OI WOTS RONG LADDY? DOONT YE LOIKE FOOKIN FAUX COCKNEY AND/OR GLASWEGIAN IN YE JAPANESE FANTASY GAME? OCK!!
It's a pretty substantial graphical downgrade. Not sure where the "slight" comments are comming from. There's reduced geometry, massively reduced foliage density, reduced texture quality, worse lighting, etc
OG PC release:
Definitive Edition PC:
There's a lot of perks though which make the tradeoff worth it:
- Orchestrated music and japanese voice acting
- QoL improvements
- New content
- The whole 2D mode
- 60fps on Ps4 Pro and X1X (Ps5 and SX too, obviously) as well as lower hardware requirements on PC
- Included in Gamepass
But the graphical downgrade is a shame. It has made the game go from looking amazing to just "nice".
Here's hoping that maybe modders will be able to restore at least some of the downgraded stuff on PC
If anyone wants it here are my edits for engine.ini for the DQXI Steam PC demo, it should work with the full release as the saves carry over, worst case you may have to copy it over to the ini's for the full game:
[SystemSettings]
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=6
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.2
r.TemporalAASamples=8
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.8
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1
r.Tonemapper.Quality=5
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-2
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.25
r.ViewDistanceScale=10
r.MotionBlurQuality=4
r.MotionBlur.Amount=0.3
r.MotionBlur.Max=1
r.MotionBlur.Scale=1
r.MotionBlurSeparable=1
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.01
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=16
r.Shadow.TexelsPerPixel=10
foliage.DensityScale=7
grass.DensityScale=7
foliage.LODDistanceScale=15
Add these at the end of the file for better... lots of stuff. If you don't like a sharp image then remove or reduce the value for "r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1", I'd keep "r.TemporalAASharpness=0.8" as is though since the temporal AA does blur the image and that counters it.
"r.ViewDistanceScale=10" is one of the biggest changes you can make, it will add enemies to the field basically as far as you can see which I thought really made it feel a lot better, no more 10m away fading in Bongo Drongos. This setting mostly affects the CPU I've read so avoid if you have a banger. Most people can fire this right up to 10 though if they have a high end CPU I'd reckon. I'm on a 3770K@4.3 and its gravy.
I am sharpening a lot because I'm playing with a 4K native output that being supersampled from 6K internally, you can do this by changing "ScreenPercentage=100.000000" within GameUserSettings.ini to something higher, I don't really understand how it multiplies the axis because I use a value of "125" and that seems to be about 6K going by the size of the steam overlay toast in the bottom right corner. Thats on 4K native remember so if you are on 1080p and horsepower to spare then you can go higher probably. Just don't set it to like 200 if you can't actually play with those settings (due to unplayable fps) because you get a taste of something you can't have. A value of 150 appeared to be 8K and it was simply glorious but I can't maintain even 15 fps at that IQ level.
The motion blur is a personal choice ofc but I'd really recommend it if you are capping to 30. Even if you are running at 60 I think its adds a lovely animated film quality to the animations because they are so fast at points even 60 isn't enough frames to really see whats happening, similar to glory kills in Doom.
The two variables with "mesh" in them will give you back the nice models from the original version, when they are seen at a distance. In the DE it changes to the non-shaded versions of the models when they are a very short distance from the camera. Apart from just dropping the mesh quality for cutscenes in general, I think sometimes its a double whammy of crapness because the camera is much further away from the chars than you think it is (they are decreasing the FoV and zooming in to create a certain visual style). which introduces another drop in model quality on top of the general cutbacks they made.
Here is a link to where you can find the config files depending on platform/store:
TL;DR - These settings will make it look ace beans, use 'em if you have left over GPU usage or don't mind capping to 30. Which is what I've done to get 6K + big tweaks on my GTX 1080. If you want me to explain any of the other settings just ask, I've spent a bit too much time tweaking this game (and most other UE4 games really) to be honest...
Bonus UE4 Temporal AA tweaking advice: Even though a lot of people on t'internet (PCGamingWiki included, but they just aggregate forum posts kind of, so not their fault) will say use 16 samples, don't do that, use 8 or even 4. As it will reduce ghosting massively with only a miniscule loss of stability in areas that are hard to anti-alias even at 8K, so don't lose sleep over them.
