Fatigued Souls (Part 1)

Looks like they’re missing a few texture layers (specular, bump) there. Very possible it’s a bug with this material’s shader.

Or I suppose they clumsily decided to redraw textures and got halfway done before going, eh, whatever.

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Major bummer. less colorful. Virtually all of the new textures are much less detailed. Specular shaders are way less detailed. So much that some scenes iy almost looks like they are completely missing. And the bump and normal maps are also less detailed, which in turn makes the textures look flat. Heat effects confirmed missing from fire bombs. Makes me wonder what else is lost in translation.

yeah, there is a new lighting pass which reflects color from nearby objects. But the digital foundry comparisons with the Xbox 360 look more detailed, much more dynamic in colors, and moodier shadows and contrast—in virtually every shot. Despite not even being 720p.

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Folks the time for kindness has come and passed: if in 2018 you dreamt a remade game would look as good, or even better than the original you are a hopeless toad. Games don’t remake better.

I’m accepting evidence to the contrary but that’s a long mountain to climb.

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ugh ugh ugh

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I seriously cannot imagine even acknowledging this, it’s going to be so obviously inferior to the perfectly accessible original work

i’m not in favor of spreading needless negativity. remasters can be fine.

i don’t want sb to become even more of a place where we write things off beforehand.

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but this is like … a priori a bad idea, as with every other “we rewrote the shaders from 7 years ago” rerelease

I’m very anti needless negativity but I am also very pro this crap is beneath us

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i definitely think there are issue with this remaster. on the whole it does look fine, but thre are some real questions to be had about how the lighting model is different.

in particular the changes to the armor detailing, the now incredibly boring flames, and the dampened light rays warrant attention. but a lot of the rest looks fine; it’s just considerably less shiny.

otoh the sotc remake did a lot more than just stealing old assets; a direct comparison shows they remade a lot of it. there were parts that looked bad, and parts that looked pretty good. it wasn’t just a direct port, they rethought a lot of things to see how they would work in a more modern rendering context. as much as i miss it, we can’t have 3 feet of distance fog in every game anymore.

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To me, the weirdest thing is discovering how attached I am to the way that Dark Souls looks. Those deep blacks! That weird cyan sky! The, uh…over-exposed camera? I dunno what it actually is.

Most of the time when a remaster comes out I’m like “yeah cool glad that people are experiencing this game in an easy modern way”

So it’s been a bit weird getting this riled up about it!!

Still, there’s a lot of Ugh here IMO. Maybe not write-off amounts of ugh, and I’m glad that people (read: kids) will be playing it on Switch (hell yes), but I really wish that it wasn’t so…boring

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I was sold on Dark Souls as soon as I arrived in Firelink Shrine. See also: Nier northern plains with hills of radiant winds bgm

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im not totally writing this off (convenience, lots of new players getting to play this awesome game, functional online) but Souls 1 has a really specific palette that i like a lot and it’s a little bit of a drag to see it dulled like this. Especially since most people will look at the silky smooth 60fps walk cycles and declare it an obvious upgrade

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ok i only saw that bonfire change now.

get the fuck out whoever is remastering this, get the fuck out

…Is it the first game in a long time your simple hearts have really loved the look of…? They say betrayal stings the heart the harshest!.. Feel the obnoxious resentment of the ancient teenage cynic grind away at your soul… Your fingers stone and mouth steel… begging to scream out loud!!! This Remaster Is Dawg $$$hit!!! FFUUUCK IT! It WAS BETER beFOrE

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we really aren’t that kind of place here.

No but Wind Waker HD did annoy me so much that it put me off of playing an otherwise well-regarded update of a, ehh, fairly mediocre Zelda game, if that counts as gamer rage

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I do really think that attempting to take these at face value actually leads to more “needless negativity” than not

I don’t like them changing it either but the cool blue tint to everything in Dark Souls in one of the biggest things I dislike about the game; it’s a specific distancing palette that fights against the earthiness and looks like a heavily color-tinted PS2 game.

It’s more preference than I think it’s poorly done but I dislike being in that mood more than any of the other game

There’s a bit of jumping to conclusions here from looking at the Burg and a few knight armor sets. I wouldn’t be surprised if in dark, lava-filled, and high-altitude areas, and with cloth models, the new technology shows its strengths.

wait…

there’s more than the undead burg???

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