Crisis Shrine and Closing Thoughts

Hey everyone, welcome to DF Direct Weekly number 102. It's here, it's happening, it cannot be stopped. Like the release of Final Fantasy XVI, it's gonna take a global extinction event to stop it happening. So let's crack on. This is indeed our weekly show about the latest gaming and technology news. There's a lot to talk about this week. So uh joining me first of all, hello Oliver Mackenzie. Hi Richard Gohan. Yeah fant,astic. Great to have you back on the show. And um Alex Batalia, he's back. Yes, returning from sickness. I was it took me out more than COVID did, whatever I had. Um, but I I'm much better now. My throat feels good and ready to talk for hours on end about video game news. Your throat feels good. That's all we need to know. Uh let's back on with the first news topic. Uh so it's been a week of delays. Two key dil uh titles have been delayed. Um first of all we have Starfield uh which now actually has a release date to be fair, didn't have one before. Uh the release date for that is September the 6th and we shall be learning more about it during the E3 period. Specifically there's going to be a developer underscore direct at uh June the 11th. Secondly a story coming from Bloomberg, uh Jason Schweyer, so you know, he's staking his reputation on this one. Um yes, apparently in the wake of the extremely negative reaction, Suicide Squad has been uh delayed to later in the year . I'm gonna go to you first on this, Oliver. Um thoughts about this? I mean two very different stories, but I guess the linkage is delay. Yeah. I think with Starfield it makes uh more sense in an organic way because that game is absolutely massive. I have to imagine they've got five or six years of content in the pipe. The previous showing, well, it was very, very impressive, obviously, uh, I think it showed they had a lot of work to to go. Uh and uh uh the roughly ten month delay I think is fitting with probably what you'd expect from a project of that scope. I don't think it's too crazy, at least not not to me. I did expect it in in May or June, but you know the delay isn't uh unprecedented there. But for I think it's very curious with the suicide squad delay because I wasn't that pleased with the way the game was in the initial footage that we saw of the initial gameplay footage, but I'm not too sure how much they can do to fix it because the game has been stru ctured, it seems, around these co-op elements. And if that's what the delay is about, indeed, or the you know proposed hypothetical alleged delay, if that's what it's about, then it does seem like a bit of a tall order to turn that around by Q4 2023 I think. So I kinda wonder how that will uh will end up uh going. Yeah I mean if you spent seven years, eight years creating a game and then in the final few months of development. Um there are stories that the whole thing is being upended and being ret old . Um wow. That's problematic, right, Alex? Yeah, I think in in this case I'm of Oliver's opinion where I it's hard to imagine what six months will do for the core gameplay concept ideas, as in like, for example, when they showed off uh the idea of like uh gear score, like uh getting new um weapons for your characters that have like different DPS stats, um or even like the base gameplay uh of like shooting these like purple attached nodes onto enemy robots and tanks and all these other things. Uh that's all the stuff that was mainly criticized with that showing. I think John's uh John's nice tirade was a good capping point of that. Um and I don't think those things are going to be changed in that time, but I almost wonder if it's going to be slightly retooled for its image uh and how they present it, as well as maybe just some of the UI to make it not so transparent that it is actually a games as a service title, because that seems to be the the heavily negative reaction. That's the only thing I can imagine they could do in that time period. Um with regards to um Starfield, this one I'm actually happy they're delaying it because I think I would really like to see um a Bethesda title come out with um the least amount of issues possible, both for their own sake, for our sake, and also for Microsoft's sake, because I think Microsoft's kind of on a roll right now with Hi-Fi Rush coming out, like a really super polished title . And And I don't think they want to have like the huge baggage that is like releasing a technically problematic game, like buggy, kind of like Halo Infinite came out where it wasn't perfect in a lot of ways and it almost felt like it still needed more time. I think to make this year like a good capstone year for Microsoft releasing one of the biggest games of the year, if not maybe the biggest game of the year, uh in a really polished state would be great. So I'm happy to actually see it be delayed. Yeah. Um well we've got this question from Bjork Tribe, one of our DF supporters. Bethesda's history of buggy launches aside with a t with the team developing Starfield as a showstopper piece for X box, what do you suppose the odds are that the PC version will have an equal amount of love, since it's still the Xbox brand? So yeah, this is a curious one, right, Alex, because well these titles from Bethesda Game Studios, I mean it's almost legendary that they kind of launch with with technical issues, with glitches, with bugs, with crazy things, and part of that I think is simply down to the sheer size and scope of the game. There's eventualities that a user will uncover relatively easily that you know years of QA might not uh might not sort of uh uncover. I'm not sure I I sort of get the question because in my experience the console versions always seem to be a sort of less stable than the PC versions. They are, and they always have been, I I think like the yeah, just go back to Worldwind and you'd see the same thing with regards to how the Xbox version performed versus the PCs of the era. It did a good job, but it, you know, it it definitely had its negative aspects. And I think that carries on to Oblivion, Fallout 3, especially the PS3 versions of those games, um where over time they just kind of degrade and slow down. And yeah, yeah. And also, you know, we go back to like one of the classic DF uh benchmarks of the era was like running up that tower in Fallout 4 and seeing how badly CPU limited it was. Uh, you know, like with all the the with the kind of combat that goes on in that game. I think this time around though, because it is targeting much better CPUs, uh it just by default will be better. The one thing I I'm really curious though is whether or not um there's gonna be a performance mode because this trailer they released a year was like targeting 60 fps for certain segments of the trailer. Um, but the previous showing on Xbox, what was apparently Xbox, was really obviously thirty FPS with uh frame rate depth. So that's a tall order and a difference to suddenly go from like slow code that's not hitting thirty to sixty all of a sud I'm just curious if that's g still on like on the table. Yeah, I mean I don't know what to make of that. Is it a marketing uh tool which is basically just, hey, these here's a really nice trailer, we've mastered it at sixty frames per second. Probc build footage. Or do you think they're actually saying hey we're gonna have a 60 fps performance mode? I think it might have been prudent not to have done it at 60 frames per second if you're not if you don't have a performance mode in the bag, right? Because that's that's kind of like one of the key takeaways that that kick that that was uh that that emerged in the wake of that trailer review. Hey it's 60 frames per second and you know it's it it's gonna be tricky, right? Oliver, any any thoughts on Starfield beyond uh beyond what we've talked about already? Do you think it should will have a sixty FPS mode? I think if they do it, I don't think it's gonna be super consistent just based off of their track record. I am very happy that it's not shipping on last chain consoles. I am very happy that it's being delayed seemingly to get the game in hopefully decent shape, but I think that a 60 FPS per someone might just be a bridge too far, or if they tried it won't be so perfect. I was actually kind of um interested and surprised and in some ways impressed by some aspects of the trailer. Uh like just little snippets that we saw , in particular the off-screen footage that was very briefly shown in between Todd Howard. Uh-huh. Uh where like we saw some