DF Direct Weekly #254: Xbox Project Helix, Sony Exiting PC? Starfield PS5, Crimson Desert Console!

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See for TV game here, got a copy of Pepsi Man finally for the PlayStation one.

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You just want to play this game.

He also was in fighting vipers if you remember as an unlockable character, I believe.

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And in the back, we've got another special guest for the podcast list.

There's Mike Mark, not Mike, Mark Triforce, that'll send us back to their recording footage

for the latest episode of the D-Friture Super Show, which is about 90s, 2000s, like awesome

water games for the focus on wave rays, but we go into a bunch of them.

So be sure to check out the other soon.

Awesome.

Okay, well, let's crack on with our first news topic.

Okay, a first news story of the week.

This one came in last night, Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Microsoft has announced that the

next generation Xbox part of the word turn of Xbox strategy.

It has a code name, Project Helix.

And she's saying it will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games.

So effectively, black and white confirmation of things that we've been talking about

what for two years now.

And it turns out that Jason Ronald, the head of next generation at Microsoft, is going

to be giving a talk at GDC, discussing the path ahead.

John, what do you think about all of this?

Wow.

It's interesting to me that they've chosen to announce it this way.

And I say that because, I don't know, I wonder if this is the right strategy or not.

We're going to have to wait to see, I hope so.

But Xbox Series X was all kind of just dropped as a thing back at the Game Awards, if you recall.

And it just kind of had this slow build up.

And I wonder if like a more hype thing that really shows what they're trying to do would

have been more effective because they're trying to make a comeback here, right?

And having a vision, the way Apple does it or the way Nintendo does it, I think is possibly

more effective.

I don't know.

But since they have gone this route, I'm excited to see what the heck this actually becomes.

And I would say by announcing it now, they're basically saying, yeah, we're going to head

with this no matter what, right?

Which we've obviously been concerned about the state of things in terms of new hardware

with the memory crisis, storage crisis happening right now.

So obviously we discussed PlayStation 6 arriving later.

We don't know what the state of their handheld thing is.

Like it just seems like a really difficult time, the steam machine.

But with this, it seems like Microsoft is planting the flag and say we're moving ahead

with this product.

And I get it.

I think that makes a lot of sense.

And I recently said that Xbox Series consoles were dead and a lot of people didn't like

that.

But dead, when I say that, I mean like that, they have to focus on what's next, right?

And being dead, so to speak, from a marketing perspective, does not mean bad, does it?

Like, you know, Saturn and Dreamcast are two of my favorite machines ever.

And they failed miserably a lot worse than the Xbox that's for sure.

It doesn't change how awesome they are.

And that's the same year with Xbox Series, it's a great machine.

It's just that Microsoft going forward, clearly they have to find a different path.

And I think this is the beginning of that new path.

And do we have more details about the PC connection and everything?

No, we have nothing.

So we don't really, but they do say player Xbox and PC games, right?

Yeah.

Which suggests that it does indeed offer what we've kind of been theorizing in that this

is no longer going to be just a normal games console that's isolated with its own sort

of SDKs and everything, but it's going to be a PC style platform, which again, the benefit

here, I think, and I'll be curious to see what they say at GDC is that this should conceivably

allow developers to more easily target Xbox without having to do extra work of going

specifically for a different bespoke platform, right?

I don't know.

I reckon they'll do both.

And I think what's going to happen is there'll be a section of the storage that's specifically

for Xbox.

Oh, okay.

And then there'll be like a sort of standard Windows 11 that you can access and then you

gain the partition.

I guess, I guess now that you say it, that makes sense when you consider the name project

Helix, right?

So okay, okay, I get it.

So that I guess it basically means that, you know, I mean, how do you maintain a secure

ecosystem within Windows 11 as tight as Xbox or at the moment, the answer is you can't

really.

So, you know, the idea of having things partitioned off kind of makes sense to me.

And it, it's basically like the way I see it as a sort of dual function machine.

And I think that sort of makes sense.

I like, I like, okay, yeah, that's actually a really good point.

And that's actually what you've talked about in the past, actually, John, where you've

got Steam OS, where you've got like Steam OS, the sort of Steam deck fun end.

And then you can just dip back into the Linux desktop if you want that's what I'm suspecting.

That's kind of what I've been hoping for.

And but I guess with Steam OS, they're still linked technically, right?

Yeah, yeah.

In this case, they may do something where the Steam OS like game style portion of whatever

they're making would be more walled off than it is on the Steam deck.

