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[Audiophile]

Quite excited for DeStr 2. I just hope there are longer treks with more planning and equipment needed. Once I "got" the gameplay loop of the first game I needed an even deeper and more treacherous Post-Apocalyptic Amazon Simulator experience.

...

I'd love for there to be a few points at the edge of the map/s where you set off on epic very-wide-linear expeditions, perhaps setting up custom camps on the way and really having to plan everything down to the tee with a much more free-form approach within them. Maybe some sort of advanced terrain analysis tools to go with the weather stuff. Not to mention new vehicles, gadgets, package-carrying equipment etc. I'd really like to see some deep water traversal like boats and even using the controls to gently navigate thin ice.

Some of those longer, latter missions where you really felt the sense of struggle really made the game for me. Climbing mountains with extreme snow and having the traversal so heavily gamified and involving.

I can imagine extreme wind, rain, snow and sand storms; with steep and treacherous landscapes to be be overcome in new ways.

I recall their being some vey small caves in DS1 but extending into large caves and using the games systems and tools to navigate them would be awesome. Could even have underwater bases and diving or submarine mechanics.

So many possibilities..

 

[Luipadre]

1 million views on PS channel alone. 15 of them are mine

 

[Omnipunctual Godot]

Please, God, let them get over the artistic ego enough to let me listen to music this time.

It's bad enough that you can only listen to the game's music in your room. But it seemed incredibly arrogant to also remove Spotify functionality.

For a game that goes many hours without any music, that's not acceptable.

 

[rofif]

Please, God, let them get over the artistic ego enough to let me listen to music this time.

It's bad enough that you can only listen to the game's music in your room. But it seemed incredibly arrogant to also remove Spotify functionality.

For a game that goes many hours without any music, that's not acceptable.

but when the music hits? perfection

 

[Chuck Berry]

but when the music hits? perfection

Exactly. The lack of music was to push that extreme feel of isolation, which made (when the soundtrack kicked in) everything in the moment that much more meaningful

It never stopped being a relief to come back to base, drink a Monster, and crash out on my bed while blasting Bring Me The Horizon

 

[rofif]

Exactly. The lack of music was to push that extreme feel of isolation, which made (when the soundtrack kicked in) everything in the moment that much more meaningful

It never stopped being a relief to come back to base, drink a Monster, and crash out on my bed while blasting Bring Me The Horizon

! yes. And when you hear music coming from online structures, that's so comforting too.
But in general, the environmental sounds of wind, rain and so on are great in this game.

 

[Omnipunctual Godot]

Exactly. The lack of music was to push that extreme feel of isolation, which made (when the soundtrack kicked in) everything in the moment that much more meaningful

It never stopped being a relief to come back to base, drink a Monster, and crash out on my bed while blasting Bring Me The Horizon

! yes. And when you hear music coming from online structures, that's so comforting too.
But in general, the environmental sounds of wind, rain and so on are great in this game.

This is one of the few games I've platinumed. It's novel for the first 40 hours. Not the second or third.

 

[CamHostage]

I'm wondering if there will be any Ray Tracing reflections in the game. For now there aren't any titles using Decima that have any RT solutions. I thought about it because two things - PS5 Pro and gameplay mechanics. I think that if the game won't have it form the start then probably Pro will not receive it also. It's a shame.

Maybe, but he seems to be pretty comfortable with the current baked process and results. Also, Guerrilla favors its tricks for cinematic lighting solutions, to the point that not only are all the ToDs in Horizon FW baked many times over (granted that RTGI is still more future ambition than practical reality) but also the "Hero Lighting" trick puts extra light and kick on Aloy which is not sourced in the world. (Notably, no RT features were added to the PC version of Horizon FW, or to the PS5-only Burning Shores DLC.)

Kojima's Xbox OD will run on Unreal Engine, and we'll see what Physint runs on, but that could be where Kojima Productions experiments with RT to see what approaches work better for its game development approach.

