Dark Souls II - From Software Responds

I'm guessing the first few bosses are particularly bland so that players who could not get past the archers in Anor Londo can still have a few hours of fun.

I played the first 5 areas on Xbox, and it looks great for 8 year old hardware. Looks way better than Demon's Souls and in most areas MUCH better than Dark Souls. I'm almost sure the PC version will look even better on max, since they said the PC version will make use of the additional resources of the platform. But try to run it on an 8 year old PC and you'll get the console looks. Simple as that. You can't have a huge open world with 200+ weapons and 150+ items all having different animations and top tier graphics at the same time with limited hardware.

I'm sure From fell into the trap of presenting a smaller area and tuning visulas up then realizing it won't work for the whole game. Watch Dark Souls youtubers who have been playing builds for a year now. They will tell you early full area builds worked on 10 fps, so From had to make sacrifices eventually, and they chose visuals over content.

I hope the 1,5 months of wait for the PC version is due to optimizations for the platform. If they present the same graphics as in the consoles, with just higher resolution and better framerate, I'll be pissed off. If they tuned down the graphics due to performance on consoles, there's no reason to do the same for PCs. The idea that it's to not make console gamers envious and angry is ridicuolous.

Gwendo said:

If they present the same graphics as in the consoles, with just higher resolution and better framerate, I'll be pissed off.

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Then I hope you're prepared to be pissed off.

Gwendo said:

The idea that it's to not make console gamers envious and angry is ridicuolous.

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I bet you'd be surprised how often companies does this. Might seem ridiculous, but you also have to take into account that a very large portion (the largest probably) of their customer base are kids, the company will act accordingly.

You never know maybe Dark Souls 3 will be a true next gen graphical title.

vurt said:

But it's the art design that has been stripped down...

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Exactly; glad some of us realize the significance of the downgrade. FROM has made some very excellent models and textures, but they have sabotaged their own art design by stripping out the robust dynamic lighting system.

How sad and ironic considering FROM touted their lighting system as a key to the evolution of the Dark Souls "experience". But if you like to cling to hope, read below...

Forbes Insider Info Article

Well that is a legitimate and much more serious concern.

But then again most people are saying that the game looks very good and I am likely to take their opinion seriously too.

The differences in some screens showing the "Dragon mansion" though are totally jarring. A very very big stripping out of art assets and a killing off of the tone and atmosphere of the scene.

Then again those after scenes seem a bit weird too. The gamma is way too high and that always makes a game of simple geometry and textures look particularly awful. Surely tweaking the ingame settings (brightness i.e that I always have somewhat low on games) a bit would produce a better effect. Maybe they are trying a bit harder to make their point ?

Anyways still extremely looking forward to the game. One of the few non Kickstarter games I am anticipating this year (This, Risen #3 which will hopefully be decent and the Don't starve DLC, how is that for a set )

From was criticized for slow frame rates in DS1 and it appears they had to continue weighing and choosing resource allocation this time around too and instead chose to keep frame rates higher in lieu of better visuals. I'm just a curmudgeon anymore but gamers are a bitchy crowd always find something to bitch about. Of course my personal bar for visuals is pretty low in that if graphics look better than Atari 2600 PAC Man I'm good.

I think the game looks great for the most part, I just can't understand why the backgrounds took such a massive hit. Why is everything crisp and beautiful but the sky and sea looks like they blurred some art for an 8 bit game? The game gets away with it in some places, such as a dark sky near the Lost Sinner or the Drangelic Castle which puts one in mind of the vast empty feeling of Anor Lando. Then there is the evening sky around the Bastille or the lava lakes around the Iron Citadel, what is with that low-grade background art? There are no enemies in Majula, and everyone goes there, but they only upped it to a blurred Sega Genesis quality sky.

Dude, the sky is falling because of this in my eyes. I am upset.