this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.
Difficulty wise, yeah, it's hard. That's a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it's probably better that they launched a game that is "too hard" and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you'll make things much harder on yourself.
Shader compilation stuttering only happens if a game was coded incorrectly to begin with.
Shaders should never ever be compiled during gameplay, and if it has to be done, done so asynchronously.
Either way it should never be dismissed as a problem that is "common in new games". It's amateurish and completely avoidable.
The fromsoft cult doesn't like that kind of talk, you're supposed to ignore performance issues, dictate to people how to play the game or else "they did it wrong", and tell people to GIT GUD.
I adore Fires of Rubicon. They know how to design games, and how to pull off an aesthetic. That side of the studio has serious world-class talent.
But fromsoft has some big issues on the graphics tech expertise side of things.
I don't think I've seen any subsurface scattering in their games, or proper multi-texture materials. I don't think they are on a PBR workflow (physically based rendering) though they couldn't achieve their "style" if they were. And the way they still rely on shell texturing in places they really, really shouldn't, actually hurts.
My problem isn't with their style. It's that they don't seem to know all the industry standard solutions and techniques that exist and have been developed, and shoot themselves in the foot both in terms of performance and fidelity, by achieving things in ways that an expert could immediately tell is a bad idea.
Why exactly do they need to be targeting photorealism with shit like PBR?
PBR isn't shit, and it doesn't necessarily mean targeting photorealism.
It's just a benchmark for material rendering that means once all your assets come out the other end of production, they work consistently with each other.
You could shift that benchmark towards cartoony or painterly or whatever you like, and even with assets produced using PBR, it's easier to "style" your game later because all your different assets are at the same starting point, and will therefore react to rendering changes consistently across the board.
Basically if your entire team is making metal materials by eyeballing it, and you then put it all together in a scene, you won't be able to get all the different metal objects to look like metal at the same time as you make changes to the lighting in the scene, because the asset team made all of them using slightly different material parameters.
If you make your entire asset production pipeline PBR, all metal assets will behave the same, all glass materials will behave the same, flesh, fabric, fur...
You get the idea.