(*Incidentally, Decima has used "Ray Tracing", kind of, but in ways you wouldn't think about. The audio system casts rays into objects marked with acoustic material and shape properties to determine the sound reverberated around the environment and back to the player; I've seen that labeled as "raytracing" in its bounce patterns, although this and the MS Project Acoustics do more wave simulation with acoustical property simulation, so it's probably a different category. And then Killzone Shadow Fall's reflection system uses a raytracing process for direction and roughness, although Guerrilla are quick to specify that this is "ray-marching" and "a 2.5D ray-trace", which gets into discussions of what people will comfortably qualify as RT.)

The technology of Killzone Shadow Fall

It was an irresistible opportunity. Just before the launch of Killzone Shadow Fall, Guerrilla Games offered us the chan…

www.eurogamer.net

 

[Audiophile]

Wondering if there'll be a dynamic day/night cycle. There's clearly more times of day in the trailer, hopefully it's not just fixed for each area or specific story elements.

Bringing together a dynamic weather system (plus Decima's cloud system from Burning Shores anyone?) with a dynamic time of day would really bring the whole thing up another level.

Also wondering where it's set? She mentions Mexico "before", so I'm guessing that you're maybe leaving off from there and perhaps going into South America. If that is the case then the deserts might be Patagonia or Atacama; there may even be rainforests/jungles which would be a real nice contrast to the usual landscapes. I can only imagine how awesome it'd be trekking through the thick jungle in these games.

I'm guessing that with them being grey/blue in the ship that they're in the seam and with the title being "On The Beach"; you're going to be veering into these realms more too.

 

[Terenty]

Looks cool, but I expected a bigger departure gameplay wise from Kojima.

It looks kinda the same, only with more biomes. The same big, slow BTs in a tar pool only the model is different, the same car/bike, the same BTs hanging in the air you need to sneak around, the same bridges/timefall shelters etc.

The Magellan ship probably works as fast travel between different biomes or smth.

Hopefully there are other things not shown yet that will help differentiate the two games.

 

[Chuck Berry]

This is one of the few games I've platinumed. It's novel for the first 40 hours. Not the second or third.

Sounds like a you problem

I did what I needed to do (and I’m a mild platinum whore) in 72 hours. 75% of the trophs. Left more than satisfied

If you got that beat with the lack of sonic pleasure why not turn on a podcast or something

 

[Jesb]

It looked incredible but unfortunately DS is just a game I’m not into like I was MGS, I only played DS briefly only due to PS+ and I lost interest in it quickly as a walking simulator delivering things didn’t appeal to me. I wanna give it another shot eventually but it’s just not on the same level as his other franchise.

 

[Johnny Concrete]

So regarding that whole Higgs sequence: is the robot samurai a sort of emergency device that got activated by ripping the pod off Sam?
He’s touching the pod and there’s some kind of electricity going on, maybe a signal being sent.

So the robot could be a last resort to save the BB whenever the carrier gets killed or captured?

 

[CamHostage]

Wondering if there'll be a dynamic day/night cycle. There's clearly more times of day in the trailer, hopefully it's not just fixed for each area or specific story elements.

Bringing together a dynamic weather system (plus Decima's cloud system from Burning Shores anyone?) with a dynamic time of day would really bring the whole thing up another level.

Kinda crazy that the first game didn't have a full ToD cycle, right? (Supposedly there was an actual "lore" explanation of the daytime and weather control, but still, bizarre for a game about being out in the elements.)

It seems like that's a possibility this time; not only have we seen nighttime sequences, but we've also seen blazing daylight, bleary morning sunrises, chilling dusk hours after sunset, and that one crazy full moon.

