Shadow of the Colossus (Remake 2018) [PS4]

[Shifty Geezer]

Quick PhotoShop hack to show a bit of processing could easily make the game look more Team ICO. Stick it in as an option if afraid of offending those with no artistic soul.

 

[Globalisateur]

That was the sparkling of the sand in Journey's case. In SotC, the fundamental look is different. The look isn't soft and dreamy and moody any more. There's no overbright-bloom or haze.

The main difference (of 'art style') is the less intrusive bloom & fog that plagued the PS2 version. On PS2 heavy bloom (and fog is some cases) were a necessity to hide the lack of details, lack of proper lighting and low res 'PS2' textures. But so much bloom & fog would destroy the additional details (polygons, textures) and better lighting we have now on PS4.

Also the PS4 game has HDR, apparently the implementation is excellent, and HDR can't be seen here...

Let me show you (I can cherry pick, too):

Much more details on PS4:

Notice the better sun lighting present on PS4 version:

Fog is used to hide super low res textures on PS2 and lighting / reflections are better on PS4:

 

[OCASM]

The main difference (of 'art style') is the less intrusive bloom & fog that plagued the PS2 version. On PS2 heavy bloom (and fog is some cases) were a necessity to hide the lack of details, lack of proper lighting and low res 'PS2' textures. But so much bloom & fog would destroy the additional details (polygons, textures) and better lighting we have now on PS4.

Also the PS4 game has HDR, apparently the implementation is excellent, and HDR can't be seen here...

Let me show you (I can cherry pick, too):

Much more details on PS4:

Notice the better sun lighting present on PS4 version:

Fog is used to hide super low res textures on PS2 and lighting / reflections are better on PS4:

From dreamy and moody to generic and bland. "But mah sharp textures!"

Aesthetics > fidelity.

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

The original is my favourite game ever and, although I agree that this remaster has every justification to want to push fidelity, I at least want the option of the fog and bloom of the original.

The PS4Pro version supposedly will have support for a 60fps mode: would such a mode be better suited to include the fog and bloom or might it negatively impact performance?

I imagine that it would at least be able to reduce the LOD.

 

[Nesh]

What's missing is not actually fog but bloom. As explained in this post, bloom was calculated in a very unique way which is what gave the game its ghostly, foggy look. I even made a basic implementation in Unity if you're interested: https://github.com/ocasm/sotcbloom

The remake instead uses a generic bloom algorithm. A more modern way to get similar results to the above could be doing something like this: https://github.com/ocasm/ssms

Thanks for the clarification. I like the atmosphere of the effect. Still comes with the side effect of "hiding" the details in the distance.

 

[bunge]

The original is my favourite game ever and, although I agree that this remaster has every justification to want to push fidelity, I at least want the option of the fog and bloom of the original.

The PS4Pro version supposedly will have support for a 60fps mode: would such a mode be better suited to include the fog and bloom or might it negatively impact performance?

I imagine that it would at least be able to reduce the LOD.

This may be the wrong thread for this but I f this is running at 60fps, what would prevent it from working on PSVR?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Let me show you (I can cherry pick, too):

What do you mean 'cherry pick'? I never said the originals looked better and certainly never said anything about better sun lighting or reflections or whatever other things are mind-numbingly obviously superior and better in the remake. Yes, the horse scene is an obvious improvement, as is the detail overall. The complaint isn't that the game is improved in visuals, but that it's lost a lot of its visual identity. Even if this identity was just the product of shortcomings of the original platform, the original look really helped with the moods of the Team ICO games. If you want to make a movie that looks like a 1980s movie, you either shoot it on 1980s tech or you process it to look like 1980s tech. What this remake is doing is saying the original look sucked and the game should have and would have looked like this pin-sharp generic fantasy world if the tech was better. Things to fix are object detail, texture quality, and resolution and framerate. Things to leave alone are monster designs, environmental aesthetics, and visual style.

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

This may be the wrong thread for this but I f this is running at 60fps, what would prevent it from working on PSVR?

Divine will that I don't masturbate myself to death.

 

[London Geezer]

With the kind of camera movements in this game, VR would be a puke inducing festival of death.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The original was moody and stylised and artistic. This remake is very plain vanilla in the visual department.

I haven't played SotC for over a decade but this is very much how I recall the visual style. Could you be mistaking technical compromises for conscious art direction differences?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I haven't played SotC for over a decade but this is very much how I recall the visual style.