And then it's like a bespoke secure place to play Xbox games from whatever, you know,

their Xbox marketplace store.

I guess the question I have is whether there'll be a way to sort of like link those together,

like Steam, because like from the Steam OS menu, you can't do that much.

But on the desktop side, you can at least link up things into that menu.

So you can have games and custom stuff like actually appear within your like quote unquote,

like collection on the main interface.

And I think that's really valuable.

And that's I feel like that's something that they should probably try to get right because

you got to imagine like, you know, if it's two completely separate things that might

not be that appealing to people.

But if you're able to bring PC stuff like custom over into that game OS experience, that

makes it like extra compelling because that solves the problem that a lot of the home

theater PCs have had for a long time.

That's what that's the problem that bad side kind of solves, right?

Where you basically have a PC in your living room and you can just use it front end, but

you can bring things into the front end if you want.

So I'll be curious to see if they can pull it off because I think that would be awesome.

Okay, what do you think?

Yeah, I am really curious to see the extent to which like you can play maybe PC games in

the Xbox interface.

And indeed, if they are intent on continuing to ship Xbox games at the same time as their

shipping PC software beyond just its applicability to Xbox series, they'd be shipping a version

of the game that might run an Xbox series, but would also run with enhancements on this

next generation Xbox and Xbox partition.

That's an area that I'm kind of curious about and I'm particularly curious about because

I think this is probably a smaller volume play than Xbox has been traditionally at least

this initial product.

I think will be a smaller volume play just based off of its likely die size and price.

So would Microsoft really have the power to kind of push developers to ship multiple versions

of the same game to target the PC platform?

Fundamentally, this will be a PC it can play those PC games, depending on how the the

porting process goes if the GDK I mean, maybe it's acceptably easy to do so.

But that's something that I'd be very curious about.

I think you can probably take it as read here that Microsoft is basically staying the course

of next generation Xbox going full steam ahead despite the change in management here.

This aligns with like all the rumors that you've heard for years and years at this point

that Magnus Speckley's wood play set is the most powerful console and both Xbox and

PC games are obviously implicated here.

But I think like maybe there's a bit of a different push with this because obviously

the console aspect of it is front and center.

There's none of this.

This is an Xbox framing about this device.

It's not really being positioned as one of a family, one of part of a family of devices.

It's being positioned as its own unique next generation Xbox console device.

It's a very different kind of framing even if the underlying strategy is not that different.

I'd expect to see probably more forward announcements from Microsoft going forward than Sony because

they're in a position where they don't really have a very good console platform at the

moment.

They need to promote the future to give people hope in their console platform efforts.

I think that's something they're very concerned about.

It's especially concerning because obviously we see that the current generation Xbox

platforms are not selling in such wide numbers.

You know, that Xbox series consoles are selling to a small fraction of their PlayStation

equivalents.

But that also extends to confidence in the installed base that the consoles have.

For instance, there was a recent estimate that Resident Evil Requiem has sold, I think

2.3 million copies on Steam, 1.6 million copies on PS5, and only 300,000 copies on Xbox.

So I think there's a sense as well that a mungly installed base of Xbox series consoles

that those players are less willing to part with their money, presumably because they

have less confidence in that platform and it's going concern going forward, right?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, this whole concept of having a machine that is also a PC, it could

lead to confusion, and I mean, the more I think about it, the more confusing it could potentially

get.

So if you have your Xbox partition, well, what happens if you go to your Windows partition

and load up the Xbox store, do you get two versions of the game, one, the curated version

and one, the PC version, that's a sort of curious idea.

It's not sort of something you sort of think is probably a good idea, but I do think they

have to be separate because the bottom line is, you know, you think about some of the

stuff that Windows has issues with, malware, viruses, well, yeah, basically functionality

at this point.

In my case, putting it a USB flash drive and waiting a minute for it to turn up.

But other stuff like, you know, the whole concept, Xbox simply wouldn't want their ecosystem

to be in any way hackable, which Windows certainly is, right?

So I do think there has to be some level of segregation, but how does that actually all work

in practice?

We've got a question here for support of Michael Peirne, IDF team with the Helix Nextbox confirmed

as a quote, unquote, console, but that runs PC games, what chance will it be that you

no longer have to pay for basic game pass just to play multiplayer games if that basic

internet charge is gone, will Sony follow suit?

It's a little silly in the year of our Lord 2026 that it's free to play marathon online

on a PC versus PS5 acquiring a plus subscription.