...ToD and Weather could be fixed per area/mission, however. The Decima time change system isn't just something you "hook in" and it works on a global illumination system, you also have to bake the lighting conditions for each expected time of day and for each location (and probe the heck out of it for finer detail variations) so that the game can have cinematic looks prepared at all times without bogging down the engine trying to do it all in realtime. (At least, that's how it works in Horizon, and I'm guessing since neither Burning Shores nor the PC port made any ambitious changes to the lighting system; Death Stranding isn't just "the Horizon engine", there's plenty of custom work, but a realtime GI would be an undertaking.) The use that we know of for photogrammetry in Death Stranding is on the micro level (facial capture and body scans,) I don't recall if there's ever been any indication of photogrammetry on the macro level of landscapes but that's something to work out too. And then I don't know the cost of data for all the ToD variations but that can be a lot of info as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's no dynamic ToD in Death Stranding 2. It just feels like Kojima would seek to control that, and he's got the lore to do it. (And in most games, you usually don't even notice whether or not day can shift into night if it gave you really good looking days and nights, although DS is a game about understanding the landscape and survival conditions in harsh natural conditions so nightfall should be one of those conditions.) What's in the trailer seems like it could go either way, and that the biomes/landscapes shown were picked for the best conditions in the best lighting for emotional impact; nothing was shown two different ways like is often done when a ToD is involved. But it'd be logical and cool if they did add that feature to the game.

 

[Puscifer]

Rewatching the trailer but did Higgs do a Talking Heads reference with that same as it ever was line lol

 

[TheRedRiders]

Kinda crazy that the first game didn't have a full ToD cycle, right? (Supposedly there was an actual "lore" explanation of the daytime and weather control, but still, bizarre for a game about being out in the elements.)

It seems like that's a possibility this time; not only have we seen nighttime sequences, but we've also seen blazing daylight, bleary morning sunrises, chilling dusk hours after sunset, and that one crazy full moon.

...ToD and Weather could be fixed per area/mission, however. The Decima time change system isn't just something you "hook in" and it works on a global illumination system, you also have to bake the lighting conditions for each expected time of day and for each location (and probe the heck out of it for finer detail variations) so that the game can have cinematic looks prepared at all times without bogging down the engine trying to do it all in realtime. (At least, that's how it works in Horizon, and I'm guessing since neither Burning Shores nor the PC port made any ambitious changes to the lighting system; Death Stranding isn't just "the Horizon engine", there's plenty of custom work, but a realtime GI would be an undertaking.) The use that we know of for photogrammetry in Death Stranding is on the micro level (facial capture and body scans,) I don't recall if there's ever been any indication of photogrammetry on the macro level of landscapes but that's something to work out too. And then I don't know the cost of data for all the ToD variations but that can be a lot of info as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's no dynamic ToD in Death Stranding 2. It just feels like Kojima would seek to control that, and he's got the lore to do it. (And in most games, you usually don't even notice whether or not day can shift into night if it gave you really good looking days and nights, although DS is a game about understanding the landscape and survival conditions in harsh natural conditions so nightfall should be one of those conditions.) What's in the trailer seems like it could go either way, and that the biomes/landscapes shown were picked for the best conditions in the best lighting for emotional impact; nothing was shown two different ways like is often done when a ToD is involved. But it'd be logical and cool if they did add that feature to the game.

Decima's lighting sytem has been need of a big upgrade for years now, I remember DF mentioned how GG were experimenting with with ray-tracing, my hunch is they'll likely go down the route of some sort of hybrid GI system accelerated by RT.

It's no secret that Death Stranding 2 will be using the latest iteration of Decima, I'd be curious to see whether they'll implement a dynamic lighting system - but I think Kojima would want to tie that into the game design - maybe certain type of BT entities come out at night compared to the day, maybe there's a visibility advantage at different times of the day or even the frequency of BT encounters. Just speculating.

 

[DJ12]

The fact that he said "I dropped the framerate" when it was some random dev working on the game lol. The way he tweets I totally understand when people think Kojima is an indie developer, one guy alone in his bedroom pumping out AAA titles because he can do it all.

Do you think the other devs said to him it would be cool to drop the framerate of the puppet animation, or do they just do as he says as he's the genius on campus not them?

 

[Senua]

Rewatching the trailer but did Higgs do a Talking Heads reference with that same as it ever was line lmao

Yes

 

[midnightAI]

Rewatching the trailer but did Higgs do a Talking Heads reference with that same as it ever was line lmao

It does seem that way. The character to me though seems quite Bowie inspired.

