The Last Of Us 2 Downgrades [TLOU2]

fehu said:
It helped to sell more consoles and more of the first chapter, it doesn't damage the franchise or the sony's image.
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Tkumpathenurpahl said:
The tale grows in the telling.

There needs to be aesthetic consistency across the entire game and if a scene or level - which may have been added relatively late in development - chokes the engine, it makes sense to tone down the causes.
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I acknowledge both as reasonable explanations, even though none of them convinces me much... because it may seem that in ND they don't know what they're doing, so to speak. I don't think a bit more fog and a couple of shadows can dramatically help on the sales of consoles and previous games, either.

It's just... meh... :???:
 
eloyc said:
The question is: why?

Not only developers have known for ages that we gamers notice these kinds of differences (we remember trailers and preview demos, we can even keep videos of it to compare later, downgrades are criticised aggressively...), but also ND has developed a few games before this one, so they perfectly know the machine and what they can and cannot do. So, why?

BTW, is the PRO version still lacking those shadows, animations, etc.?
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Because most gamers arent really enthusiast. They know the early PR will generate a ton of anticipation for the game, and that most gamers wont be going back to watch a two year old video comparing it to the final product. Even if they do, how many people will choose not to purchase the game because it fell short of the initial trailer? Im not saying I like it when publishers do this, but its been common practice for so long that it doesn't even get a reaction from me anymore. It is more annoying when publishers will use screenshots for X1/PS4 version of the game for its eshop page for Switch.

As far as the Last of Us 2 goes, its still competing for the best looking game on the market right now. Naughty Dog does incredible work.
 
iroboto said:
i think the animations look great. Falls short of what was shown in 2018, but I still think likely will be best of class for in-game for this generation.

Lighting and shadows took a huge hit from 2018. I was convinced it was going to be the graphical win of the generation, but it's so clear when dynamic and static objects are lit differently in this final build.

Image clarity hurts it as well, but the main issue I have with the build is the lighting changes.

Overall very good imo still definitely among the top performers in graphics. But not as good as the hyperbolic praise as it gets from some fans that can't perform a neutral evaluation.
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The downgrade, all the hype, didn't do the final graphics any justice. Showing much better graphics two years earlier, then release it in downgraded form, along with all the fans hype has that effect. I'm sure the next generation HB2, HZD showcase and UE5 didn't help it either.
Death Stranding still takes the cake on PS4 atleast, overall it's a masterpiece in graphics. Too bad the gameplay isn't for everyone.

fehu said:
It helped to sell more consoles and more of the first chapter, it doesn't damage the franchise or the sony's image.
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Sounds like a good tactic!
 
Death stranding has awesome cutscenes and character models, but it's barren land, pretty static, and forest zone looks poop in comparison to TLOU2
oh and animation sucks
 
iroboto said:
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Game looks naf compared to TLOU2. Lots of shadows missing too if you have a good look. I know there are shadows missing in the TLOU2 but just keeping you honest.

ultragpu said:
Maybe the base PS4 is holding the Pro back after all? You had the demo running on a Pro without any problems in 2018 so at some point ND must found out PS4 base was having trouble running that king of lighting, animation and shading so they dialed back all those to keep everything the same except the resolution. Then with the extra power been made after the downgrade they instead slightly increased the foliage, wet effect etc which are not as power hogging as lighting, shading perhaps?
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That and the likely effect of the frames dropping below 30fps would be my guess. As it is at this moment the Pro drops below 30fps when water is around. I would say they changed lighting, shadows and maybe a few others to keep the 30fps on the base and did the same on the pro to keep both games looking the same.

TLOU2 was never going to have accurate shadows and reflections as it doesn't have RT. I doubt any game of this current generation will have accurate shadows or reflections etc.

TLOU2 though is still really great looking game.
 
Unknown Soldier said:
Game looks naf compared to TLOU2. Lots of shadows missing too if you have a good look. I know there are shadows missing in the TLOU2 but just keeping you honest.
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I'm not talking about graphics, just how they pulled off the animation system.

How TLOU2 smoothly goes into an execution sequence on the last hit. Reminds me of the combat in Ryse, except you had to hit a button to cause the execution sequence.
 