That's a fair point, but this also sort of takes us into the whole concept of affordability

because if it is an open Xbox, then basically it's got to be an expensive Xbox.

And I had pushback, I had an email the other day from a guy with the hacker alias Majestic

Boller.

Oh.

He's just sort of made it, made it sort of up there on the spot.

But basically his contention is that the next generation Xbox might be a game pass box.

So basically you would get it at a relatively affordable price.

Let's say he's suggesting here $700, like a PS5 pro, however, you can only play games

that are on game pass ultimate.

And if you want to play your PC games, then you can do so.

But again, you'll need a game pass ultimate subscription to do so, which would kind of

make sense in terms of like being able to provide an affordable Xbox, but surely strikes

at the heart of what the PC is all about.

And if they're looking to unify Xbox and PC, that doesn't particularly square that circle.

Does it?

I think Microsoft is really positioning this as a much more open console box.

But at the same time, I think they run the risk of people basically just booting this

into this device and just using like steam big picture mode all the time, which is honestly

how I kind of foresee myself possibly using a device like this.

But I don't really think they go down the road of like here's an aggressive subsidy

based idea that you're going to use for a millionaire ecosystem.

That's like completely opposite from the model that Microsoft is suggesting they're going

to go down for this box.

Well, but they do have to make it affordable, right?

Well, do that.

I mean, this is something I'm wondering about.

It's like when it comes to pricing, how do they market this?

Because let's say it's a thousand dollars or something.

That would be very, very expensive for a game console, right?

But not that bad for a powerful PC, right?

Yeah, that's the only thing we've used in the past.

So what do you call it?

I don't know.

You know, what if it is, you know, basically an OEM designed the likes of a Susan MSI can

make their own versions of which would have, which, yeah, which wouldn't have like a game

past tie in.

I don't know, you know, I think there's a number of challenges facing this particular

project, which hopefully we'll get some clarity on GDC with from this Jason Ronald

talk, but yeah, I mean, all bets are off, really, we just don't really know at this

point, interesting discussion point, though, a special agent Cooper, our supporter asks,

was an eight second logo reveal teaser, nothing else, the right move to get us all excited

about project helix, well, you know, probably not, but as a kind of teaser that you might

be getting something a bit further along possibly, I don't know, I don't know, I mean, we

can't say what's what's going to be right or wrong until it actually happens and we see

the results, right?

Because that's the challenges they're facing right now.

This is kind of just how it tends to work with new console launches.

There is a slow drip feeder information, but in this case, we already know so much about

the makeup of the console or of a PC like console box, we already know so much about the

Magnus chip, we already know so much about I think about the relative product positioning

otherwise.

We already know all kinds of different things about the chip from various leakers, people

who are well informed about it.

So I don't really feel like there's that much, I mean, there's, there's a bit of interest

I think in the actual mechanical technical, like how are they going to separate Xbox and

Windows?

Do they do a partition?

Do they have with some equivalent for the Xbox full screen experience in the Windows

partition?

Exactly how does that operate?

But in terms of the basic kind of contours of this thing, I feel like there's not that

much suspense.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I think basically they've got to just get people excited about Xbox again.

I still think that none of this actually addresses the core strategy or the core problem

either, which is, you know, at one point, this is an Xbox, everything was an Xbox, but

now that isn't the case.

And so what is an Xbox that's kind of like, you know, what they've got fundamentally

addressed at this point, I guess we'll find out.

You think they can get it down as low as like, I don't know, six, seven, hundred dollars

or something?

Or do you think it's going to be like a thousand plus?

Well, you know, the rumors are talking about this comparatively massive die for the Magnus

chip.

Right.

Chip, chiplet design, they're also talking about, let's just say a generous amount of memory

unified memory.

It's 36 in the leaks, isn't it?

36 gigabytes is a primary.

I mean, it could be long.

That's the one thing that you can change in the design at pretty much any given point.

But you know, man, that would be, I mean, they could go to 24, but there aren't too many

options if they keep the same bus there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's really, really tricky.

I mean, the pricing of this, the timing of it, I suspect at the end of 2027, if they're

still talking about announcements right now, it's got to be next year at some point,

likely the end of next year, I think that would make sense.

Man, who knows what's happening here?

It's quite exciting, though, to actually see official stuff appearing.

I mean, I'm just happy that they're not thrown in the towel.

They're going forward again.