 

[Bartski]

 

[Andrew Evenstar]

I gotta play the original. this and that game has always had my interest and the games look badass. thankfully I still know barely anything about the game or story so I can still be surprised too.

 

[Eliciel]

I just didn't manage to finish the first one, maybe I am the problem. I couldn't bring myself to keep delivering crates for some reason..

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

 

[Bartski]

 

[TheRedRiders]

So DF seem to be super impressed with the Death Stranding 2 trailer. Some interesting nuggets...

Fluid simulations are great.

Seems to be using screen space reflections, maybe even shadows.

John and Oliver are both in agreement that the overall lighting presentation of the game is evident of ray-traced global illumination, especially in regards to how the bounce and indirect lighting is behaving. This makes even more sense because combining RTGI with reflections and shadows would be "prohibitively expensive".

 

[Audiophile]

So DF seem to be super impressed with the Death Stranding 2 trailer. Some interesting nuggets...

Fluid simulations are great.

Seems to be using screen space reflections, maybe even shadows.

John and Oliver are both in agreement that the overall lighting presentation of the game is evident of ray-traced global illumination, especially in regards to how the bounce and indirect lighting is behaving. This makes even more sense because combining RTGI with reflections and shadows would be "prohibitively expensive".

This is where I'd like to see the Pro come in and be used in more than one way rather than just a straight-doubling of pixels:

Something like this for eg.

PS5 | Standard Modes
40fps @ ~1440p DRS + TUA ^
30fps @ ~1620p DRS + TUA
- RT GI

PS5 Pro | Enhanced Modes
40fps @ ~1620p DRS + ML TUA ^
30fps @ ~1800p DRS + ML TUA
- RT GI
- RT Reflections & Shadows
- Higher Alpha Resolution & DoF Accuracy
- Distant LoD

PS5 Pro | Performance Modes
60fps @ 1620p + ML TUA **
40-60fps VRR @ 1800p + ML TUA *
- RT GI
- Distant LoD

^ = Frame-Tripled in 120Hz container.
** = If Pro's CPU is capable.
* = Frame-Doubled in 80-120Hz container.

 

[Msamy]

So DF seem to be super impressed with the Death Stranding 2 trailer. Some interesting nuggets...

Fluid simulations are great.

Seems to be using screen space reflections, maybe even shadows.

John and Oliver are both in agreement that the overall lighting presentation of the game is evident of ray-traced global illumination, especially in regards to how the bounce and indirect lighting is behaving. This makes even more sense because combining RTGI with reflections and shadows would be "prohibitively expensive".

Actually RTGI have the biggest graphics impact in most games I am 100% with this descion , rt reflections and shadows can be add letter to ps5 pro version .

 

[TheRedRiders]

Actually RTGI have the biggest graphics impact in most games I am 100% with this descion , rt reflections and shadows can be add letter to ps5 pro version .

Completely agree - can't even tell the difference with RT shadows, and RT reflections are just a nice bonus - the real visual difference and magic comes with the dynamic bounce lighting and illumination.

I'll be curious to see how the RTGI implementation has helped the development - as the developers won't need to waste time baking in lighting and worry about accuracy and such - this will be even more complicated when there's different times of the day.

EDIT : I'll also add that the RTGI will work wonderfully with the game's environment, we've already seen from the trailer that the game will have dynamic environments, flooding and rock cascades, I'm guessing a bunch of other stuff to which will push a lot cool physics tech. Realtime dynamic lighting interacting with dynamic environmental changes.

 

[Audiophile]

Anyone else noticed when the bridge is being destroyed (or self-destructing?) in DS2, all the little sparks are dynamically casting light spots down into the water..?!

They look completely natural too, I don't think it's trickery but actual emissive light sources. They're all varied and the ones which occur closer to the water as the pieces fall are less diffuse and brighter/sharper.

RTGI with emissives casting light immediately and correctly into a dynamic body of fluid is seriously impressive.

