News - Dark Souls 2 fans angry about console graphics downgrade

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The game, released on Friday, looks very different to its preview videos.

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A game made for 2014-era PCs is inevitably going to look a bit crappy in comparison on 2005/2006 era console hardware. But that lava effect is abysmal.

Big fan of the Souls series after clocking 80 hours on Demons & 90 on Dark, already clocked just over 20 hours on Dark Souls 2 since Friday and loving it.

Some places do look way better than others but its not really bothering me, its an enjoyable foreboding experience. First 3 hours or so have been the hardest so far must admit, the rest of it though has been plenty co op play to learn boss enemies attack patterns before going for it myself.

My main gripe is the Human Effigies (Similar to Humanity on the first game), trouble is the drops are extremely rare (more so than the Humanities in the first game so turning back to human is something that you should only do in a situation that needs it. Its a catch 22 situation also, every time you die your life bar gets smaller until it hits 50% and the only way to restore it to full is using a Human Effigy. With the way the game is laid out you do die a lot (especially people that are relatively new to the series) so could end up trying to get through it with little health after all their Effigies are used.

Granted there is a ring you can get outside The Cathedral of Blue which stops the decrease at 75% but you won't visit that area till after you have killed the Last Giant and Pursuer (Pursuer is optional boss)

They need to do something though, the performance has been ok and adding more detail etc will hinder it, they will also need to do something with drop rate on Effigies as you can't farm areas to get them as after killing the same enemies on a level a set amount of times they no longer appear. As an example at The Lost Bastille, just outside McDuffs Blacksmith, there are 5 dogs which can be killed easily, you can farm these to try and get Effigies. So doing a little experiment I killed the five, visited bonfire to reset them. It was either 10 or 12 times before they disappeared, so either 50 - 60 dogs killed in total and there was only 1 Effigy dropped. That's a really low drop rate for something that is REALLY needed and used in the game.

I'm so sad to hear this. At least the developers should have been upfront and honest about it. If there's one thing you don't want to disappoint are your eager fans.
Anyway, I still can't wait to get my hands on Dark Souls II for PC.

Seems like alot of the owners of last gen consoles are raging because they got substandard graphics on such an old platform... should be thankful they got the game at all, very surprised people expected PS4/XBONE and PC like graphics on a 360 or PS3, demo footage on PC so you cant expect like for like!

Need to play dark souls at some point :P.

NO sympathy ... everybody knows consoles is a cheaper and easyer way to game like pc gamers but in limited specs ... if your complaining about a downgrading in spec on consoles buy a gaming pc next time and don't complain it nothing new this happens .... remember GTA 4 Graphics had to be downgraded also for xbox 360 en PS3 why? cuz it's a console ... ya'll might wanne be like a pc gamer and have a full game expierence but you'll never have. saying it's both the same is just like saying ferrari(pc) and williams(ps/xbox) f1 racing team is the same ... it just means ya'll can drive the track with us but don't ever expect to win the race ya'll can complain as much as you want but never ever ever ... :)

So there might be chance this comes out on PS4 and XBO then? It would make sense at least from a graphics and obviously sales point of view.

And people thought what happened with Colonial Marines was bad!

For as long as games have been advertised, the makers always use the PC version when showing it off as the graphics are much better

You want to have the full PC experience? Buy a goddamn PC. Do you think you've been smarter, buying a £200 console rather than £500 PC? No, and now you're paying the price.
We upgrade and go.

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Originally Posted by Flurk

NO sympathy ... everybody knows consoles is a cheaper and easyer way to game like pc gamers but in limited specs ...

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Originally Posted by J0s3e

You want to have the full PC experience? Buy a goddamn PC. Do you think you've been smarter, buying a £200 console rather than £500 PC? No, and now you're paying the price.We upgrade and go.

