) are much harder to beat at higher framerates than on console.
 

gngf123

Member
I would be really surprised if they patch this. It's not an easy task to separate the game logic from the fps if the game is already completely programmed this way. I doubt they would rewrite the game for a port this late.

They fixed a similar bug in the Valkyria port, I think.

I also remember that it took them 3-4 months to finally get it released, but they did it.
 
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