Also something for people to remember, from all the games shown, it looks like the PS5 will still likely have issues rendering accurate shadows and reflections. We saw in 'Rachet and Clank' that not all reflections were there.

However if the engines like the Naughty Dog engine and Decima Engine(H2FW) can get more tweaks to allow better RT performance, games should be amazing. Horizon 2 Forbidden West already looks amazing as it is but I am sure anyone can find faults in it's current build. I would like to see Naughty Dog release a patch update for TLOU2 on the PS5 which shows off RT and replaces all the gimmicks used. Imagine seeing proper shadows and reflections in the game. It would be amazing.

I actually wouldn't mind if they took a whole year to get it right.
 
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ultragpu said:
Maybe the base PS4 is holding the Pro back after all? You had the demo running on a Pro without any problems in 2018 so at some point ND must found out PS4 base was having trouble running that king of lighting, animation and shading so they dialed back all those to keep everything the same except the resolution. Then with the extra power been made after the downgrade they instead slightly increased the foliage, wet effect etc which are not as power hogging as lighting, shading perhaps?

Also chances are some of those things could definitely be artistic decisions. The volumetric light intensity is more subdued in some areas in the final build but overwhelmingly strong in others, so is the fog effect. Wet shader is also applied very differently between the builds.
1xxjec.jpg

2zbjoh.jpg

Animation and skin shaders are definitely downgraded so is shadow casting light sources.
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that was my thinking too.
In development, sometimes the team will be split between "demo team" and "main team". It could be that the demo team was specifically optimizing that demo for PS4 pro. Then the main team realized that their performance was not on-target for PS4, hence the downgrade. or it was the same team but they were focused for making the demo for PS4 pro, then they realized the perf on PS4 was below target (despite the earlier assumption they probably made when optimizing the demo for PS4 pro that these things should also scale well to PS4), hence the downgrade.

in the final game, the performance on PS4 Pro generally are flawless, only very few scenes that runs under 30fps. They are non-essential scenes, that feels like ND deliberately let the performance plummet. Probably development resource allocation issue. No need to optimize those scenes, as it have no practical impact in enjoyment/gameplay.

or late in dev process they still need to improve perf but no more time, thus they took the easiest (and less potential for making domino/knock-on unintended issues) choice: disabling shadows, etc.

so many things can be the reason. unless we get some insider info. Or those with hacked PS4 and PS4 pro starts fiddling with the game config and do benchmarking/perf profiling.
 
Um yes that what i expect from an optimization process 2 years later for any game. Especially in regards to a verticle slice of demo gameplay cleaned up to look nice in a gameplay premier. In other areas visual fidelity has been improved as well.
 
The most glaring problem is dynamic objects and character's ambient lighting. The things lightmaps can't be of any use for. And it's been a sticking out point of their tech since TLoU in PS3 and it's frankly disapointing that ND hasn't sorted it out. They've spent the whole gen finding ways to add more texels to their textures and more polygons to their models but the lighting is still pretty old school. It's UC4's glowing rocks all over again. sight...
 
milk said:
The most glaring problem is dynamic objects and character's ambient lighting. The things lightmaps can't be of any use for. And it's been a sticking out point of their tech since TLoU in PS3 and it's frankly disapointing that ND hasn't sorted it out. They've spent the whole gen finding ways to add more texels to their textures and more polygons to their models but the lighting is still pretty old school. It's UC4's glowing rocks all over again. sight...
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My theory is that for the demo they had some serious improvements in this area but they couldn’t get it stable enough for release, so they decided to let it slide and solve it in the next-gen releases.
 
Yes animations were downgraded. It's very noticeable. Still have the best animations though.

ModEdit:
*copied OT stuff to other thread
 
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The PS4 was a plain old mid-range PC with its x86 architecture and the considerable homology of its GPU to discrete off the shells ones when it came out. While the exotic architecture of the PS3 meant that devs were only able to maximise the console performance late in the generation (as was famously the case with the original TLOU), this is definitely not the case for the PS4. You can't draw blood from a stone.
 
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