 

[Arsic]

Calling it now, thats Lou all grown up or something.

Pretty sure Lou is dead. It’s clear Lou is somehow now data of some sort. The cyborg Ninja fighting in that trailer had a blue light and a baby giggle come from it, and this girl in the trailer had a small flicker effect as she walks out of that scene.

 

[MagnesD3]

Pretty sure Lou is dead. It’s clear Lou is somehow now data of some sort. The cyborg Ninja fighting in that trailer had a blue light and a baby giggle come from it, and this girl in the trailer had a small flicker effect as she walks out of that scene.

Yeah Lou was dead before Sam met Lou though thats what I took away from Deadman and sams conversation.

 

[Bartski]

 

[Digity]

Seeing 2025 at the end was a kick in the berries.

 

[Bartski]

 

[NeonGhost]

Day Night cycle ?

 

[TheRedRiders]

Day Night cycle ?

Makes sense given the alleged RTGI implementation.

 

[mckmas8808]

Day Night cycle ?

No way. I feel like that's asking for too much.

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

This was retweeted by Kojima. DS2 will be bonkers!

Edit: Probably just a cosplay shot.

 

[Heisenberg007]

This was retweeted by Kojima. DS2 will be bonkers!

Best looking game, BY FAR!

 

[Johnny Concrete]

This was retweeted by Kojima. DS2 will be bonkers!

This is footage of 2 people cosplaying on a beach? It's not in-game graphics, that's for sure.

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

This is footage of 2 people cosplaying on a beach? It's not in-game graphics, that's for sure.

Hmm, you might be right. It does look like a cosplay shot.

 

[SlimySnake]

This was retweeted by Kojima. DS2 will be bonkers!

lol look at this dude's channel.

 

[Hollowpoint5557]

Was that our first look at ps5 pro?

Back on Feb 1st I posted this and I still think so.

 

[Shin-Ra]

Hopefully aiming precision weapons (with a DualSense) doesn’t feel like shit this time.

MGSV aiming was dreamy, popping off headshots until targets start wearing head protection.
Death Stranding aiming (even at 60fps on PS5) was so bad I stopped trying, until boss fights forced you to use them which made them more frustrating dealing with bad aiming and lack of practise.

The ‘Sam’s not a legendary soldier like (not-) Big Boss’ isn’t a good excuse.

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

Yes

I've only heard Talking Heads on the radio, so that reference in the movie Dream Scenario was kinda lost on me.

 

[GymWolf]

lol look at this dude's channel.

Real life has the best water tech i ever seen

 

[NeonGhost]

No way. I feel like that's asking for too much.

Why is that too much

 

[CamHostage]

Day Night cycle ?

We do know already that DS2 will have areas in early morning glow, blazing hot daytime sun, washed-over dusk, and street-lit nighttime. (This is a change from the first game, which was a perpetual grim day unless story points led differently; there was some lore reason why light was the same all day long.)

What we don't know yet if is there is a day/night cycle that these environments can change over time or be different depending on when you visit the region. It could be that all of these times of day are set per area by mission parameters/deployment timeline. But there could indeed be a day/night cycle. (And there could conceivably also be some combination of pre-set time sets and also evolving sunlight conditions.)

Makes sense given the alleged RTGI implementation.

Well, sort of... RTGI doesn't mean a game can automatically approximate various times of day (or that it's a better solution for ToD than some of the other GI approaches out there, realtime or baked, though ultimately RTGI is what developers are pushing towards, so long as they can get the hardware to pull off what's needed.) Even if global illumination is accomplished through ray-tracing, artistry still needs to go into lighting conditions and color tone and shifting demands of the setting to create a day/night cycle (same as a baked process.) RTGI could help the simulation greatly when used well and optimized to perform strong, if that is in fact part of DS2's ToD solution (assuming either exist), but it's not a tech where it a guaranteed answer to the question.

 

[nosoynadie22]

This was retweeted by Kojima. DS2 will be bonkers!

Edit: Probably just a cosplay shot.