They also say to set "r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight" to "0.45" instead of my value of 0.2, which is because it "almost totally gets ride of ghosting at the loss of some temporal stability", well the reaosn you use Temporal AA is to get a super clean, non-vibrating image imo so I went with 0.2 and reduced the sample count to 8 instead. Simply reducing the sample count to 8 from 16 will remove more ghosting than changing the CurrentFrameWeight value and won't lose you stability in the process.
If you are using motion blur these things are even less of an issue because it will make the ghosting only visible when you are rotating the camera at full speed and looking for the black outline trails off of your character, mostly over grass. Ie, its not a problem in any way.
I don't see a difference in the grass and aliasing etc. while using these. Same distance culling to the npcs in the village too but you mention only the monsters there so maybe it doesn't apply to them. Can you tell which is which based on these? Did I get the wrong file or something, it had next to no settings inside it, just some file path structure lines at the top so I just pasted your stuff underneath. I had high hopes for the AA at least but maybe the UE implementation is not as good as I hoped, it seems like for most games it doesn't do as well as say, the Alias Isolation mod.If anyone wants it here are my edits for engine.ini for the DQXI Steam PC demo, it should work with the full release as the saves carry over, worst case you may have to copy it over to the ini's for the full game:
[SystemSettings]
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=6
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.2
r.TemporalAASamples=8
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.8
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1
r.Tonemapper.Quality=5
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-2
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.25
r.ViewDistanceScale=10
r.MotionBlurQuality=4
r.MotionBlur.Amount=0.3
r.MotionBlur.Max=1
r.MotionBlur.Scale=1
r.MotionBlurSeparable=1
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.01
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=16
r.Shadow.TexelsPerPixel=10
foliage.DensityScale=7
grass.DensityScale=7
foliage.LODDistanceScale=15
Add these at the end of the file for better... lots of stuff. If you don't like a sharp image then remove or reduce the value for "r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1", I'd keep "r.TemporalAASharpness=0.8" as is though since the temporal AA does blur the image and that counters it.
"r.ViewDistanceScale=10" is one of the biggest changes you can make, it will add enemies to the field basically as far as you can see which I thought really made it feel a lot better, no more 10m away fading in Bongo Drongos. This setting mostly affects the CPU I've read so avoid if you have a banger. Most people can fire this right up to 10 though if they have a high end CPU I'd reckon. I'm on a 3770K@4.3 and its gravy.
I am sharpening a lot because I'm playing with a 4K native output that being supersampled from 6K internally, you can do this by changing "ScreenPercentage=100.000000" within GameUserSettings.ini to something higher, I don't really understand how it multiplies the axis because I use a value of "125" and that seems to be about 6K going by the size of the steam overlay toast in the bottom right corner. Thats on 4K native remember so if you are on 1080p and horsepower to spare then you can go higher probably. Just don't set it to like 200 if you can't actually play with those settings (due to unplayable fps) because you get a taste of something you can't have. A value of 150 appeared to be 8K and it was simply glorious but I can't maintain even 15 fps at that IQ level.
The motion blur is a personal choice ofc but I'd really recommend it if you are capping to 30. Even if you are running at 60 I think its adds a lovely animated film quality to the animations because they are so fast at points even 60 isn't enough frames to really see whats happening, similar to glory kills in Doom.
The two variables with "mesh" in them will give you back the nice models from the original version, when they are seen at a distance. In the DE it changes to the non-shaded versions of the models when they are a very short distance from the camera. Apart from just dropping the mesh quality for cutscenes in general, I think sometimes its a double whammy of crapness because the camera is much further away from the chars than you think it is (they are decreasing the FoV and zooming in to create a certain visual style). which introduces another drop in model quality on top of the general cutbacks they made.
Here is a link to where you can find the config files depending on platform/store:
TL;DR - These settings will make it look ace beans, use 'em if you have left over GPU usage or don't mind capping to 30. Which is what I've done to get 6K + big tweaks on my GTX 1080. If you want me to explain any of the other settings just ask, I've spent a bit too much time tweaking this game (and most other UE4 games really) to be honest...