environments, some cool planet environments, and there was a brief shot with like these massive dinosa ur type reptile creatures. And I just thought, wow, that looks cool, but the scope of this game seems pretty insane because just imagine those reptile creatures, the players are going to expect people to interact with them, to shoot them , to engage in combat with them, unless it's some sort of like weird non-combat area, but of course Bethesda never does that. And then that's all expected to have some sort of plausible interaction with the player and sort of almost maybe a horizon. Zero dawn kind of big attack enemy sense. And I think that Bethesda's gonna try to do all that stuff because they always do, but the the level of polish will be, I'm pretty sure, quite questionable, especially at launch. So, you know, delay the game for another six months if I need it as far as I'm concerned. You know, I'd rather have a good product than a than a product that you know, invariably the solution of Bethesda games is to say, hey, you know, this is a great game, but wait four months or whatever, you know. Interesting . I mean, yeah, this is the the thing, right? Because we're going in with basically decades of baggage from what we've come to expect from a technical perspective from these games. And uh when we looked at the last major showing at the last E3 period. Yeah, it was look it was looking absolutely fantastic, but there was still the sense that performance was uh not consistent. So yeah, I'm gonna be interested to see where this one ends up in terms of uh the concept of whether it's been delayed or not, it as far as I'm aware it never got a release date. I think people were just expecting it within a year window. And I think to be fair, this year is looking really, really PAX anyway. So I quite like the idea that Starfield has actually carved out its own area of the release date calendar, so to speak, because you know there's there's a number of congested months this year, and as far as I'm aware, September's looking fairly clear at the moment. CBC, of course. There's a lot going on. But yeah, so I think that's fantastic. Suicide Squad. Again, it is just a story from um uh Bloomberg, but again I don't think uh Jason Schreier would publish that if he wasn't fully on top of the facts there. Um Wow, I just don't see how they're going to sort of reverse you know a good degree of the development um assuming that they are going to reverse it and not just you know retool make it better etc etc uh there's a lot of unknowns in there we just don't know but you know, the concept of um Rocksteady taking on board the the reaction and and making changes can go one of two ways, right? We could either have gone from a game that might perhaps would have worked as a game as a service and wor ks really great and then basically the the alternative is that maybe it's not gonna work out with these last minute retoolings so to speak. So I guess, you know, who knows? Is this short answer? Who knows? Just have to wait and see. Um but I think that's all we've got to say about that at the moment. Let's move on to the next news topic. Um so later on this month, uh The Last of Us Part One, Tilou, Tilou Part One It's coming, it's coming to PC. There's been an an announcement from Naughty Dog revealing the PC features. And Alex, you're going to be reviewing this for us. Talk us through your impressions of of well of the blog post announcing the specs? So the blog post uh alongside the specs there's some announcement of some other things. The I mean some of them are silly, but it's like, oh it's got a V sync option and um you know you can control graphics from low to ultra and I guess the question is whether or not ultra is something better than the PlayStation 5. Maybe it is we'll see when the game comes out. I'd hope that they have a good ultra option. Two really key things that I saw uh in there were also FSR two point two and DLSS. Obviously without any knowledge of which version of DLSS it is, but it is the super resolution variant, so there isn't any DLSS3 here. Maybe a missed opportunity uh here with the game, given how apparently heavy it is, with the specs shown off here. Uh, but that's the second part of it. And this is both good and uh like they've been showing off the spec sheet for minimum recommended performance and ultra is both good because it actually shows which we really like to see is exactly the specs for 60 fps at some resolution and some uh preset, which is the way I think these kind of specs sheets should be done generally. They can obviously be even more detailed than this, uh, but this is better than most other people do. So that's the good part . The questionable part is just what specs are are are there. I want to kind of start with the minimum first because uh they've posted as well on Twitter that the game runs on Steam Deck. And we know from tons of benching from both myself, Oliver, Rich , that the Steam Deck kind of compares it's like a 720p PS4 in terms of GPU quality almost. That's the way I'd kind of put it. It's like 720p PS . I think that's a fair a fair appraisal of its power. Yeah. Yeah. And um but if you look at the minimum recommended specs here, it's 30 FPS and 720p at the low setting with a GTX 970, which historically it's not less now over time, but it used to be, you know, like two times console settings, you know, like two times the performance of a like a PS4 almost uh when it you know like run the Witcher 3 time sp an. Yeah. Um that's what it was. Obviously, over time that the that architecture did not scale as well with like higher compute loads, so I expect it to be not be as good as it used to be. But 720p30 is a huge difference. Um and that makes me wonder a little bit like what a GTX 1060 would be like, because the other GPU here for 720p30 is the um 1050 Ti , which is not too far off from a 1060, but the four gigabyte variant, um, which is maybe these spec sheets are kind of also laid out due to the amount of VRAM that the these each of these GPUs respectively have. It's hard to know because this once again the spec street sheet is not transparent. So I'm a little bit worried about that, the minimum spec on the GPU side of things. But also when I get over to the recommended and performance spec, there's some questionable things here. Namely, because usually the RTX 2060 uh 2070 super and the 5700 XT, which is mislabeled in the spec sheet, it's a 5700 XT the AMD one. Usually that's what I go my go-to GPU and our performance comparisons of what a PS5 GPU tends to perform like in a rasterized game. Sometimes it's a bit above, sometimes it's below a bit below. It depends on the game and the scene. But that's usually where it is. And this is for 1080p 60 at the high preset, which might be PlayStation 5 esque settings. That's like quite a bit below the 1440p sixty of the PS5 version. Yeah, and they're talking 2080 Ti level for 1440p . That's that's you know that's a GPU that's always been very consistently above when we've been able to get exact settings. It's usually been very consistently above the PlayStation 5, sometimes dramatically so, depending upon the game. So I'm a little bit worried about that. But even the ultra spec here has some questionable things there. The um AMD RX7900XT um can perform at 4K Ultra 60 FPS using FSR quality mode, but for the RTX4080, which is usually a semi-comparable GPU in a lot of aspects without ray tracing, um, doesn't apparently require any upscaling, which is really weird. Like usually you'd expect these GPUs to be very similar to one another, but the spec sheet almost says they're r actually rather quite different. So there's there's a lot to be said here. I think once again we always have to wait and look at the game when it comes out and uh you know, I have a s a couple of these GPUs and it would be interesting to see how they actually do fare in comparison to the spec sheet at the end. Maybe that's something to include in the video as well, just to like actually say, hey, are how useful are these spec sheets in the end of the day? Um but I'm a little worried based upon the spec sheet that is put out. Just a little bit. But always, as always, you know, these these things don't mean that they're not 100% concrete. Well, there's there's some interesting stuff in there. Let's take a look at the the low sp uh spec. I mean that they're saying it's gonna but work on Steam Deck, right? Yeah. And uh these specs for the minimum are way above Steam Deck. I