Welcome to the blog post surrounding the publication of the 50th edition of Digital Foundry Direct Weekly, meaning that we’re swiftly coming up to our one year anniversary of the show, something we may have celebrate in some way! I wasn’t able to be involved with this particular episode owing to the commitment to the Steam Deck review, but rest assured, you’re in good hands with John, Audi and Alex tackling the key topics of the week.
That kicks off, of course, with Elden Ring. Our coverage has been somewhat piecemeal to date as code arrived late, plus both Namco and ourselves wanted to put out performance data related to the day one patch – though it appears that not much changed from prior versions: there have been some tweaks from the network test code we looked at last year, but ultimately, there is the sense that both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions should be smoother than they actually are in their respective performance modes, while it’s difficult to fathom how the PC version released in the state it did.
00:00:00 Introductions00:01:13 Elden Ring impressions00:18:44 Steam Deck review imminent00:20:52 Bethesda launcher is no more, moving to Steam00:25:41 Sol Cresta has issues00:34:54 Street Fighter 6 has been announced00:44:46 Unreal Engine 5 leaves early access00:47:26 DF Supporter Q1: Does your mechanistic understanding of how video games and graphics work get in the way of experiencing the games you play?00:50:53 DF Supporter Q2: Were you surprised by the strong negative backlash from console gamers regarding the image quality in Horizon Forbidden West?00:58:15 DF Supporter Q3: When do you think PCIE 4.0 will show large GPU performance gains over 3.0?01:00:26 DF Supporter Q4: Do any of you have any idea why AMD are dragging their feet on a DLSS equivalent?01:02:52 DF Supporter Q5: What do you guys think about the graphics between Elden Ring and Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls remake from 2020?01:05:15 DF Supporter Q6: Do you think the fighting game genre can still impress in the age of ray traced gaming?
We’ve already pushed out our PC analysis and as the clamour for information on the console versions was so intense, we also looked to get out some initial impressions as quickly as we could. We’ll also be looking at the game running on Steam Deck, which has been transformed from the game’s early showing on the Valve handheld – though the issues we’ve pointed out in the PC game still persist, they just manifest in a different way. Our console tests should be complete very soon, whereupon the focus shifts to the last-gen machines.