From Software responds to Dark Souls II graphics downgrade concerns

the game can look really good sometimes and really poor in others = laziness imo

It could have all looked good.

I have to call bullshit on that, because they were going for balance in graphical quality!
So they lowered those parts we saw, to make them stand out less!
 
I played DS1 on my PS3 for the entire week leading up to release of DS2. Still think DS1 looks better.

That's crazy talk.

Currently going through a 2nd. Dark Souls run only for comparisons sake and Dark Souls 1 destroys 2 in art direction.

Art direction wise in a lot of areas of course. Dark Souls 2 still has some pretty damn amazing art direction as well. The opening areas of DS II (Things Betwixt and Majula) 'destroy' the Asylum and Firelink Shrine in my opinion. If I'm speaking about purely graphics, which I was, than it's no contest. Plus I can actually play DS II at a decent framerate on the 360 version, that helps a lot in the looks department.
 
Game developers do need to be called out for this type crap. by the time a game is shown to the public to build hype and then be a very real visual downgrade is treating gamers with no respect.

The lack of respect for developers around GAF (and the internet gaming community as a whole) as of late is sickening, IMO.

Dark Souls had several rough/unfinished areas too. Demon's Souls had far less physical landscape in general. It's certainly a combination of lack of resources and time, but calling people who put in thousands and thousands of hours to make a product for others to enjoy "lazy" is repulsive. Especially games that are ultimately this fucking great.

I agree with both of these points. There is a middle ground somewhere where you simply ask for an explanation without attacking people and making up conspiracy theories.


I have to call bullshit on that, because they were going for balance in graphical quality!
So they lowered those parts we saw, to make them stand out less!
From what I've gathered the parts that ended up looking worse where mostly the ones that were supposed to be bathed in better lighting. Looks like they didn't have the time to tweak those areas when they realized the lighting was too much for the console versions.
 
Game developers do need to be called out for this type crap. by the time a game is shown to the public to build hype and then be a very real visual downgrade is treating gamers with no respect.

This is more of a publisher and marketing problem, than a developer problem.

They didn't downgrade the game for fun or lazyness, but they did continue using the bullshit promotional material to net more sales from misinformed people.
 
It was worst from what I heard. Some parts were like slideshows.
No-Mans Wharf on PS3 has some serious surpassing Blighttown potential.
Absolute horseshit.

"The final version of Dark Souls II displays the culmination of this delicate balance and we’re very proud of the positive media and fan reception for the game.”

So they're happy with a product that has bugs and problems like:
  • Objects and enemies materializing out of thin air.
  • Flickering shadows and light sources.
  • Out of sync sound effects.
  • Mob animations either freezing entirely or moving at lower FPS (like 5 FPS low).
  • Input lag both in the menus' and HUD screens.
  • Input lag during gameplay (character not reacting at all).
  • Player being "smelted into the wall" during a Boss fight.
  • Painful loading times (18 seconds on average for me: quickest was 14s. longest took 42s.)
  • Very inconsistent framerate (going from the higher 10s up to 60fps when nothing is happening on screen)
  • Holes in geometry.
  • Enemies not reacting to the proximity of the player.
What the hell...
Only the bolded happened for me. The rest, nope. I really wonder what's wrong with your disc/PS3.... o_O
The most egregious were the delay in showing the menu after you hit start, and the loading times. The sound effects de-synch happened to me as well but really rarely, and only in some specific parts.

I'm not saying your experience isn't true or valid, but it's definitely anecdotal. I have played most of the game (not beaten yet but close) on PS3 and my experience vastly differs from yours.


At best, indifference. At worst, disappointment.
If only. That would be reasonable enough. Now it's "at worst, vitriolic hyperbolic rage and talk of lawsuits".

Except that we've seen *tons* of console screenshots that showed the game indeed didn't look great.

Pretty much every Dark Souls 2 screenshot thread was filled with 'this is ugly' comments and rightfully so.
Indeed. So I really gotta wonder at people raging at the false advertisement; where were those people in those screenshots threads? Were they saying "nuh uh this game looks good, can't wait"? So confusing. First the game looks like shit. Then it's released, and the retail version often looks better than some of those screenshots, but some other places look worse and it's suddenly OMG LIES? I don't get it.

The biggest issue with this game is that they renamed Sticky White Stuff.

This is absolutely disgraceful, and now I have to decide if I want to cancel my pre-order or not.
Hahahaha :)

uhh there's people already saying framerate's consistently shit

game on consoles is basically ugly blightown
just relaying what i've read yo

should've added an "apparently" to my second sentence doe
You might want to just not repeat disinformation next time? Calling the game "an ugly Blighttown" is a complete lie. The framerate has been 95% stable for me. I noticed some rare dips every now and then, and nothing ever as bad as Blighttown.