mean you know Radeon four seventy is broadly compatible to a PS 4 Pro, as is the GTX970. And in terms of the 1060, it's on it's on us it's on a rung above these GPUs. It should it should be alright. Yes, so so there is that. So the question is, I guess well maybe you have to use upscaling FSR on the deck to to get seven twenty P thirty or or something close to it. It's not entirely clear. Um yeah, the GPU side of things is certainly interest ing and um I suspect we probably would be using upscaling on on the uh uh on the recommended specs to get something like fourteen forty P. I mean that's not beyond the realms of possibility. But you're right, it should be broadly comparable, you know, native 1440p, you'd you'd think . I don't know. So interesting stuff, right? Um it would be great to actually see some, you know, this is sort of pie in the sky stuff, bearing in mind the game probably is still in in in development as we speak, but it would be nice to actually see, you know, a trailer that actually shows these GPUs or at least one of them running running the game. Yeah, that'd be great. Um like for example just showing off like uh the game at four K native sixty or something like that. That'd be really interesting because we've never seen that before with this game. So it's been m you know uh this is Oliver's coverage back in the day. Um, you know, just like uh this this is this game has been one that that has always kind of been in that fourteen forty P sixty realm on the PlayStation 5 hardware, whether it's the second part two or part one and we can finally see that art breathing at a high frame rate at a higher resolution. And something I would have loved to see. There was a there was a four K thirty mode and then also a four K forty mode which I think they stripped out of it post post release Oh they did? Oh wow man, that was gonna be our my go to uh benchmark. Yeah my benchmark. I believe I believe they I believe they did cut that out. But I'm kind of curious to see how this scales at all because the last of us part one, or T loop part one as I affectionately call it, is a game that relies very, very heavily on baked lighting and the settings they've name checked here. Like I think it's texture quality, shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion. You know, I think you have to assume that if if those are, as we expect, not obviously not ray traced implementations of any of those techniques, that there would be a particularly impactful improvement over PS5 because it's not like the PS5 was particularly lacking in short terms of SSR quality or shadow resolution or anything like that. I would be interested to see because I I have to presume that ultra preset is at least one or two notches above whatever the PS5 can do. So hopefully there is some return on investment for people who have high-end uh hardware where or are are able to push the game to the max. But even if there isn't that much of one, um, I think Naughty Dog's TAA in T loop part one on the PS5, it does have a fair bit of breakup and shimmer. So the idea that you could play this at four K at high frame rates with something like uh DLSS two quality or something to clean up that final image. I think that should make for a big improvement, at least in terms of image quality, if not visual settings. Yeah, yeah. It is great to see DLSS and FSR two in there, which I think was the case for Uncharted. It definitely had DLSS. That's for sure. Yeah, it definitely had FSR two as well too. One thing I want to point out really quickly from this is they also mentioned that the cinematics have been uh cleaned up for ultra wide displays and the game itself is too. Which is is this not an insignificant task. No. For an entire game that is I mean, it has tons of um cinematic sequences in it. And I imagine a number of them, if you just go outside that sixteen by nine border, there was probably like character models just like T Post . You know, this is the typical thing, or there's just nothing there at times. Um, so that that probably took a bit of work. And I'm also really excited to see this in general. I mean, I'm not a big fan of the series like Oliver is, but I'm excited to see the fact that we're seeing Naughty Dogs in studio work finally coming out on PC for the first time since like 1998, I guess. Um and it's gonna be really, really cool to just see how they treat the platform. I imagine it's up to the exact same standard that they do with the PlayStation, which is probably pretty high. So and it's just, you know, the first of many things to come, I imagine in um part two may come at some point as along with factions or whatever factions two is gonna be called. Um I'm gonna say to be clear though, Alex, it obviously Uncharted did appear on PC, but that was a collaboration with IN Galaxy. There's no hint of any kind of collaboration with an external partner on this one, right? Yeah, so far no, none of that at all. Um and I think also the rumour mill bu beforehand was saying that this was an internal ND thing. So that's what I expect. We'll see though when the game comes out. I've got to ask Oliver as a massive T Lou fan, how are you enjoying the TV show? Oh that's a good question. Uh I I actually have not watched any of it. I'm planning to wait until the release of the episodes. And then I'll smart idea. Yeah, I can't I can't keep up week to week with it's too much too much stuff in my head. You know, have to save us for pixel counts. It's it's running at fourteen forty P. Yeah. But there's a f there's a four K twenty four mode. Anyway Um Yes, uh The Last of Us Part One uh hopefully review code will be turning up soon and uh we shall endeavour to have launch day coverage for that on the PC because uh wow, it's gonna be a big big, release for PC users, I think. And uh we're just really hyped to to see it. I mean, you know, a naughty dog game scaling beyond PlayStation 5, you know, that's just gonna be a treat. Let's move on to the next ne ws topic. So, um, and I'm gonna take a deep breath here . The uh continuing circus surrounding the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard continues um and it's going in all manner of crazy directions, um, which you know I've I've just kind of blown away. Uh it's to the point where we're actually seeing four-page ad uh ads being taken out in national newspapers in the UK where Microsoft is telling the world that if the acquisition goes through um then um call of duty will actually be appearing on 150 million new devices. Um a lot of those would be Nintendo Switch will made be made avail available to 150 million devices. Meanwhile, um there's been some crazy claims from Sony about what would happen to Call of Duty and um PlayStation's competitive position in the market should the merger go through, including stuff. And I think we'll talk about this first. The concept that Microsoft might deliberately sabotage Call of Duty to make it worse for PlayStation users and yeah, there are certain examples cited of of bugs being introduced into the final level and stuff like this. Um Oliver, I've got to get your opinion on this. Yeah, I think it's a bit of very strange lawyering and it doesn't seem to have too much resemblance to reality. Because I think it's interesting because actually we do have examples of the inverse case to this where Sony started to ship the MLB the show games that we on Xbox and those versions are very comparable to the PlayStation versions. Like there's no feature level deficits or like significant performance deficits, I don't think, between the two consoles. So you kind of have to look at that example and say, well, you know, Sony is at least a good you know, they're they're they're a good partner with this stuff. And I don't really don't think it makes sense for Microsoft to go out of their way to make a worse version of Call of Duty for PlayStation, especially because their agreements seem to specify that PlayStation is getting a feature complete version of the game. Obviously not a version that's on, you know, PlayStation Pass or PS Plus or whatever, but you know, it's a it should be a PlayStation Pass. Yeah. PlayStation Pass. Yeah, yeah. It's the new one. Yeah. What w whatever it looks like in twenty twenty five or whatever. Um and we also have examples of Microsoft taking games to Sony platforms recently, specifically Symbethesda games. So we had the Doom Eternal RT update and Deathloop, which obviously came out first on PlayStation, and the PlayStation versions there were