The image in the post you are replying to is from the original. Contrast that with the remake. Have you watched the comparison vid in this post?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The image in the post you are replying to is from the original. Contrast that with the remake. Have you watched the comparison vid in this post?

I hadn't previously but have now. I personally like the change but then I don't think the haze/fog present in the PS2 original was an intentional artistic choice but a technical compromise to limit detailed draw distance.

 

[Tkumpathenurpahl]

It may not be how it would have been realised had the developers not been technically limited, but they were limited and they did integrate those limitations into the art direction, so it is still part of its aesthetic.

 

[dogen]

I hadn't previously but have now. I personally like the change but then I don't think the haze/fog present in the PS2 original was an intentional artistic choice but a technical compromise to limit detailed draw distance.

Why couldn't it have been both?

 

[OCASM]

Thanks for the clarification. I like the atmosphere of the effect. Still comes with the side effect of "hiding" the details in the distance.

But is that its purpose? No. How do I know that? First, because the bloom in most instances, specially in open spaces where you can see far away, is not bright enough to actually hide anything. Second, Team ICO, in the article I linked to, explains that the team was trying to mimic the effects of HDR lighting and dynamic tonemapping. The strong bloom is then necessary to sell the effect. In other words, this was a conscious artistic decision. Nothing to do with hiding low detail meshes.

But I guess hardware limitations is a more palatable explanation to some people than the idea that Bluepoint is blatantly ignoring the visual style of the original.

You can even see this in the intro when Wander is about to enter the Forbidden Lands. In the original, the lighting is overexposed even when he's passing through the entrance. Once he goes all the way through the exposition is adjusted and you can finally see the landscape. This , along with the music playing is meant to create anticipation and later awe in the player. In the remake, you can even see the temple before Wander has started to pass through. Just awful.

It's one thing to improve on the author's vision and another to just ignore it.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Why couldn't it have been both?

The improbable mathematics of coincidence.

 

[milk]

Arent you guys beeing a bit overboars with this stuff? The bluepoint's game does have plenty fog, hdr and bloom, maybe not as exagerated as the ps2 original, but it still feels more moody, and mysty than most other games. It certainly feels like SOCT to me. Looking back at the original, its lighting was occasionally very impressive, as all weird hacks ended up managing to look like a lot of the more sophisticated phenomena they were not actually even close to be simulating. But a lot more often, things just looked weird. Fog making shadowed parts of the env look brighter than the sky, thas somehow clipping out its detail because of brightness but not reaching actual whites on screen and blooming over stuff... Ugh guys, look at the original and count how many times things managed to look pleasing and how often it didn't.

 

[OCASM]

We already know what Team ICO aesthetics look like at a higher fidelity and this looks nothing like it.

 

[Nesh]

But is that its purpose? No. How do I know that? First, because the bloom in most instances, specially in open spaces where you can see far away, is not bright enough to actually hide anything. Second, Team ICO, in the article I linked to, explains that the team was trying to mimic the effects of HDR lighting and dynamic tonemapping. The strong bloom is then necessary to sell the effect. In other words, this was a conscious artistic decision. Nothing to do with hiding low detail meshes.

But I guess hardware limitations is a more palatable explanation to some people than the idea that Bluepoint is blatantly ignoring the visual style of the original.

You can even see this in the intro when Wander is about to enter the Forbidden Lands. In the original, the lighting is overexposed even when he's passing through the entrance. Once he goes all the way through the exposition is adjusted and you can finally see the landscape. This , along with the music playing is meant to create anticipation and later awe in the player. In the remake, you can even see the temple before Wander has started to pass through. Just awful.

It's one thing to improve on the author's vision and another to just ignore it.

I didnt say that was the purpose.
I said that the effect fitted perfectly the game's aesthetic with the technical limitations of the hardware in mind. The effected added but couldnt take anything away on the PS2. The effect had almost a constant presence on the PS2 game and the far distance did look fuzzy most of the time

The same "intensity" of the effect might have been accepted with mixed results considering the expectations and standards set by today's hardware capabilities.

Personally I d like to see some more implementation of the HDR with god rays passing through the monsters and such

 

[London Geezer]

Wow! Seeing that video, I clearly have selective PS2 memory, as I have a very different image of the PS2 game in my head than that mess.