I started playing it last night and, while it's fun to get back to the fast-flying mayhem, it's definitely the ugliest game I've played on PS4 Pro.
It's not just unimpressive, it looks, like, broken. I'm not being hyperbolic, it genuinely looks like there's some rendering issue that needs to get patched. The colors, the aliasing, the resolution, the (lack of) shaders — nothing looks... right.
I understand having an aggressive dynamic resolution and detail scaler for this game, I welcome it! But... if a lot of this stuff is dynamic, the top end is still extremely low — even on PS4 Pro. Near the beginning of the game you are walking around this environment at a slow pace (awesome environment artistically, I love it) and since it's on the underside of a bridge, apart from the limited, (relatively) geometrically simple path in front of you, everything else is in the distance and at a lower LOD. Yet still, this is where I noticed a lot of the issues.
The resolution in this segment looked like 1080p with zero AA of any kind, or perhaps sub 1080p. There is weird light shimmer and other stuff on Rico's hair and clothes in certain scenes, far more than the already prevalent pixel shimmer, this seems straight up glitchy. A lot of the colors are this weird kind of saturated as if there's not actually a light source on them, and they're just being shown whiteboxed, it's uncanny and something I don't recall seeing this generation. As if there were almost no shaders to speak of. The HDR is definitely faked and, while RDR2 does that too, the colors and lighting in this look so uncanny and unnatural no matter how I mess with gamma, HDR brightness, and HDR peak brightness, I can't get it to look okay. There is this
inscrutable color banding in dark areas even in live gameplay where at a certain point, grays just jump to this blueish black, but it moves all around as you move your camera. Even the motion blur feels like it activates too early or too late or something. I can't put my finger on it because I only played an hour and a half or something, but I know it made me raise my eyebrows the first time I noticed it.
Look, I
liked Just Cause 3 so this isn't saltiness related to that. I played JC3 for the first time earlier this year and it ran fine on PS4 Pro with Boost Mode activated while looking way better than this. I expected dynamic rendering systems that traded visuals for performance when needed (especially during storms), but I can't comprehend both the performance and visuals in even the slowest moments on this supposedly much-improved engine.
Hope some of it is revealed to be patchable.
Turn up the brightness and look at the dark spots. This isnt me fiddling with settings because the game doesnt even have brightness settings outside of hdr.
And then tell me what kind of raw horsepower proper color grading wouldve needed
This becomes exponentially worse underwater and in caves where theres no localized light sources.
Yes!! This is the weird and terrible color banding I was mentioning above.
And for anyone wondering, it's not just prerendered cutscenes. It's in actual gameplay as well.
I really hope ps5 in 2019. I can't survive to stuff like this for other 2 years.
Do not blame this game's problems on the hardware. It looks really rough even on XB1X.
Ps5 will be out in Fall 2019 or more probably Spring 2020. It's not going to be 2 year, but more like just a bit more than one year of waiting.
Oh god, 2019ers even in this thread.