very similar. Actually, I think in the case of Doom Eternal, I would arguably say the PlayStation version might even have a little bit better image quality because they aren't using VRS in that version. VRS? Yeah. So so all history between the two parties basically says that these will probably, you know, won't very likely be good faith attempts to recreate Call of Duty on PlayStation probably very much. This is the issue, I the issue from my perspective is this concept of intended malicio us uh uh dealings to to disadvantage a specific platform where I can't actually think of yeah, when it comes to those multi-platform ports between the platform holders. Everybody has has been actually rather well behaved. And you know, I also think it casts shade on uh the developers. Um you know the the the idea that they would go along with this is is you know, when you consider a a developer with the technical chops and the reputation of Infinity Ward, uh I think it's a disservice to the d to the developer to even suggest it. I think it is lawyering gone mad . And uh the sooner this whole circus is over the better really. Um which kind of leads us on to the other thing which was dominating the news this week which is the arguments that Microsoft has put forward that they can get Call of Duty or well not they I suspect it will be somebody like Infinity Ward can get a native switch version of Call of Duty running and they've previously said that would be feature complete. Uh now we did a uh I wrote an article about this and I think we discussed it on a prior direct, which basically suggested well a cloud version would be doable but not advisable um for various reasons. Next gen switch, no problem. Alex do you think did we get it wrong? Is the question there. Do you think we could make a uh not we uh the developers could could could get a native version of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone running on the Switch? I mean the paperwork describes prior impossible ports like Doom Eternal and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, they were talking about a feature complete version of the game. And Call of Duty, I mean, going back to well, the last call of Duty game that did not run at 60 frames per second, I think was Call of Duty 3 on the PlayStation 3. And that's not because they didn't want it to. I consider 60 frames per second as part of the defining DNA of Call of Duty and it 's not Call of Duty if you're not at 60, but at the same time we have seen a lot of 60 games translated onto Switch at 30. Yeah. So and I think that's where the magic would be. And also just the like the most most of the impossible switch ports also end up doing a lot of special work there in regards to just like models looking different. In the in case of impossible ports like um maybe it was the second Wolfenstein game, it was like where they even edited the level geometry at certain instances to make it so you couldn't see uh like uh far away det ail to keep the frame rate up. I think that's what it would end up entailing to do it like this. And I think it would be a very compromised experience. I don't sixty is not at all possible. Um it would be a 30 compromised experience probably with warzone being maybe a much more variable experience than that because in that game presuming it would have crossplay uh because the they really have extensive crossplay options in Call of Duty. Um you could not necessarily uh compromise things like view distance because people are just sniping you and you couldn't see them. Yeah. Um I don't think we're wrong. I just think it's very it would just be super, super compromised um if and when they bring it out. Just we would have to look at it. But I think just there's all of these I am always impressed by them. John is always impressed by them. The Golver is too. You are rich. But I've always said like that's not the way I would play the game. Like I wouldn't play Doom Eternal on the Switch, personally. I think it's very neat from a technical perspective, but like you could play it with sixty with like mouse controls, you know. Or one twenty with mouse controls. Absolutely, yeah. You know. Which you can do on a Steam Deck. Uh yeah. Obviously not towards a mouse in any easy way. But he can easily run it at sixty. Um but yes, the the switch version, I mean, you know, it's o it's okay at thirty. Fortnite is well, Fortnite last time we looked at it, targeted thirty but had issues sustaining it. And I think that's by virtue of the scale of the of the whole enterprise, you know, hundred player games. Oliver, thoughts on this? Do you think they could get a decent I mean they're talking about modern warfare too and war zone here. Yeah. I guess support is is theoretically possible. I think like Alex said, it's um probably a matter of resetting expectations. Like if you do start to say, okay, we're gonna sacrifice that sixty FPS target, we're gonna go to 30. That's obviously proven uh very fruitful for a lot of impossible ports, especially like the Doom games and the Wolfenstein and whatnot. Those the that's basically the starting point for getting a lot of eighth gen console pedals onto Switch, and I don't see why this would be that different. I think it's such an easy win. Um you know, maybe the resolutions would be like 360p portable or 540p docked, but actually there is something sort of interesting about this, which is that the Call of Duty engine has quite good upsampling. And actually, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, it came out, they did a presentation in Japanese where they said that their upsampling method was derived from a presentation that Infinity Ward had done on the upsampling used for Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. So there there is like the at least some element or the core of their upsampling process as of a few years ago is performant enough to run on switch, so who knows? Maybe that's a great vector for them to just like get a bunch of additional performance overhead, run it a little at a low resolution, get a roughly acceptable result. Um I would think that maybe the RAM would be the biggest issue just because, you know, I mean, the Switch is so RAM constrained when it comes to some of these really demanding titles and the call duty titles have so much asset variety and so many high quality assets and incidental bits of detail and it's kinda crazy nowadays. Um the the other aspect of it of course is that Apex Legends runs on Switch, Warzone runs on uh mobile devices already, we have Fortnite on Switch. You know, I don't think it's like the engine technology I, think is, probably suitable for switch. It's really just a question of degree. I think that's what it is. It's a question of how far are you willing to go? Are you willing to get a 30 FPS experience with a really unsteady war zone mode? Or or is that not acceptable Well I think Microsoft are actually saying that as well in citing those as examples, right? If they're talking about uh you know Doomaturn or Apex Legends uh Fortnite, you know, you can look at those titles, you can see how they compare against the um the these existing console versions. I guess the saving grace is that the um you know Warzone 2 uh does have an existing last gen version. I mean they've got it running on Xbox One um and you know not great but it runs and there are further um compromises that could be made beyond that to accommodate a smaller screen you know for example smaller resolute lower resolutions uh and yeah, it's interesting that you cite the temporal super sampling because I did actually see how Vanguard looks without it on the base PlayStation 4. And you wouldn't believe how low resolution it actually is and how good it looks after that upscaling process. So yeah, I think there's there's a lot of potential technologies that could be deployed there. I don't envy Infinity Ward having to do this though, right? It's it's not really in a time where we're looking to banish Crossgen and look forward to the new generation of consoles and all that they have to offer uh to suddenly sort of drop a switch version into the mix and say, hey, you know, get on with it. We want to bring this game to a hundred and fifty million more devices. That's probably not the engineering challenge that they they would relish at this point. But at the same time, they can't, you know, Call of Duty is so large, the installed PlayStation base is so huge that they can't let go of those um uh older consoles in the way