Gaiff
SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
This thread isn't about their design philosophy or the fact that they've shut down Japan Studios, it's about the polish of their products. Sony has built a brand known for quality and this has continued in the PC space. They've only been porting their games for 2 years and are utterly embarrassing most developers on the platform despite the no-doubt great challenges porting games from PS4/PS5 to PC pose.
2020: Horizon: Zero Dawn, the launch was extremely rough and handled by a third party studios. Users reported myriads of issues but Sony was on the ball and the dev team was very communicative and transparent. Most major issues were fixed within days and we had updates, posts from the developers for when to expect patches and issues being worked on. Hell, Sony even went ahead and put some of the team members of Guerilla Game on the project to assist. They also added DLSS/FSR and now the game runs beautifully and scales very well.
2021: Days Gone. This was no doubt their best port yet. UE4 with not a single stutter? A myriad of graphics options with clear explanations and visual feedback to see immediately what they change? Fantastic scalability, smooth as butter, and runs on a wide variety of hardware configs without a hitch? If every release was like that, PC would be without a doubt the best platform to play but sadly, this kind of quality is rare these days.
2022: Marvel's Spider Man, great on day 1 except for the fact that the CPU demands are very high. It also caped VRAM at 80% usage for some reason and apparently, this cap was removed thanks perhaps in part to
yamaci17
who pointed out the issue. Through the whole way, Nixxes was transparent and communicative. They issued patches quickly with details explanation and were hard at work for weeks trying to get this game in its best possible state.
2022: God of War. Not quite as good as Days Gone as it had some minor issues and it's a bit more demanding than you would expect but it nonetheless still runs great and was largely very good on day 1. Also nice to have settings that put it above console specs with the right hardware and DLSS/FSR.
2022: Sackboy, A Big Adventure. Launched with the dreaded shader compliations stutters but was fixed quickly. DLSS, fantastic ray tracing, very scalable with high-end hardware and plays and looks fantastic. It was a bit of a stumble but the ship was righted fast.
2022: Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection, this one came out of the gate extremely polished and with no obvious issues. The only "problem" is that like Spider-Man, the specs required to run it at PS5 settings are surprisingly high, asking something in the range of a 3070/2080 Ti to run at it at equivalent settings/fps.
2022: Miles Morales. It built upon the foundation of the base game. The launch was almost perfect and they even added RT shadows. In my experience, it's also less demanding than the original game, perhaps due to the fact that it's set in winter and that the foliage is barren, saving on performance. Still very heavy on the CPU but if you have the right hardware (and even not so good hardware) it plays and looks fantastic.
2023: Returnal, ran beautifully for me on day 1 but I have a 13900K/4090 so my experience is hardly representative of the player base. That said, according to the benchmarks, the requirements on the hardware are very light, being able to outpace the PS5 settings/performance with a 2070. I do think that Housemarque was way too conservative with the resolution on console. They could have targeted 1440p with DRS and still maintain 60fps from what I've seen but went with 1080p. The game comes with a myriad of options that make it look significantly better than on consoles. Chief among them is ray tracing which can look fantastic but admittedly isn't perfect. I've heard of perhaps traversal stutters but didn't experience them myself. DF did report that transitioning between specific points causes a slight hitch but this happens on PS5 too so not much could have been done here apparently. Still, a pretty high quality port with some minor issues that are easy to ignore.
The next big one is The Last of Us Part 1. I'm expecting a situation similar to Uncharted. The game will look and run great but you'll need one hell of a rig to match PS5 settings/performance.
With how dreadful AAA PC ports have been lately, I applaud Sony for how efficient and fast they are. I also think their approach of communicating with their players should be replicated by more developers. Are they perfect on day 1? No, far from it but they put their money where their mouth is and are committed to delivering the best player experience they can and pour the necessary resources into that goal. It doesn't matter that we're not playing on their consoles, playing Sony games on PC certainly doesn't feel like we're being treated as second-class citizens. They often add things that their consoles don't even have and the extra performance/visuals/smoothness sometimes make it worth it to double-dip (GOW and Returnal for instance). Anyway, I'll stop rambling but yeah, Sony cares about quality and they should be commended for that, especially in an industry where many devs just release turds on PC and never bother fixing them (Koei Tecmo, looking at you!)