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Erm, guys you might want to reread the article. I think you'll find that what the console gamers are complaining about is that they'd assumed (or Namco had given the impression) that the demo graphics were of a standard that they could expect to see on their consoles. Not that "here's what you can get if you've got an i7 with SLI/Crossfire dual graphics".
Oh, and J0s3e, not keen on the tone of that - sure PC's are a more expensive/better hardware environment for games. But the consoles have got the upper hand in TimeToGame, are better value for money (if your usage case is gaming only and ignoring any perceived value in better graphics) and have a FAR simpler software setup ... plug and go, whereas a PC isn't.
Then again I've got both and my 360 is gathering dust at the moment.

Wouldn't go so far as to say I'd agree, but a friend of mine said (jokingly!) that consoles would be a lot more popular if you could get porn apps on them... like you can on PCs. Made me smile.

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Originally Posted by Ferral

My main gripe is the Human Effigies (Similar to Humanity on the first game), trouble is the drops are extremely rare (more so than the Humanities in the first game so turning back to human is something that you should only do in a situation that needs it. Its a catch 22 situation also, every time you die your life bar gets smaller until it hits 50% and the only way to restore it to full is using a Human Effigy. With the way the game is laid out you do die a lot (especially people that are relatively new to the series) so could end up trying to get through it with little health after all their Effigies are used.

Granted there is a ring you can get outside The Cathedral of Blue which stops the decrease at 75% but you won't visit that area till after you have killed the Last Giant and Pursuer (Pursuer is optional boss)

They need to do something though, the performance has been ok and adding more detail etc will hinder it, they will also need to do something with drop rate on Effigies as you can't farm areas to get them as after killing the same enemies on a level a set amount of times they no longer appear. As an example at The Lost Bastille, just outside McDuffs Blacksmith, there are 5 dogs which can be killed easily, you can farm these to try and get Effigies. So doing a little experiment I killed the five, visited bonfire to reset them. It was either 10 or 12 times before they disappeared, so either 50 - 60 dogs killed in total and there was only 1 Effigy dropped. That's a really low drop rate for something that is REALLY needed and used in the game.

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Having not played Dark Souls that whooshing noise you might be able to hear is your explanation going over my head at Mach 1. I'm slightly tempted to put in a pre-order just so I can perhaps understand that comment above - which definitely sounded good. :)

lol, i think i remember graphics like that when i was playing on my 7900GT and Athlon X2 back in 2005.

Wait...

Now I think about it, isn't the PS3 gpu basically a 7900 with half the memory bandwidth!

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Originally Posted by Flurk

saying it's both the same is just like saying ferrari(pc) and williams(ps/xbox) f1 racing team is the same ... it just means ya'll can drive the track with us but don't ever expect to win the race ya'll can complain as much as you want but never ever ever ... :)

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Would that be the same Williams F1 team which has won 9 constructor and 7 driver's world championships?

Would it not be better if the "screenshots rendered in actual game engine" or whatever it said instead specified what level of graphics were being shown?

I remember A:CM and the fuss over that. Consolers were up in arms over the naff graphics, some I believe even going as far as lawsuits and court cases (albeit badly represented)?
Meanwhile, PC gamers are staring at their monitors, shrugging and going, "Graphics? Yeah. What's the problem".

Perhaps just an overlay stating what spec the machine that's rendering these in-game shots actually contains?

I understand where people are coming from - if they thought the demo graphics were for console (which they may well have done if they had no interest in PC gaming) and then found on release that they weren't it would be very disappointing.

Even so, I always saw PC as the performance platform and console as the social platform. Immersive single player/online graphics for PC and a much better multi-player experience for consoles, in which case the game becomes kind of secondary anyway. Course, that's just me, and it seems now most people would rather game online with their consoles anyway. *sigh*

If your told that's how the game is going to look on whatever platform, you would expect it to look like that.

From the article this was how they expected it to be on consoles, and its quite a difference to the release. Agree that it should show 'PC gameplay' or similar like how TV ad's have to show 'Not in-game footage' when a game trailer is showing cutscene's etc.

Flurk, thats a bad analogy, this is more like being sold a Ferrari from a brochure which when you bought it turned out to be an old Polo with a ferrari badge. You can still drive it, but it doesn't look the same.

most games are designed on a beast of a machine with all the gloss turned on. they then downgrade it to fit the confines of the target system, less memory, compressed textures, etc. much easier than expanding the assets/features.