Can't agree with that. There are areas in DS2 that look way worse than anything in previous Souls games, even 5-2 etc. I'm seriously wondering whether interns designed the Shaded Woods/Ruins or Tseldora. Some of that poor texture work is unbelievable. It's as if these areas were left in the "rough 3D sketch" phase and they forgot to do the detail passes on them.

The inconsistency of DS2's art design is staggering.
I wouldn't go that far. I agree Shaded Woods looks crappy, I couldn't help but notice the bland texture. I thought Tseldora was cool looking for the most part though. I thought Harvest Valley looked far worse than Tseldora, to be honest. But other than these two places, I think the game looks fine, not enough to say "staggeringly inconsistent".

Yeah no. Completely untrue. Please stop making these false claims, guys. They are not really helping the actual cause here.
Indeed.

It depends. Yes, the graphics aren't a focal point, but yes the brooding atmosphere and environs directly leads to the pleasure many people get from it. They were planning to enhance that feeling with their new visual flairs, which they advertised literally only a few weeks before the game came out, including many visual elements which fundamentally impacted gameplay. One boss is basically entirely fucking lame shit now without the new lighting system.
What? Which boss is that? Spoiler-tag if necessary.

The lack of respect for developers around GAF (and the internet gaming community as a whole) as of late is sickening, IMO.

Dark Souls had several rough/unfinished areas too. Demon's Souls had far less physical landscape in general. It's certainly a combination of lack of resources and time, but calling people who put in thousands and thousands of hours to make a product for others to enjoy "lazy" is repulsive. Especially games that are ultimately this fucking great.
Agreed 100%. Calling Dark Souls 2 a "lazy" product is infuriating. So much amazing content in this game, both artistic and gameplay-wise. Man.
 
So people are attacking the devs now?

C'mon, it's the consoles that aren't powerful enough, would any of you think that it would be better to have a good looking game at a shitty framerate? Not me, hopefully DS2 will come out on the new twins, too.

EDIT: Oh, and I hope the PC version will hold up against these old trailers.
 
No-Mans Wharf on PS3 has some serious surpassing Blighttown potential.

Definitely wasn't that way for me at all. At all. Was smooth just as any other area I was in. Even the Gutter, which kind of reminded me of blight town, wasn't like this.

I seriously think it's from a system to system basis or something. Everyone seems to be having different problems.
 
I understand the arguments against From, I'm sure it sucked just as much for them to not be able to hit their original aims.
But some of you weekend warriors are acting like right fucking cunts. Jesus, does perspective even exist in your world or is some elaborate Internet joke I'm not in on?
 
Thats the TGS demo exactly

Not the full retail review copy all the other major outlets got.

look at the footage

If anything its a commentary video on old footage. Not a full copy of the game

From were still promoting the game as if it was like the old version a week before the release of the game, Just remember these things can only be published by From permission.
 
About as serious as your corporate apologist attitude is, sure.
Nothing about that sentiment has anything to do with being a corporate apologist - it's called having tact and not blindly insulting people over the internet flippantly. The level of discourse in this thread is really disheartening, even if there is a legitimate issue here it's long been buried by nastiness and baseless speculation.
 
The TGS demo was being played September 19th, less than a month later was the Japanese PS3 network test. The network test had the downgraded lighting, but still had the deep black levels. So we know the downgrading of the lighting effect preceded the downplaying of the darkness in the game. Not to mention, of the thousands of people who played the network test or watched footage of it, no one seemed to notice the difference in the torch/bonfire lighting effect. The idea of a bait and switch seems silly in light of the fact people were seeing what was basically the retail version ~5 months before release.
 
Comeuppance for years of not respecting consumers.

About as serious as your corporate apologist attitude is, sure.

And this is why no one takes what you have to say seriously.

I think you mean publishers, and the executives behind all of this. The developers themselves are not to blame. The execs who approve of marketing and the people publishing the game are to blame.

As a developer, I think we all know that we would love nothing more than to be super open with the public about what is going on. We'd love nothing more than to have people sit down and listen to the reasons we had to do things. Unfortunately, developers don't get to do that, they aren't allowed to do that, lest they get some sort of retribution from the people who sign their paychecks. It's bad business sometimes to be so open, and so therefore the business people up above dont allow the devs to be open.
 
Dude, just stop. You're making people with legitimate concerns loom worse by association.

Sorry I don't find nit-picking at a piece of terminology when he's been weakly defending this practice since it first hit the road to be a legitimate thing to respond to.

The downgradathon has been seen several times by multiple different companies in a very short timespan. After all of the shit people have put up with over the previous gen, some of us are a little tired of it. FROM and Namco are both at blame here and their joint "statement" makes that ever more clear. They may be one of the good guys but this is not, in any way, a good guy move.
 
