God of War [PS4, PC]

[Phantom88]

God Of War Devs Talk PC Release, Mod Support, And Playing With Keyboards


How much did you think about mouse and keyboard controls for God of War?

DeWald: Quite a bit, because right away we knew that, coming on a PC, we’re gonna have to focus on that. We’re gonna have to figure out what that looks like. One was building a customizable interface that you can change all the keys. That’s not something that existed on the console. There’s a lot of work just doing that. But then figuring out what is that default setup? And does that feel natural? One of the learnings that we found was, for instance, the traversal modes that you usually do on console, you press circle. As you jump across things, you lift up barricades, and you crawl through cracks and things like that, it was all just circle. One PC we had E for interact, which is a pretty common system, but we found that, when we had people testing, they always tried to press space to jump across gaps, even though the pop-up thing was saying press E, crossing the gap with space was more natural for the keyboard. So we had to go back through and find all those traversal points that had some sort of jump mechanic and add in the option for space to be able to work there too. And that’s just not something you do on the consoles. Now I have two buttons, E and space, that both do the same thing. But it just felt natural for people to do that.

Do you guys think it plays well on the mouse and keyboard, or do you still prefer a controller?

DeWald: I actually play most of the time on mouse and keyboard now just because I’ve been working on it for two years, and it’s just been my default. It feels super natural to me to play it on mouse and keyboard.

https://www.gameinformer.com/interv...elease-mod-support-and-playing-with-keyboards


DeWald says there that he's been working on this for 2 years. Thats certainly much longer than i would have imagined

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Are you sure that's actually higher res texture assets and not just aniso 16x + benefit of native 4k vs checkerboarding? Checkerboarding loses texture detail on distant surfaces in particular, especially when combined with relatively low levels of AF - so if that's zoomed in those two could explain the difference there.

I feel with every other aspect of improvement mentioned it would be odd for Sony not to tout higher res textures if that was truly the case.

That actually does look kind of like a combination of checkerboard rendering greatly reducing fine detail combined with low aniso exacerbating the effect. The base texture looks to be the same, but the CB and aniso makes it look far less detailed than the texture probably actually is.

It might also be a different MIP level.

Regards,
SB

 

[Silent_Buddha]

God Of War Devs Talk PC Release, Mod Support, And Playing With Keyboards


How much did you think about mouse and keyboard controls for God of War?

DeWald: Quite a bit, because right away we knew that, coming on a PC, we’re gonna have to focus on that. We’re gonna have to figure out what that looks like. One was building a customizable interface that you can change all the keys. That’s not something that existed on the console. There’s a lot of work just doing that. But then figuring out what is that default setup? And does that feel natural? One of the learnings that we found was, for instance, the traversal modes that you usually do on console, you press circle. As you jump across things, you lift up barricades, and you crawl through cracks and things like that, it was all just circle. One PC we had E for interact, which is a pretty common system, but we found that, when we had people testing, they always tried to press space to jump across gaps, even though the pop-up thing was saying press E, crossing the gap with space was more natural for the keyboard. So we had to go back through and find all those traversal points that had some sort of jump mechanic and add in the option for space to be able to work there too. And that’s just not something you do on the consoles. Now I have two buttons, E and space, that both do the same thing. But it just felt natural for people to do that.

Do you guys think it plays well on the mouse and keyboard, or do you still prefer a controller?

DeWald: I actually play most of the time on mouse and keyboard now just because I’ve been working on it for two years, and it’s just been my default. It feels super natural to me to play it on mouse and keyboard.

https://www.gameinformer.com/interv...elease-mod-support-and-playing-with-keyboards


DeWald says there that he's been working on this for 2 years. Thats certainly much longer than i would have imagined

Almost makes me tempted to buy this on PC just to reward the effort he put into the KBM controls. That's something that so many games get wrong on the PC when ported from console. You have the ability to rebind keys but then some keys are inexplicably hard bound to certain actions with no way to rebind them (Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 that I got in the Steam Winter sale has this exact problem). Some game revert to default keybinds when navigating menus or the map, again with no way to rebind them.

It's an easy way to see if a PC port is a lazy port or not.