that other franchises can, right? It's more of a FIFA situation where you've got to accommodate these devices for many years to come. And, you know, there are vectors in which you could downgrade the base Xbox One experience still further visually and it would look okay on a handheld screen? I guess the question is really how far do you cut and at what point does it become unfair? Uh I noticed looking at um uh I was looking at Warzone on an Intel arc actually, and I was uh fiddling about with settings to get 4K um XESS , and you know the grass settings are actually quite you know wide ranging, for example. Turn those off, it actually increases visibilities quite a lot. So there is the question of fairness as well within that experience. I don't think it could compare but against you, for example, going up against a PC user with ultra wide and uh keyboard and mouse controls. But but they 're one forty four. Oh my god. They should let you disable, I think, the cross platform matchmaking. I think they let you do that in the existing Yeah, they do. But but I personally would would be very interested in a Call of Duty on Switch because I actually played a lot of Black Ops 2 on the Wii U, right when that came out. And I will tell you that the multiplayer lobbies in Black Ops 2 on Wii U were a lot easier than the multiplayer lobbies in Black Ops 2 on Xbox 360. So it's a a good chance to to maybe clean up a little bit and bring up that KD ratio. So it might be fun. We did have a a supporter question from not not Robert Harper. I suspect he's trying to cunningly double bluff us here. It probably probably is Robert Harper. Going by how compromised modern warfare two on the Xbox One S is, do you predict the hypothetical switchport would simply target thirty FPS instead? I think we've covered that. With CPU likely being the main bottleneck, particularly in Warzone. I just can't see how they would target any higher than that. I think we've covered that. I think we agree. And I think Microsoft agrees based on the uh examples that it's citing. Uh this is the weird part of the question . Do you believe other versions may be paired back to accommodate it? Or that perhaps this agreement only extends to the switch successor? Well, what we can say is that it doesn't only extend to the switch successor because that rules out the hundred and fifty million devices, right? Um I don't believe that Infinity Ward um would pair back the other versions to accommodate it. Um I think it would be the switch version that would be paired back, evidently. I mean it wouldn't make any sense. Um I agree. Yeah. Let's move on to the next news topic. Halo Infinite season three has is upon us, finally and um we're not really covering the game that much these days but there is an interesting technical addition to the to the game which is that um raid facing has been added to the PC version. I believe it's multiplayer only. I believe it's Sun Shadows. Um and obviously we do have in our midst Mr. Raid facing Alex Batalia. So I gotta cover this. I think we should talk about here because um it's I mean well the the this is another question, right? Have you got better things to be doing with your time? Um for for channel coverage, yes. Um we've shown in the past, I think our last couple Halo videos, you know, you can always see a slight decrease in viewer count each Halo video that comes up. And the last one is probably the least viewed Halo video, I'd imagine. Um but uh so I don't think we'll be covering this in the main channel, but I do actually like them going back into the game, at least on the PC version here, with a promise to bring this over to the Xbox consoles. I think it was just Series X was mentioned so far. And adding some ray tracing. Is it the ray tracing I would add to Halo Infinite? And I don't think the answer there is yes. Because it applying to multiplayer first is most people actually when they play multiplayer games, especially on the PC, is they're not actually very interested in graphical quality. As sad as that is from my perspective as a reviewer, um, they're turning down things. We just talked about grass and call of duty. Um I recently saw watched some streams of people playing that game from MBARK, whose name is escaping me right now, but everyone was playing it at like zero FPS. I mean uh zero graphics, million FPS with massive FOVs. So I think it's a little bit out of place coming to multiplayer first. I don't think I would have done that. Rather I think it coming to campaign on PC first would have been very interesting because then we could have seen whether or not it affected some of the core complaints John and I had back in the day with regards to uh like shadow distance in the game and shadow quality at a distance, which was lacking. Uh with the multiplayer maps, it's actually pretty hard to tell, but one of the things that was very noticeable was that at least up close within the mid distance, not up super up close, but like within the mid distance, some shadows would be called out due to the shadow maps uh not being so good uh at a mid-distance, and it would definitely improve the shadow coverage at like the mid-distance. But from the further distance, it didn't actually look too different. Didn't look like it was extending the range of the shadows from what I've seen so far. Um, I think actually, if they did go back in and add in ray tracing to the campaign, I was actually looking forward towards something like Ray Trace Amul Inclusion or Ray Trace GI, which one of Halo's biggest issues in my pre-launch coverage, and I think at launch was just how almost like forspoken, where just like there's this just kind of like really generic global illumination that's used at times for a lot of the game world, and it just like everything in shadow s just like glowing constantly glowing it's like blue everything's glowing blue and um things like ray tracing amin inclusion and ray chase gi due to their modification of global illumination or replacing it really fixed that and we saw that in things like most recently the Witcher 3's uh enhanced edition where the original game looked blue almost in shadows always and the new version on consoles and on PC with the GI and RT AO on looks a lot different and a lot better as a result. That's what I would have loved to have seen here. Maybe it would have made that 30 FPS mode they have weirdly somewhat viable and usable for the campaign. Um but here I think shadows is just maybe this is some sort of leftovers from the AMD partnership at at some at some level. You know, for example FSR two's not in there uh which might be would have also been a nice to thing to have seen here. So it's hard to sit really say how they're going to advance the game further in the future, given all the layoffs that occurred, including on their tech team. Um so I'm happy to see it, but I I actually could have wanted something more and different. Okay. Thoughts on this one, Oliver? It's not the most overwhelming addition to the game, is it? No. Well it's not yeah, th there are definitely other aspects of Halo Infinite's visuals that you'd think are in more urgent need of developer attention than this. Right. But I actually did play some of this yesterday. I went into multiplayer and forge and just checked it out. And I actually came away pretty pleased actually with with what I saw. Because it adds a lot of small scale shadow map detail that you don't see in Halo Infinite because the in Halo Infinite the maximum shadow resolution is seems pretty limited even on PC, like you don't get a lot of that nice small coverage, and then of course, they aren't using any sort of like um SDF type techniques to extend out shadow distance too far, so you just get like totally cut off shadows at a distance, and from what I saw, at least, and I'll include some capture of it here. I was seeing a lot of uh nice shadowing, including really nice self-shattering on the trees, very accurate self-shattering on the trees that you would not have gotten before because the resolution was too low. And um yeah, I was really impressed even on things like character models and on the Warthogs and things like that, just lots of self-shading that again is basically lost in the original because the resolution is not sufficient. So I was pleased with that. The part that I'm not too pleased with, I guess, is yeah, AO would be great. GI would be great. Obviously, there's a wish list of things I could I could go on for all day about things I'd like