2020: Horizon: Zero Dawn, the launch was extremely rough and handled by a third party studios. Users reported myriads of issues but Sony was on the ball and the dev team was very communicative and transparent. Most major issues were fixed within days and we had updates, posts from the developers for when to expect patches and issues being worked on. Hell, Sony even went ahead and put some of the team members of Guerilla Game on the project to assist. They also added DLSS/FSR and now the game runs beautifully and scales very well.
2021: Days Gone. This was no doubt their best port yet. UE4 with not a single stutter? A myriad of graphics options with clear explanations and visual feedback to see immediately what they change? Fantastic scalability, smooth as butter, and runs on a wide variety of hardware configs without a hitch? If every release was like that, PC would be without a doubt the best platform to play but sadly, this kind of quality is rare these days.
2022: Marvel's Spider Man, great on day 1 except for the fact that the CPU demands are very high. It also caped VRAM at 80% usage for some reason and apparently, this cap was removed thanks perhaps in part to
yamaci17
who pointed out the issue. Through the whole way, Nixxes was transparent and communicative. They issued patches quickly with details explanation and were hard at work for weeks trying to get this game in its best possible state.2022: God of War. Not quite as good as Days Gone as it had some minor issues and it's a bit more demanding than you would expect but it nonetheless still runs great and was largely very good on day 1. Also nice to have settings that put it above console specs with the right hardware and DLSS/FSR.
2022: Sackboy, A Big Adventure. Launched with the dreaded shader compliations stutters but was fixed quickly. DLSS, fantastic ray tracing, very scalable with high-end hardware and plays and looks fantastic. It was a bit of a stumble but the ship was righted fast.
2022: Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection, this one came out of the gate extremely polished and with no obvious issues. The only "problem" is that like Spider-Man, the specs required to run it at PS5 settings are surprisingly high, asking something in the range of a 3070/2080 Ti to run at it at equivalent settings/fps.
2022: Miles Morales. It built upon the foundation of the base game. The launch was almost perfect and they even added RT shadows. In my experience, it's also less demanding than the original game, perhaps due to the fact that it's set in winter and that the foliage is barren, saving on performance. Still very heavy on the CPU but if you have the right hardware (and even not so good hardware) it plays and looks fantastic.
2023: Returnal, ran beautifully for me on day 1 but I have a 13900K/4090 so my experience is hardly representative of the player base. That said, according to the benchmarks, the requirements on the hardware are very light, being able to outpace the PS5 settings/performance with a 2070. I do think that Housemarque was way too conservative with the resolution on console. They could have targeted 1440p with DRS and still maintain 60fps from what I've seen but went with 1080p. The game comes with a myriad of options that make it look significantly better than on consoles. Chief among them is ray tracing which can look fantastic but admittedly isn't perfect. I've heard of perhaps traversal stutters but didn't experience them myself. DF did report that transitioning between specific points causes a slight hitch but this happens on PS5 too so not much could have been done here apparently. Still, a pretty high quality port with some minor issues that are easy to ignore.
The next big one is The Last of Us Part 1. I'm expecting a situation similar to Uncharted. The game will look and run great but you'll need one hell of a rig to match PS5 settings/performance.
With how dreadful AAA PC ports have been lately, I applaud Sony for how efficient and fast they are. I also think their approach of communicating with their players should be replicated by more developers. Are they perfect on day 1? No, far from it but they put their money where their mouth is and are committed to delivering the best player experience they can and pour the necessary resources into that goal. It doesn't matter that we're not playing on their consoles, playing Sony games on PC certainly doesn't feel like we're being treated as second-class citizens. They often add things that their consoles don't even have and the extra performance/visuals/smoothness sometimes make it worth it to double-dip (GOW and Returnal for instance). Anyway, I'll stop rambling but yeah, Sony cares about quality and they should be commended for that, especially in an industry where many devs just release turds on PC and never bother fixing them (Koei Tecmo, looking at you!)
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