I dont think the malice is justified still

There is clearly some media and marketing confusion between the two disparate versions of the game

We wont get true closure and answers until the PC version hits either way but my predicr after seeing everything is that the TGS build is the PC equivalent

The April reveal is a nice proof of concept as intended

And lastly the compromising console version wasn't truly revealed until the network test.

All that said this is the optimistic approach and

Yes From/Bamco should have been much more clear about version disparities during the development and marketing of the game.

This all folows the happy assumption that the PC version will be awesome :p
 
What the hell kind of response is this? I really don't get PR nonsense half the time... Like, do they realize how ridiculous they sound AS they're saying it or shortly after? Damn.
 
End result of this for me: I will be wary of From's trailers and prerelease material in the future. (I do this already for pretty much every game company)

Gonna go back to playing this game now. Curious to know how many people in this thread have spent more time in the thread than playing the game.
 
I think you mean publishers, and the executives behind all of this. The developers themselves are not to blame. The execs who approve of marketing and the people publishing the game are to blame.

As a developer, I think we all know that we would love nothing more than to be super open with the public about what is going on. We'd love nothing more than to have people sit down and listen to the reasons we had to do things. Unfortunately, developers don't get to do that, they aren't allowed to do that, lest they get some sort of retribution from the people who sign their paychecks. It's bad business sometimes to be so open, and so therefore the business people up above dont allow the devs to be open.

A much more elegant man than I. I will defer to your post and take my leave here, as to not mud the waters any further.

All anybody is asking you to do is not blame individual employees. Its like beating up a random chic-fil-a cashier over gay rights. It crosses the line past bad taste.

I hate doing this up-posting shit but you posted mere seconds afterwords so

I won't point a finger of blame at one employee over another nor am I going to start a pitchfork mob on QA dude #11's house. I do ask that a development house as a whole, however, do their best to keep their final product as it was shown off and talked about extensively in the reveal interviews. I do not feel like this was "their best" and there are all manner of reasons why this could be. I may never know exactly why beyond speculation from players.
 
I really really want the pc version to look as good as possible but something tells me that it will be just like the console versions in 1080p/60fps and it makes me sad.
A storm is coming...
:(
 
That's crazy talk.



Art direction wise in a lot of areas of course. Dark Souls 2 still has some pretty damn amazing art direction as well. The opening areas of DS II (Things Betwixt and Majula) 'destroy' the Asylum and Firelink Shrine in my opinion. If I'm speaking about purely graphics, which I was, than it's no contest. Plus I can actually play DS II at a decent framerate on the 360 version, that helps a lot in the looks department.

Yes, I agree that the visual fidelity of several areas in Dark Souls 2 are leaps ahead of those in the first game (console version), no way to counter that. We can always agree to disagree when it comes to personal taste, however. For me, the transition from Things Betwixt to Majula was the first sign of what would later become a very schizophrenic game without any sense of cohesion or direction.

The level of detail and craftsmanship put into the Undead Asylum is leaps ahead of that of Things Betwixt. They way From elegantly compensated all the repeated textures in Dark Souls 1 by adding stochastic geometry here and there speaks of an attention to detail that's missing in most locations of DS2.

Even Lost Izalith with all of its technical problems was a surreal and imaginative location and that's something I feel is (edit) mostly missing in the sequel.
 
What the hell kind of response is this? I really don't get PR nonsense half the time... Like, do they realize how ridiculous they sound AS they're saying it or shortly after? Damn.

They just don't care it seems.

We got the biggest downgrade in gaming since Aliens: Colonial Marines and From decided to not even say it's done for performance reasons but kept on bullshitting people because it seems like VG sites went soft on them (and some even defending them) and so From knew they can get with it.

The funniest thing in their response this is they mentioned resources when they hired Blur Studio (people say they are expensive as hell) to make a big VGA CGI trailer for them.
 
Just so I am clear, people are mad that FROM promoted graphics and things that were not in the final version.... That makes sense, your media for marketing and promotion should be accurate to the final version of the game.

That is what people are mad about right? How can people try to defend that?
 
Just so I am clear, people are mad that FROM promoted graphics and things that were not in the final version.... That makes sense, your media for marketing and promotion should be accurate to the final version of the game.

That is what people are mad about right? How can people try to defend that?

Yes. False marketing. that why people are upset.

? How can people try to defend that?

by calling other people crazy.

lchEExf.jpg
 
The whole game? Every zone?

My favorite location in Dark Souls 2 was the
Dragons Shrine.
Even with the downgrade, the place is beautiful. Other favorite locations:
Iron Keep
,
Majula (exteriors)
and
Cathedral of Blue
. Still, there's an abundant lack of cohesion from beginning to end and it has nothing to do with warping from one place to another. They lazily connected the areas with very generic hallways, tunnels and corridors.
 