to change in the LO infinity . Um, but the big disappointment for me as someone who's not super into multiplayer and I don't know, it's not in the campaign, which sort of sucks because that seems like the most natural place for it. I hope they do implement it in the campaign at some point soon. I guess I'm happy they implemented it, but they implemented it in a way that is not really personally that appealing to me. I wouldn't mind playing through Halo Infinite again on PC. But uh but it's not there. Yeah. I get what you're saying because you know in the campaign you can actually have time to linger on the details. You can appreciate the visual upgrades and uh in the multiplayer it's just phonetic plastic from start to finish so yeah it isn't really a great fit uh alex you were talking earlier about that game from Imbark Studios I. think you're referring to the finals. Yes, that's what it's called Um have you played it at all? No, I haven't. Um it's uh between coverage it's always hard to get in especially one that's just like a closed beta release um and things like that. But I did notice that it has believe DLSS support and RTX GI support. Yeah, because we actually have a a question from Automata and we can't answer it because we haven't played it. But he's basically asking if we've checked it out. He's saying uh the big selling point is insane levels of destru ction and yeah it supports RTGI and um he's actually the first game he uses DLS S3 in which is a competitive multiplayer because actually seems to work out well for him there. So maybe we should check that one out. Um but yeah . Okay, let's move on to supporter QA. That is the part of the show where every week we poll our supporters on Patreon. We ask them for questions to include within DFDirect weekly. We choose the best or rather the ones that we are actually equipped to answer because there's a whole bunch of questions there. And uh yes, we present them uh for your viewing pleasure. Uh the first question is from Zephyr. Hi DF team, exclamation point, with many games dropping their proprietary engines and recent games using proprietary engines like Woe Long Fallen Dynasty uh or Dynast y struggling to deliver next-gen experiences. Are we now at the point where in-house engines are no longer feasible? Is this signalling the end of the era of games using bespoke engines? Now, this is a topic we've talked about endlessly in the past . Um, Alex, thoughts on this one? I mean, it is we are seeing these engines fall off, right? There's no doubt about it, but at the same time, we're also seeing that when um uh middlewares or or third party engines like unreal engine are used, there can be issues . Yeah, so this is a really hard question. I would love to hear what all you have to say about it too. Um, I do think just the recent rash in the last year and a half of uh companies that historically have been like super about their own tech switching over to Unreal, uh, just is proof of this this occurring, but I still don't think it actually applies to every game studio out there . And for example, look at something like id . It's a studio that where their technology is actually enabling their games. Uh their crisp 60 FPS, um, their emphasis on like lower latency controls, gener ic you know I don't ever see them switching over to Unreal. And I think this is it's part studio culture and it's part um how much like how specific their game is in terms of what it needs to be doing. Because Unreal can't do everything. And neither can Unity. And that's why these engines still have their place. And for a game like World Long and all as well as um that Monster Hunter clone, my goodness, we just covered it and the name is this yes, Wild Hearts. Which is also running on this katana engine, I believe it is called, which also powered Neo two before this . That's one it's an instance where I'm actually really saddened about the what has happened there because I actually always liked the way Neo two looked . Um and here it seems like the engine in its own right should actually be fine, but I think it's almost being like pushed out too quickly and too early and with not enough polish uh for the platforms it's releasing on . Um and that's what is mainly the issue here. And I think there's a slight when a game per doesn't perform well and it's running on custom tech, like let's look at First Foken, for example, I don't think there's anything wrong with the tech per se. I think it's the project usually. There's something like there's some sort of scheduling with the project. The you know, maybe there was some trouble midway development. And it's not really the tech that's the problem, but it's the project. But then after the fact, uh to either appease stockholders, appease platform holders, appease someone that is not happy with the game sales, there's a blame put on the technology. Uh I think that kind of happened with Cyberpunk, because I don't think Red Engine proved itself to be poor or anything like that. It just proved that the their their project was not a good fit necessarily for last gen consoles within the time constraints they had. And then it they switched over to Unreal, which m was almost like a deflection in my opinion. And I feel like that can happen and I don't want that to happen. I would rather prefer that there was a greater diversity of engines and they all were given their time to shine with a with a project that has enough time for the platforms bits being released on, which hasn't happened yet for a lot of studios, unfortunately. I don't know if this is COVID, or if it's just the new era we're in where games release unfinished. Um but that's that's how I feel about this question. Okay, all of our thoughts? Yeah, I think it's tricky because in the case of Wol ong , uh I covered Stranger of Paradise. I played a bit of Neo 2 and I've played Well, I ran into a bit of a brick wall with the first boss on Wolong, so I won't say that I've played You've played Wolong. Played at least you have ex experienced I've experienced at least the first twenty minutes of gameplay of wool on I actually thought Neo 2 didn'to bad. Stranger of Paradise was a I mean I was I was not very pleased with it at all woolong looks uh better than than stranger paradise i'm not sure how it compares to neo two it looks probably in the same ballpark uh but i'm not that i'm not that happy with the way the game looks frankly i i wasn't that happy with what I saw from how the game's GI comes together, how just how the lighting comes together. I was not that happy with it. In some respects, it's not even really up to the standards of a good looking, a reasonable looking last gen game, in my opinion. Just again, just from what I saw, just from what I played in that initial section. It also suffered from really bad stuttering issues. I don't know those have been fixed. It has for frame rate problems. Tom covered that in his his piece. And it's a disaster on last gen , and it's a big problem on series S. So I don't know, at some point you kind of have to throw up your hands and say, like, this is a team that's clearly very skilled, like there's great art in these games, combat, gameplay is fantastic. Uh would it be better for them to move to a different tool set given all the myriad issues on this one? I mean, I think that's a reasonable proposition, personally. Um kind of the broader question, I think, is a bit more complicated. And I think it's been complicated in particular by the adoption of DirectX12, which is hard to manage for smaller engines. You really need to have a lot of engineering resources on on at your disposal for for a studio like id software deplo ying their own tech with dx twelve or with um with Vulcan or whatever APIs they're using, low level APIs. I'm sure they're totally fine with it. They have a massive engineering staff. Uh like Alex said, it really enables their games. But for uh you know, some some smaller studios with their own custom tech, like we see on PC with Wolong, it's a bit of a bit of a problem. So I don't know what you do about that. I think it in invariably does lead to consolidation whether you like it or not at the moment. Just that's the way that people are being pushed. Well you recently covered like a dragon ishin, which is a company that has essentially moved on in theory possible from its own engine, yes, to Unreal Engine four and that kind of introduced its own problems with the initial launch on PC, which had uh some pretty bad startering issues. But do