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Dark Souls 2 Lighting changes/Downgrade
- Thread starter Moral Panic
- Start date
I guess. The graphics that I saw presented screamed "framerates will dip down into the low teens often" to me based on what I have seen the PS3 be able to handle in the past. Havana AC4 is damned near unplayable at times. The system is simply shit for open world games. That's why almost all of the "graphical showcases" on the system are linear corridor games.
If they would have presented the game to us as shown, people would be raising a shitstorm because of the framerates in the teens.
After seeing what Dark Souls is like on PC compared to PS3 from a framerate perspective, especially after DSfix, I'm not sure why anyone is arguing for miracles on the PS3.
I understand people saying this, but then why would they show the lighting effects to the public, claim they were on PS3, and then never make any statement about their absence?
It just boggles my mind that they never told anyone about this and didn't expect any backlash.
Facism
Member
When you guys see this place in the final build you'll realize that no amount of modding can fix this.
And I'm honestly not a fan of mods at all, I want to play the original developers vision. Something like a resolution fix just increases the amount of pixels, that's fine but I don't want texture mods and lighting mods and all that stuff personally.
It's fine if people want to go that route but it's certainly not a solution to me.
Yes, definitely, unless something changed in the day 1 patch.
That area and the painting hallway shown in the gameplay reveal have suffered the most from what I've seen. The painting hallway was borderline unrecognizable.
This place is all grey now until you turn on the lights and it looks like a red light district, a grey room with a red tint overlayed on top. No contrast, no atmosphere.
Please tell me this is still in the retail release with all the atmosphere and lighting effects!
man my interest in what these areas actually look like is piqued hard. Any screens?
Wolfe
Member
You must not be familiar with the concept of overreaction. Guess what, the marketing team isn't the dev team and the dev team likely has no control over what the marketing team says/does. This is like getting pissed off at a particular director for things that a studio has said or done in regards to a movie he/she is making.
I've worked at a couple dev studios and talked to some of the programmers when this exact kind of situation has happened with marketing doing stupid shit and it was all dictated by the publisher.
I'm not saying you can't be upset by the changes (that may or may not be in the final game) but take a step back and look at things from a different perspective. Saying they should "atone for their embarrassment" is quite over the top.
Fried Food
Banned
Do you remember what channel was streaming it? I wanna see it for myself
Pie and Beans
Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
Can't remember if this is the exact same area, but you can see where all the red and 'warmth' of the area is drained out and you're just left with a wash of grey:
You can also just see a ton more stuff than before, which will dramatically affect that patent pended "whats round that corner!" Souls feel.
Curious_George
Neo Member
Without having a PC release here to actually scrutinize, I think it's kind of silly to blame From for potentially downgrading versions that might have never been upgraded to begin with (talking PS3/360 console release). I think it's fair to call them out on maybe not clarifying that the consoles wouldn't match the preview or PC version (assuming PC ends up looking closer to the preview shots) but it's also not too uncommon for preview builds to reflect a version of the game that is often only seen on high end PCs.
And as far as I can tell, these two videos from the Executioner's Chariot boss fight, one from the network test and the other release, both have lighting that looks exactly the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFVzBEcdkg4 - network test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwDNNuPVv3E&feature=youtu.be - release
So I don't really understand the claims that the game was downgraded from the network test version.
I think I'll hold off on my judgement until I see the PC version before I determine how much of the preview stuff was true or just bullshots.
And as far as I can tell, these two videos from the Executioner's Chariot boss fight, one from the network test and the other release, both have lighting that looks exactly the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFVzBEcdkg4 - network test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwDNNuPVv3E&feature=youtu.be - release
So I don't really understand the claims that the game was downgraded from the network test version.
I think I'll hold off on my judgement until I see the PC version before I determine how much of the preview stuff was true or just bullshots.
It was a russian streaming site. There is no archive.
I posted 2 PC screens above. Check more here:
http://www.gamespot.com/dark-souls-ii/images/?tag=Screenshots
and here
http://www.capsulecomputers.com.au/2014/03/dark-souls-ii-to-challenge-pc-gamers-on-april-25th/
I don't think there's any archived footage, it was some Russian site hah!
Wolfe
Member
I'm curious to see how the end product looks compared to some of these images now myself but I'll prolly just redbox it before I decide if I want to pick it up right away or not.
I mean I'm still gonna pick it up at some point regardless, I fucking love the Souls games. But I might wait for it to hit 40 bucks or something first.
This can't even be real.
...eh, you could see completely across the entire Demons Ruin level. Low visibility isn't a staple of the ENTIRE game.
MiamiWesker
Member
Why is everyone saying the PC version is the one with the lighting. The PS3 version is the one with all the lighting. The question is why does the PS3 version not look like the old PS3 version?
Are we sure that those screens were taken after properly calibrating the game with the "make this thing invisible" calibration tool?
The same thing happened with GTA V. The developers showed footage that was clearly next gen/PC and said it was all PS3 footage, and people ate it up. Didn't fool me for a second. I didn't expect that was the case with this game, but now that I've seen the finished product, it all makes sense.
Pie and Beans
Look for me on the local news, I'll be the guy arrested for trying to burn down a Nintendo exec's house.
