Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Sure you may critique a product, but you should also consider that fixing stuff is like, a huge hassle. 
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
Indeed. As our parents taught us, "anything worth doing should come easy and don't put yourself out."
I don't know how bad the situation is with Elden Rings, but for me I stopped playing Remnant 2 because of its micro stuttering issue. It's especially bad because the game expects you to do quick reactions and the stuttering hinders the experience.
my PC is quite modest by today's standards and well, the game runs okay in many situations although I use the Flawless Widescreen mod, which enhances some details of the game like permitting players to increase the max framerate or having true widescreen support.
I still gotta complete the base game so I haven't played nor I purchased -yet- the expansion, but with Lossless Scaling no doubt the game is going to run at 165fps on my rig, 'cos it ran at 60fps before -the Elden Ring way, but yes- without RT.
What I don't understand is why they don't add DLSS and XeSS. It puzzles me.
I still gotta complete the base game so I haven't played nor I purchased -yet- the expansion, but with Lossless Scaling no doubt the game is going to run at 165fps on my rig, 'cos it ran at 60fps before -the Elden Ring way, but yes- without RT.
What I don't understand is why they don't add DLSS and XeSS. It puzzles me.
That seems to be a very common view among developers today.Sure you may critique a product, but you should also consider that fixing stuff is like, a huge hassle.
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Frenetic Pony
Veteran
Sure you may critique a product, but you should also consider that fixing stuff is like, a huge hassle.
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On teams of any decent size you can't just go and fix things. You have an assigned role! You need to be doing your assigned role on your assigned project, so your salary is charged to the right project so everything works right. Even if you did want to just fix, you know, "one thing" you need to get it through the whole pipeline of QA to make sure it doesn't break anything, and pushing it as an official patch which probably has someone else in charge, which is just for Steam because consoles you need to pass validation which is another thing to do before you patch anything. Meaning all of this has to be justified to a manager who's going to ask how much money, exactly, this is going to make the company anyway.
The whole thing makes what might take a modder a single line in a text file an absolute pain for an even relatively big team. It's why that Control "patch" with HDR and a better denoiser and such, from an official dev at Remedy, came out as a mod just for PC rather than an official patch.
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DavidGraham
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Flappy Pannus
Veteran
I don't think I, or Alex, would dispute that, so I'm not sure what this is in response to. This is not complaining that there's not a patch 2 days after release that fixes every immediate problem the game has, this is complaining that virtually not a single problem raised in what is now a 2-year old release from an extremely successful, experienced studio has not been addressed. I mean, broken vsync man. Come on.
There is no doubt any large codebase, especially one that is as old as Fromsoft's engine, creaks and moans with every potential update. Yet, it's not a Jenga tower - it's obviously malleable enough that they could add in the highly requested (cough) feature of ray tracing after release, and are now releasing a major DLC, which would have been the perfect opportunity to address some of these issues. With this attitude of the impossibility due to of the chain of command, nothing could be seen as justifiable criticism!
From software just doesn't care about improving their product tech after launch. They improved their engine pretty massively with elden ring and how they handled the open world, but anything for an existing title? Nothing.
They actually respond with patches to gameplay criticisms (they added torrent to the final fight for example) but committing to fixing stutters on PC or reducing the res on console for a more stable framerate? Not in a million years.
If they make their next game current gen only I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff with an updated engine (and 30 fps on console only).
They actually respond with patches to gameplay criticisms (they added torrent to the final fight for example) but committing to fixing stutters on PC or reducing the res on console for a more stable framerate? Not in a million years.
If they make their next game current gen only I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff with an updated engine (and 30 fps on console only).
At some point, we just have to accept that Fromsoft either lacks the technical proficiency or they're wilfully incompetent. They can't claim ignorance because players have made their voices heard. I can't think of one fromsoft game that is technically sound. They all have problems.
Elden Ring is by far, massively their best sales success ever. And the new DLC has already sold more than five million copies, even with its quite high price point.
So no, the players have not really made their voices heard. Doing a bit of whining online doesn't do anything. Backlash needs to be overwhelming to the point where the financial success of a product is put into question over some issue.
There's probably a level of lack of proficiency in certain areas, but this likely stems from them just having different priorities and a heavy lack of turnover. So they have who they have, and their focus is not on refining their tech to a sheen and extracting the most out of a given hardware level, but to make the improvements they feel are useful for their work, and to ensure they can produce good games in a practical and efficient timeframe.
I'm sure they could spend a bunch of time overhauling their tech and training up some people on certain areas, and taking more time out to more fully optimize their games, but this could be very disruptive for them, all while what they're doing now is working quite well, from any kind of meaningful success standpoint.
I think they are technically good but have their own priorities: big scale and density of the environment, prefer favoring resolution over framerate, seamless open world (creating stutters on PC), generous and expensive lighting to create their specific artstyle and low latency controls at 30fps (creating framepacing problems) on consoles. Overall I think those are good priorities but it could be improved by technical experts like Bluepoint as proven in Demon's Souls.
It's pretty sad that in 2024 only Bungie has cracked the low latency with no frame pacing errors at 30 fps problem. Anyone else? Share it with the world Bungie 
Reynaldo
Regular
Of course, because seamless open worlds don't exist on PC. They all stutter, right?
I have tried Shadow of the erdtree on PS5 via the PS4 app, and it stutters during the lion dance fight, something the PS5 app doesn't do. It's framerate is higher, but stuttering literally gets you killed in the right circumstances. Elden ring PS5 to PS4 isn't the best way to play the game anymore.
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