Regards,
SB

 

[pjbliverpool]

Are you sure that's actually higher res texture assets and not just aniso 16x + benefit of native 4k vs checkerboarding?

That actually does look kind of like a combination of checkerboard rendering greatly reducing fine detail combined with low aniso exacerbating the effect. The base texture looks to be the same, but the CB and aniso makes it look far less detailed than the texture probably actually is.

Alex agrees with you both in the latest DF review. Seems there are no improved textures, but very impressive what AF and higher resolution can do in this instance. I'd be interested to see the DLSS textures in that comparison too.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

If there is not a key bind that causes Kratos to say "Booooy!" on command, they screwed up this port.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

 

[Inuhanyou]

Makes sense that pc has some nice upgrades over console due to PS5 version being bc PS4 pro version, and that PS4 pro version largely being PS4 version with checkerboard rendering

 

[Flappy Pannus]

It sure looks like it

Nah, it looks like lack of checkerboard rendering + higher aniso providing the majority of the difference, which DF's video corroborates. The Ultra/High settings increase the texture streaming budget so texture LOD's are at a higher level on some distant objects, but that is minor compared with simply the lack of checkerboarding artifacts preserving the original detail. There is no indication so far that there are actually new, higher-res assets.

And it would not be a surprise in the slightest, They are surely not going to release a game on PC (if they are halfway competent) with the same sized textures that they used on the PS4 pro

It's far from a guarantee. Horizon Zero Dawn does not have any upgraded texture assets on the PC version over the Pro (and in fact requires far more vram to get the same quality at high resolutions). Death Stranding doesn't have higher res assets on the PC over the Pro version, again its added sharpness is due to lack of checkerboarding.

Days Gone does, so that's 1 of 3 Playstation Studio games released so far that actually has bothered with higher res assets on the PC vs the PS4 version.

 

[vspectra]

So this port was done by SSM themselves and not an outsource dev?

 

[PSman1700]

Incredible version of GoW, could be a nice revisit for fans of the game to experience the story in higher fidelity.

 

[SmooTh]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1482078489897582597

 

[Phantom88]

Almost makes me tempted to buy this on PC just to reward the effort he put into the KBM controls. That's something that so many games get wrong on the PC when ported from console. You have the ability to rebind keys but then some keys are inexplicably hard bound to certain actions with no way to rebind them (Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 that I got in the Steam Winter sale has this exact problem). Some game revert to default keybinds when navigating menus or the map, again with no way to rebind them.

It's an easy way to see if a PC port is a lazy port or not.

Regards,
SB

Unfortunately, having now played it, its not really great news. It boggles my mind how ALL pc articles missed it. Or not really, seeing as most of them probably played 2 hours of the game with the controller then said, yeah, god of war, 10/10.

The game doesn't use raw input, it has some pretty nasty negative acceleration. Meaning, you move the mouse really fast, the camera barelly moves. The slower you move the mouse, the faster the camera moves. This is coupled with the fact that the sensitivity on horizontal doesnt seem to be 1:1 with the one on vertical. If you try to do a circle with the camera using the mouse, its kinda jerky. It feels like it moves slower if you want to look up and down than it does left and right.

And this is just after posting the article where they were praising how much attention they gave m/kb. And even talking about their testers. How in gods name did nobody said this is emulating a stick instead of raw input ? Im at a loss for words why raw input isnt the default for every game making studio ever in the world. There are MODS that inject raw input into games. A fucking dll file that fixes games that entire studios released with borked controls. Dead Space being one of them for example.

The game is playable, its not the worst implementation in the world, but damn, im so dissapointed. And this is after Final Fantasy 7, with all its issues, but perfect mouse camera wasnt one of them

 

[milk]

Nah, it looks like lack of checkerboard rendering + higher aniso providing the majority of the difference, which DF's video corroborates. The Ultra/High settings increase the texture streaming budget so texture LOD's are at a higher level on some distant objects, but that is minor compared with simply the lack of checkerboarding artifacts preserving the original detail. There is no indication so far that there are actually new, higher-res assets.

It's far from a guarantee. Horizon Zero Dawn does not have any upgraded texture assets on the PC version over the Pro (and in fact requires far more vram to get the same quality at high resolutions). Death Stranding doesn't have higher res assets on the PC over the Pro version, again its added sharpness is due to lack of checkerboarding.