As stated earlier, when one of the big new focuses on gameplay and risk and rewards was the torch system, lighting and atmosphere become a lot more important to the designers original intention.
Imagine if the Tomb of Giants was completely flat lit and you could see it all as if you had night-vision for miles, but when you whip out the skull lantern or sunlight maggot, you can only see your immediate area. Thats why this is a bigger deal than normal as carving out that lighting has broken the balance and original intention something fierce.
VFX_Veteran
Banned
I wish Dark Souls 2 would look like Castlevania 2 on PC. That's next-gen quality game there and the art direction is incredible. I will still pick up DS2 though because the gameplay is where it's at.
So why not say that upfront? Why not have some integrity and not lead people on?
I don't imagine Dark Souls 2 will be coming to PS4 or Xbone for quite some time, if at all.
We're guessing they removed it from the console versions for performance reasons and that they're still keeping it for the PC version.
Fried Food
Banned
I found a stream from a couple days ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji1H8GesTGA&feature=player_detailpage#t=9314
This url will take you to the area the dungeon screenshot comes from. Even a quick glance will show that the lighting is kinda non existent (compared to the earlier footage)
This url will take you to the area the dungeon screenshot comes from. Even a quick glance will show that the lighting is kinda non existent (compared to the earlier footage)
VFX_Veteran
Banned
Let's hope not. That lighting engine is sorely needed in games today. That's why Deep Down looks so good.
CountAntonius
Member
My guess is because the hardware couldn't handle the entire game with those effects. Some people who have played it say the ps3 framerate struggles as is. With all those effects it probably would have been unplayable.
I would honestly NOT be surprised if the lighting and stuff was canned for the PC version. It's not like we haven't seen any flat or bland PC shots.
You got those from the Steam page? PC shots still look a lot better:
Most games look good because of lighting, even next-gen titles with high poly counts and high res textures would look bad if they had little to no lighting.
They look flat as well, unfortunately
company 03722446 said:
A company should be in communication with each others' divisions. Not doing so leads to dumb miscommunications like this that are, like I said, unprofessional. When you make a mistake you learn from it and correct it. In this case, informing their consumers that changes have been made instead of trying to pull a fast one on them, would be the ethical thing to do. Also, a good company has good communication between the product teams and marketing to prevent mishaps like you're proposing. It's sorry that you're trying to excuse this behavior. This industry is such a joke and I'm sorry you have sympathy for such unprofessional behavior when selling a $60 product. At this point I don't really care why it happened, they need to address what they're going to do ASAP. We don't even know for sure if the PC version is saved from this nonsense, do we?
MiamiWesker
Member
Its just so weird, I cant recall another time a game did this. I don't mean have an E3 demo and then half a year later the actual game doesn't look as good. From a month or two ago the actual PS3 playable demo where all those videos came from looked that good. From the final demo to the actual release a major change happens out of no where?
You said that patent pended souls feel. Thought you meant generally, in regards to the entire series. I was just being pedantic a little.
Yes I agree. If a major draw of the new game was the lighting and how that influences your traversal, they fucked it up by having it all be overbright.
Yeah. The dynamic lighting is just not there in those shots. Varying degrees of lighting exists but not to the extent of when it was initially shown.
Either that or they lied about the initial reveals being console footage. Seems to be common practice these days.
The beta tests on the PS3 had the new lightning engine.
VFX_Veteran
Banned
Agreed. Lighting is very crucial.
Indeed. I mean the shading on the player model is nice and all but let's not pretend it's even slightly better than DS1.
Fried Food
Banned
Man I really hope there is a day one patch that is going to give us what we need.
I think the steam page shots look nice, that's how I would expect the game to look.
This makes it all the more weird then.
You got those from the Steam page? PC shots still look a lot better:
I do see Dynamic Shadows in this shot, they are just quite light.
Yes. I was one of the few that played it, so in a way I have been directly deceived about a product I was planning to buy in 2 days. There better be a patch.
My guess is that they had revised the Dark Souls engine and added new features such as dynamic lighting and planned for it to run on Dark Souls 2 for the current gen. While this was initially possible, they must've realized that it wasn't optimized and removed these features basically rendering the entire engine to what it was for Dark Souls vanilla.
The end result is that the engine exists but they just couldn't optimize it in time for release and not only that but it was initially designed for next-gen consoles in mind primarily and decided to make it work for current-gen which didn't pan out too well in the end.
The end result is that the engine exists but they just couldn't optimize it in time for release and not only that but it was initially designed for next-gen consoles in mind primarily and decided to make it work for current-gen which didn't pan out too well in the end.
It's bullshit, but something that is happening with other companies. I gave an example with GTA V in my previous post (I know GTA V hasn't officially been announced for next gen-PC yet, but come on).
I really wouldn't be surprised if we saw DS 2 on PS4/XB1 in the near future. I guess for now, we'll just continue speculating on why the visuals on current gen consoles were so drastically downgraded.
Only due to the torch. The same is true on the console version.
Fried Food
Banned
I believe the console versions would have looked better if they never even bothered with the good lighting engine at all. Some of the lighting I've seen is worse than what was in Demons Soul's (either artistically or technically)