you think overall that was the w the right move for that developer. Yeah, so so I went into that in a bit of detail in the video. Um with respect to the PC issues, there were some compilation issues at launched, although those were they weren't at nearly as bad as a lot of other titles. And they did fix it within a week or so with that update. And it basically the game does not have shader comp um any significant shader comp stutters as far as I can tell now. In that case it's a bit, you know, the Dragon Engine that has some problems. I don't think the l uh indirect lighting in the dragon lit engine looks that great, especially during the daytime when you only have like one light source, you know, and you've just got the sun to deal with. It's was not that attractive. I I mean I covered that in in m my piece. Um it's a bit tough to compare the, you know, recent uh Yakuza or Lyka Dragon titles directly with Ishin, because Ishin is like a real generation straddler with all kinds of different assets pulled from a release that came out nine years ago. So uh but the lighting quality does look a lot better, I think, than Dragon Engine titles. So even in that case, it's sort of like, well, I I I'm not saying they should switch from Dragon Engine, and I'm not sure if that's something that's totally set in stone, at least publicly at this point comparisons you might expect. Yeah. Let's move on to the next question from Joe Esposito. Curious if the team has ever considered doing some PC build videos. With a level of expertise in the group, I'd be very interested in high end, mid tier and budget gaming build videos. Just an idea for your abundance of free time. I think he's pretty ironic there. Uh I think I'll I'll take this one. I mean um I like this yeah I guess we we could do them. Um I just think the concept of doing a PC build is actually quite personal. So I guess that would have to be reflected in the video. And to be honest, I'm not, you know, if I was to create in fact I did recently in the Intel sponsored video we did on ARC, I just built a um a mid-tier gaming PC from scratch. It's not very exciting because I'm not particularly interested in um you know RGB stuff, uh crazy coolers, and uh everything being white, that seems to be quite a trend these days. Um I'm just not particularly interested in that. So ultimately what you're left with is um the components chosen and what you can do with them which is what we put into every one of our videos I think um on the PC side we try to get um as as much as time allows, um, a perspective on how a game will perform on various systems and what you can do with it. I do actually did quite I mean again, I mean it's the it's these sponsored videos where we actually have time to to put a you know quite a lot of effort into it. And uh we did one also on a um RTX 3070 mobile within a razor laptop. And that was a really interesting experience as well because you could actually, you know, quantify an experience on a console and then compare it to what this laptop is doing. So yeah that's kind of stuff that I find quite interesting but in terms of you know component choices and stuff like that. Um it doesn't particularly excite me. And I also think that the end result would probably disappoint quite a lot of people because part of the circus of this kind of thing is to actually produce some sort of crazy wacky uh brightly illuminated device it just doesn't interest me at all uh I mean if you saw the inside of my PC I mean you occasionally see in um the Linus Tech Tik videos where they swap out a GPU for a new AMD one or whatever. You actually see what a state their PCs are and my PC is a state. I'm not sure I'd want to publicly advertise it the same way. Thoughts, Alex? Um so I w I almost feel like I was thinking about this and I was saying like I'm of the m opinion of Rich where maybe around the year 2005 I was like, wow, you can put LEDs in your PC? That is interesting. That was also the around the time period when when there was almost like a shift in the visual look and language of PC design, moved from beige and dark towers to more extravagant des igns. Yep. Um and uh I'm kind of really over that. So uh for me I would it would be interesting to build uh like a mute PC in terms of how loud it is. I would also be interested in building a smaller form factor PC, something that is PS5 or Xbox Series X, like Intel NUC style kind of thing. I think those are very interesting builds. But there isn't a huge aftermarket uh for the GPU side of things that is fitting in those constraints anymore at least in the mid-range yeah new mid-range. I have been considering a build that would be, you know, quantifiably twice as fast as a PS5 in every single way. So you would have like CPU limited scenarios, you'd have GPU limited scenarios across a range of games . And then the question is, could you actually fit it into a console style form factor? That might be quite fun. So, you know, there are some ideas there, but the you know, the basic concept of doing, you know, uh uh a budget high end, mid tier. It's it does yeah, I think there needs to be a bit of sparkle and interest added there. Um Oliver, haven't you just built a PC? I did, yeah, a couple of weeks ago. That's what's been featured in uh I think like my last three or four videos have all featured it in some way just through coincidence. Of a DDR5 and a two-terabyte um NVMe SSD and it's it's pretty good. Um but yeah I don't think I don't think people would be too interested to see my building process because I literally just went on New Egg, got a bunch of stuff that was on sale. And I like it I did the the interior wiring is all pretty good because I'm not expecting to well hopefully who knows stuff. I don't think I'll be doing too much of that. But um the system itself is nicely put out, but it's not fancy. And the RGB, I mean I do have RGB fans, but I turn them off. So it's not like fancy. And there's no like it's there's no like custom like people do crazy custom you know liquid cooling and stuff. I have a you know I have an all-in-one liquid cooler. You know, it's it's not it's not super sexy attractive. Wow, here's a cool new PC. It's just like here's what I could I am still amused by the concept of this abundance of free time that Joe X Esposito is referring to. But let's move on to the next question. This one's from Celtic Guardian four two one. Uh do you think the ARM architecture has a future in the gaming PC slash console space? Obviously it's already ubiquitous in mobile phones and portables like the Switch. Do you think that with Moore's Law slowing down that PCs and slash or consoles might need to switch to ARM in order to keep up performance gains? Alex, I'm not sure about this because it seems to me that there's still s you know relative stagnation in the ARM space in term in terms of um single core performance, that kind of thing. It looks like there was an an explosion of innovation spearheaded by Apple at one point But it seems that now we're seeing similar solutions to the PC space, which is to go wide rather than go fast. So I feel like that explosion in the arm that happened with Apple was about the package, right? It was about the included memory on the package, right? Um and that seems like it was just like a huge explosion in performance. Oliver covered it really well, I feel, when he when he talked about it. And um a lot of people have also made videos about it and it is very specific. I think PC as in the U the PC standard of ATX and motherboards and separate RAM slots currently makes the idea of including RAM on package um not completely tenable for anything that isn't like an APU style build, which we don't see. I wish there was more AMD support for APUs actually in the wider PC space that included memory on package like that. In some way, it would be really interesting to see what they could put out for like mid-range PCs. Maybe someone could just buy something like that. But I currently don't think it has been proven out to be the necessary place that PCs need to go beyond X eighty six, X6 4, because I'm actually pretty impressed with what uh Intel and AMD have done in the last two generations. I feel like it is gotten better than it was previously before. Um prices are obviously a whole different question, but I feel like there's still a lot of room to grow there in ways. And the heterogeneous architecture from Intel is one path that is going to be interesting, as well as uh AMD's many core CCX um