Days Gone does, so that's 1 of 3 Playstation Studio games released so far that actually has bothered with higher res assets on the PC vs the PS4 version.

Sorry, but the picture in question looks nothing like what I'd expect of merely an aniso+resolution/checkerboarding difference. The base texture res is difference is too big to be down to aniso and res alone. Specially in the surfaces that are close to parallel to the camera (little influence of aniso).

It may be that PS4/PRO do have the same high res texturez available but they just never manage to fit in the streaming budget of that specific scene at least. But I'd bet hard money the texture rendered on that roco on that screenshot are definetely at different mip levels, and not because of aniso or base res/cb.

 

[PSman1700]

The pc version allows to go from ’original’ settings that ps5 use which are medium all the way to Ultra. Might not specify textures but eho knows.

Edit: gow is selling hotcakes on steam, just this night +50k people playing it (steam stats).

 

[Flappy Pannus]

It may be that PS4/PRO do have the same high res texturez available but they just never manage to fit in the streaming budget of that specific scene at least. But I'd bet hard money the texture rendered on that roco on that screenshot are definetely at different mip levels, and not because of aniso or base res/cb.

Yes. I think we're talking about two different things.

As Alex mentioned, there is more memory dedicated to streaming in the texture settings, so on some objects in the distance the higher mip-versions will be loaded - but it running on the PS5 has also two detrimental effects which further enhance this disparity, lower levels of aniso and checkerboard rendering, the effects of which are more prominent with most distant objects with more fine detail (which is why effects like particles/flies/water spray can look significantly blurrier vs the PC at native).

I keep highlighting assets for a reason though - there doesn't appear to be any new sourced textures for the PC version. More memory for streaming, better aniso, and lack of checkerboarding will indeed show more detail in textures or higher mips being loaded earlier, but the actual source material hasn't changed - like I wouldn't say a game has 'upgraded textures' when using DSR vs the max native res just because higher-res mips are being loaded as a result of downscaling. The effect is you get better texture detail in some areas yes and it's worth mentioning, but I don't think it would be accurate to then refer to that version as having 'upgraded textures'.

A game that actually has higher-res textures, to me, means there are actually new, different texture files that exist that don't exist in the version being compared. This doesn't appear to be the case with GoW PC, if it was I would expect we would see it even more prominently in near textures - we should see more new, unique detail in close-up scenes. Everything so far indicates that isn't the case, and as Alex mentioned, the improvement with the texture setting is very slight on more distant objects and the overall higher detail is more a result of native resolution and better AF. I'm going to place more weight on an extensive analysis than a single zoomed in shot of one surface myself.

 

[Phantom88]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1593500/discussions/1/3202622816420608123/

they were made aware of the mouse acceleration issues and are investigating

 

[zed]

The Ultra/High settings increase the texture streaming budget so texture LOD's are at a higher level on some distant objects, but that is minor compared with simply the lack of checkerboarding artifacts preserving the original detail. There is no indication so far that there are actually new, higher-res assets.

I concede you could be correct here.
Though it definitely are using higher res mipmaps in eg the rocks
eg rocks PC = 2048x2048 mipmap level 1, ps4 pro = 512x512 mipmap level 3
theres no way even with checkboarding etc its using the same sized textures

 

[Davros]

So we had to go back through and find all those traversal points that had some sort of jump mechanic and add in the option for space to be able to work there too.

Why do you have to add in an option for space to work when you've made all the keys rebindable ? any key should work

One was building a customizable interface that you can change all the keys.

 

[tuna]

Regarding mods:
Barlog: Our tools are difficult. That’s just how we roll. We like to have difficult tools. Our engine wasn’t really built to support that. Our tools are super custom and inherently complicated. So I don’t think that’s something that will probably happen in the future, but who knows.

Maybe Sony Santa Monica should switch to Frostbite

 

[PSman1700]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...Ay_8XPaLZxb_n_Eu2Mzj9C52zMnEtr1zaeXWQFjJ0DR5w


God of War hits a concurrent peak of almost 60,000 players on Steam in just 24 hours

And the numbers keep on climbing.