I understand the arguments against From, I'm sure it sucked just as much for them to not be able to hit their original aims.
But some of you weekend warriors are acting like right fucking cunts. Jesus, does perspective even exist in your world or is some elaborate Internet joke I'm not in on?

Hey now young man, remember where we are before speaking, "This is a neutral ground where facts and evidence, presented within the confines of civil, inclusive discourse, prevail through careful moderation."

I've only been on GAF for a little over a year now, but I've finally manage to find the bad parts bumped up to the front page that everyone whispers about.
 
I don't appreciate Namco's response. It sidesteps the issue completely, whether that is on purpose or not.

It seems like the real issue is, Bamco put blatantly misleading screens on the box. Which is a problem.

I don't see how people keep missing what the point of all this is, someone explains it almost every 4 posts.
 
not sure i understand all the flack FROM is getting for this.

maybe my eyes are broken, but DS2 is a beautiful game for the 360/PS3 generation...
 
Gonna go back to playing this game now. Curious to know how many people in this thread have spent more time in the thread than playing the game.

oh you know a lot of people here can actually read GAF and do lots of other things at the same time. They work, they play, they eat, etc...

example:
three hours ago:
I need to take off to go study.
and one hour ago:
I want to just start fresh and work my way up through the achievements.

there's nothing wrong with multitasking :p
 
you said it yourself: you don't understand.

You're right (kind of) though: graphics were never a selling point for Dark souls.
...Until the Dark Souls 2 reveal trailer where FROM started saying they would really focus on graphics for DkSII. This is the reason why people expected great graphics for DSII, because FROM promised them, FROM hyped the graphical improvements there would be in DSII as soon as they revealed it.
And then they led people to believe that the footage they were watching (again, supposed to be running on ps3) would be the game they would buy. Only now do we find out it clearly is not the same thing.

That doesn't justify the assumption that what you saw wasn't the PC version, or that reveal tailer was running on PS4/One. What I definitely don't understand is why that assumption is supposed to be excusable.
 
End result of this for me: I will be wary of From's trailers and prerelease material in the future. (I do this already for pretty much every game company)

Gonna go back to playing this game now. Curious to know how many people in this thread have spent more time in the thread than playing the game.

Well i'm actually not gonna buy the game (at full price) if the downgrade is that drastic on PC too, so that's an easy guess.
 
That doesn't justify the assumption that what you saw wasn't the PC version, or that reveal tailer was running on PS4/One. What I definitely don't understand is why that assumption is supposed to be excusable.

what and... what ?!

The asumption that the gameplay footage we saw was not the PC version ?
The asumption now is that it was the pc version. Everyone is hoping that it is the pc version. When i say "everyone" it's just pc gamers. Console gamers got what we got (I still haven't got it).

I never heard of the asumption that the reveal trailer was running on ps4/One. It was a CG trailer so I don't see how it would matter because no one expects CG qualitygameplay on a ps3 but really I haven't read any post saying that it was running on ps4/One.
I don't think they'll port DkSII to next gen platforms at all.

I don't understand the end of your post. Actually I'm not sure I understood the rest of it either.
 
oh you know a lot of people here can actually read GAF and do lots of other things at the same time. They work, they play, they eat, etc...

example:
three hours ago:

and one hour ago:


there's nothing wrong with multitasking :p

lol!

I keep doing some problems, then checking back on this thread ;)
 
This. And I honestly don't think it looks worse than the first Dark Souls on consoles. I think people are just recalling it and not actually going back to look at it. I put the game in to check and I really don't think the first Dark Souls looks better or much better than this one. This particular developer couldn't pull something like this off on the consoles. And it's not N64 graphics like ppl are saying for whatever reason. Telling people not to buy the game is like saying "We rather prove a point than have another Dark Souls game" to me. I rather show them that these games are what we want. I'm sure this is their last time making one on last-gen, so the next game should look pretty awesome.

Yeah. The game has way better IQ than Dark Souls 1 on consoles as well (it's not sub hd anymore) and runs better (at least on 360). IMO it looks a lot better, I really can't agree with people that say it looks worse than ds1.
 
It looks even better with dsfix and hd graphics/ui mod.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, I've only played it with DSFix at 60fps, didn't even try it without it. But other than DSFix, the only mods I use are for high res text and PS3 buttons.
 
I guess that's a fair response. It's vague but It confirms they couldn't get the thing to run any better then that.

I will be very upset if the PC version has nothing new to offer however. If they are going the parity route then what the hell is the point of this month and a half long delay?
 
Kinda funny that people are still going on about this, as if they can do a fucking thing about the console versions. Have fun holding your breath guys.
 
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