Bonus UE4 Temporal AA tweaking advice: Even though a lot of people on t'internet (PCGamingWiki included, but they just aggregate forum posts kind of, so not their fault) will say use 16 samples, don't do that, use 8 or even 4. As it will reduce ghosting massively with only a miniscule loss of stability in areas that are hard to anti-alias even at 8K, so don't lose sleep over them.
They also say to set "r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight" to "0.45" instead of my value of 0.2, which is because it "almost totally gets ride of ghosting at the loss of some temporal stability", well the reaosn you use Temporal AA is to get a super clean, non-vibrating image imo so I went with 0.2 and reduced the sample count to 8 instead. Simply reducing the sample count to 8 from 16 will remove more ghosting than changing the CurrentFrameWeight value and won't lose you stability in the process.
If you are using motion blur these things are even less of an issue because it will make the ghosting only visible when you are rotating the camera at full speed and looking for the black outline trails off of your character, mostly over grass. Ie, its not a problem in any way.
I'm not really seeing a difference in the grass and aliasing and stuff while using these. Also same distance culling to the npcs in the village but you mention only the monsters increasing so maybe it doesn't apply to them anyway. Can you tell which is which based on these?
Does the mesh lod thing also work for environment stuff? Like say, the sign just outside the first church (pretty much the only thing I noticed loding, alongside a distant tree at the beginning of the game)?
Couldn't get it working, no, tried with different AA settings in game. I don't think any of the settings worked for me. Maybe cos I had a game started already it's fudged up the settings internally (though I tried with starting a new save to test just so I could redo the beginning of the game to take screens and compare), or it's Windows 10 doing something weird causing the game to put the files it actually uses in a different path instead of my documents/whatever and those do nothing in my case, or whatever. Ah well...
I’m at 190 hours in the PS4 version... just started the post end-game.
that’s a lot of hours
Yes the downgrade in graphics are pretty clear.
That is what the game save is saying... I will check again tomorrow.
Because you can’t buy the original one. There are clear advantages to the original release that probably only PC users can fix.
Granted it may not seem big to some but the bigger problem is that you‘re locked into what they deem best for you to buy. What if the new version of a different game literally is worse in every way or full of bugs and you can’t even buy the original release.
There are also some preference for having the original version of the game code without any updates as some bugs or glitches can only be done pre patches on a physical version. Examples like the gold bar duplication glitch that was patched out in RDR2. Digital users are locked out while I can simply play the disc version without patching it and benefit from the glitch. It may seem cheap for some but at the end of the day, it’s the fact that I have a choice is the biggest benefit.
This is the port of the Switch version lol.
I get that and I love those changes. I have my copy of the game already.
Yep. In my opinion everything about them porting the Switch version is a separate issue entirely. The new product doesn't mean that the old one should no longer be available. Even if they take the price up to $60 to avoid having a lower price version of the game available, that would be fine so long as the original remains available. At the end of the day of the day it is about preservation. For example, Persona 5 Royal doesn't mean that Persona 5 should be removed from the store.
Fast battle mode, skipping cutscenes, lots of other QoL features. This new version could slash off around half of your playtime with the same accomplishment.
[SystemSettings]
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=1
r.Tonemapper.Quality=5
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-2
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.25
r.ViewDistanceScale=10
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=8192
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.01
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=16
r.Shadow.TexelsPerPixel=10
foliage.DensityScale=7
grass.DensityScale=7
foliage.LODDistanceScale=15
[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=2
r.PostProcessAAQuality=6
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.2
r.TemporalAASamples=8
r.TemporalAASharpness=0.8
"at least as good"
Would it be any different than discontinuing the physical version? i guess you could find the game on the used market, but the game does exist in physical format and people that bought first still have that version, no?Because you can’t buy the original one. There are clear advantages to the original release that probably only PC users can fix.
Granted it may not seem big to some but the bigger problem is that you‘re locked into what they deem best for you to buy. What if the new version of a different game literally is worse in every way or full of bugs and you can’t even buy the original release.
There are also some preference for having the original version of the game code without any updates as some bugs or glitches can only be done pre patches on a physical version. Examples like the gold bar duplication glitch that was patched out in RDR2. Digital users are locked out while I can simply play the disc version without patching it and benefit from the glitch. It may seem cheap for some but at the end of the day, it’s the fact that I have a choice is the biggest benefit.