introduction of 3D cache, et cetera. They're all trying to grow in a different way. And I'm interested to see the way they take them. And I don't think it a switch to ARM would do anything for us other than maybe reset the backwards compatibility button, which I don't want to see. Right. Yes. So so I'm happy actually with X86, X64 Well this could this this concept is actually part of your everyday life really, isn't it, Oliver? Because you use Max pretty much exclusively for your production process, which means that you have actually managed an Inelt to ARM trans ition and I think you're quite happy with it, aren't you? Oh I'm quite happy with the MAX. Yeah, I love the M1 and M2 based Macs. I have an M1 Ultra with the or a Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra right here, and it's fantastic. I really couldn't be happier just with the general performance of the machine, um, how it compares to uh uh PC hardware that you might be familiar with. It's right capable. Obviously, I did a video on this some some time ago. But to me, the question I think people get really messy with this question because there's the instruction set, right? And there's ARM CPUs that ARM designs, and there's ARM derived designs, and people get really messed up with these questions. So with the instruction set, I think it's basically unrelated because instruction sets nowadays they're all very complex. ARM ISAs started out being relatively simple, they've become more bloated over time. You know, you need to expand to support a lot of functions that they didn't need to support when they were in um you know calculators in nineteen ninety-six or something. You know, you didn't need that much. Nowadays you need very complicated ISAs. So I think the inst ruction set part, just toss that out of your mind. It's it's it's not a an especially relevant part of modern CPU core uh relative power efficiency, whatever. That's whatever. In terms of the the ARM CPUs themselves and the ARM as the ARM based SOCs themselves, ARM Limited, who actually designs the ISA, and they also make uh CPU core designs that are based on their ISA . And those have fallen behind the curve in recent years in uh smartphones and tablets and things like that. Um, they've not really been keeping pace in particular with Apple's ARM CPUs, but Apple's ARM CPUs are custom CPUs that are designed using the ARM ISA. So they license the ISA. They don't license CPU cores for most devices. They think they use an ARM uh CPU core for the Apple Watch, but everything else is custom at this point. Everything else is totally custom, totally Apple made. And those CPU core designs are competitive with the most power-efficient uh core designs in PCs today, which I would say is uh AMD Zen 4 design, which is on a very similar process node. Like, for instance, if you take a Zen 4 like a 750X summary at the 65 watts , I have an uh I have an M1 Ultra that can be brought to 50 watts and the performance is pretty similar. Both have sixteen high performance cores, etcetera. So it's kind of a a very long winded way of basically saying that I think ISA is basically unrelated and people should toss that from their heads. It really comes down to specific CPU core design . And I don't really see any reason why anyone should be switching to ARM in particular, especially considering that the ARM CPU core designs that you're going to license are going to be a lot less suitable for a high performance device than something that, say AMB would sell you . Okay. Yeah, fair enough. Let's move on to the next question from Eric Hurst. Alex, would you consider remaking your tech focus on do you really need ultra settings? Nowadays, when PC spec requirements are released for a game , folks tend to associate resolutions such as 4K with one or two graphics cards. But at the same time, the association is tied to ult for settings. Looking at the requirements for The Last of Us Part 1 on PC, it claims that it needs an RTX forty eighty to achieve four K sixty at Ultra, but surely four K sixty or close to it could easily be achieved with dialed back graphic settings and some good old DLSS. Do you think Ultra s ettings are a tech focus topic worth revisiting in the here and now ? Thank you. Yes. The answer is yes. Probably is because I think one thing that that tech focus that dates it uh is the it's pre-ray tracing and it's pre-dLSS like you mentioned here and ray tracing is usually actually good ultra settings the type that we wanted back when I made that video, I was I was kind of complaining that oh ultrasettings are like it's just like two samples more. It's like three samples more or something like that. You can you can see when you stop and pause a screenshot of something in motion um versus you know rt which is usually more transformative to the whole image at a certain cost um i'd say that kind of dates the video as well dlss were yeah, there's there's a lot that could be said now to update that video, but the general concept is still true. Uh and the the last of us example will bear out with our coverage, but I imagine if it's like any other game, for example, I look at uh Plague Tail Requiem that came out where you go down to like the medium setting for a lot of things versus the highest end setting , you get a game that looks broadly super similar, but you're getting a good healthy chunk of performance back to maybe spend on other areas like resolution, which might be more beneficial for the game. So yeah, I would definitely like to re return to this topic in a updated form at some point. Um for sure. I like this idea. Okay. Sounds like a plan. Let's move on to the final question from Mr. Bespoke. Uh hi Alex, just wondering what has ever become of your crisis shrine since it hasn't been in the background for some time now. Is it because it's not worthy of being a shrine or, is it because it's been destroyed by a backlash of anger towards your hatred of state of of starter struggle, frame pacing and shader compilation? Yeah, what what does what has happened to the uh crisis shrine while we're Well it's still technically there. I just haven't lit it in a while. It's like it'd be like in the background there. My my setup changed and it was usually easy to get s sneak into a shot at some point, but now the room is wider and the things in the background are further away. Would you d would you care about this little tiny flame there? Like right there. I don't think You could light it at any moment. But I just have not maybe maybe um there is some talk here in internally at the studio um um moving some of this around and I think I may actually reintroduce it at that point. It would also include um I have two retro setups technically and I would have one over there and it would maybe be right next to it. So we'll see. Time will take. It would certainly help uh my OCD if, your shelves are actually straight. Dude , dude, Rich, believe me, they are straight. It's the walls that are not straight. I swear to you. This is this is an this building's like over a hundred years old. Um it's the walls that are not straight. The floor is also not straight. Every single time I move the the the camera in front of me I always have to auto level uh and tilt it. So it is fair enough. Just just nitpicking. Uh Oliver, any shrines we should be aware about uh aware of in your in your area there? No. I mean there there are some games that I've thought about getting like some collector's editions or something and putting those around like uh Final Fantasy Thirteen or like World of Warcraft Classic or Half-Life or different different games I really enjoy. But uh no, not not at the moment. I have a pretty I have a pretty Spartan I don't like to decorate too much. Fair love. Uh well that's it. That's the end of the show. And uh if you enjoyed it, please do like, subscribe, share, and uh of course ring the bell for those uh I have beggating admitted they are instant notifications I'm still I'm still getting those notifications of that I really hate it does work the technology has been proven. Uh yes, so do ring the bell for those instant notifications. DF Support programme. Join us. Join our amazing community. Submit questions to the show and of course um we typically well typically we always give early access to the show a couple of days in advance to supporters and there's a bunch of bonus material, early access and some amazing retro stuff happening there. So yes, join us, but that's all from us for this week and we'll see you next week.