I think it's great because we need this, we need a, I think just reducing the industry

to just play station in Tendo is boring.

Right.

The third player is so critical to like keeping things fresh and keeping these companies on

their toes.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Well, wait and see, I guess.

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Let's move on.

Okay, so we had an interesting report this week from Bloomberg's Jason Shryer,

effectively suggesting that it's the days of Sony's triple A single player games

appearing on PC are now over.

And it's funny because Jason was talking about this for the last week.

He's finally posted his report, but it is quite funny that people were talking about

both Jason Shryer and John Dillberd, John Dillberd, you're the guy who actually unearthed

all of this information.

I don't know that you did.

I think you were just sort of spitballing, hey, you haven't seen much on PC from Sony recently.

What's that?

Yeah, let's have a look at this question here from Zephyr, IDF wanted to express my extreme

disappointment in Sony ceasing their PC porting efforts while I now have a PS5 that I got

used.

I much prefer playing on PC and they've enjoyed numerous Sony published games over the

past few years.

Going forward though, I feel it's likely I'll just play something else.

If sales didn't meet expectations, it's likely due to these ports landing after most

people have already moved on with numerous technical issues to boot exclamation point.

Is that overwhelming the industry now for modest successes seems like these port jobs

should have always been at least somewhat fruitful and that they're now going to be leaving

money on the table, wishing you all the best and hoping that Nixis will be all right.

We should have a lot of support to questions saying, hey, well, you know, what's happening

with Nixis now?

What do you think about this from a strategic perspective?

There's been discussion that across the years, I think it's that five or five years now

of PC ports, Sony made $2.2 billion.

It does sound like money is being left on the table.

So the concept of them pulling back from PC seemingly, this hasn't been confirmed.

It must be more strategic in nature, the decision.

Yeah, this is a very strange situation.

And so Sony has occupied this very unique sort of central point in the market between the

two players where Microsoft with Xbox has gone fully all in on everything PC and other

platforms.

In fact, Nintendo has stuck with you only get Nintendo games in the Nintendo hardware

period.

They've been kind of in the middle.

There's so many factors here, but like if you look at it just from a pure like outside

perspective, you see, all right, these are the two approaches these companies took.

Which one was the bigger success?

Obviously, Nintendo, but that's also Nintendo.

So it's a their software is just renowned for what.

And I actually think Nintendo has shown interestingly that it's beyond just like appearing on

other platforms.

Nintendo is a company that said, we're going to keep our software.

Our software is valuable.

We will retain prices.

Sales will be minimal like this is what we make.

This is what it sells at.

This is what it's worth.

And they found huge success doing that.

And obviously this hinges on Nintendo games being Nintendo games, right?

Whereas Xbox has been arguably devaluing content with this focus on game pass and sales

and just the way they they dull out content is like the polar opposite to what Nintendo

does.

Now this again, though, this gets into the question of like, who actually has the strength

to do that?

Nintendo could do it.

Microsoft, even other games are put on so much amazing stuff.

Like, I don't know if they could pull it off and they haven't and they've obviously taken

a different strategy.

Sony kind of occupies the middle point there as well, where I think some of their franchises

almost have the appeal of an Nintendo game, right?

Like I think you could argue that for certain games like T Liu is huge Spider-Man, God

over 2018 is her huge, but not every game.

So like this gets back to this question about like do console exclusives help drive success

of the platform?

There's I think both sides of the coin have a fair argument there and that in some metrics,

I would say yeah, like exclusive some consoles can drive the success of that platform.

But on the other hand, you can make a lot of money if you're releasing on PC and I

guess I'm wondering where Sony's metrics might be coming from on this kind of stuff because

they already had policies in place for things like you can't ship simultaneous big single

player games on PS5 and PC, right?

The PC game has to come later unless it's like a multiplayer style game or like a remaster

or something.

But if it's a brand new game, new single player game, it has to ship on PS5 first.

That seemed like a good strategy for me based on the numbers, but then again, as we saw

in the last couple releases, I think God of War, Regner, Ox, Spider-Man 2, they didn't

do quite as well maybe as they might have wanted.

But I don't know, I still feel like they left a lot of low hanging fruit like off the

table, like you look at I think Demon Soul's remake, probably would have made a good amount

of money in PC, for instance, more than some of the other games they did.

Yeah.

I think Ghost of Tsushima did really well on PC, right?

Not bringing Yota to PC seems like a miss.

But again, maybe Sony's deciding that they're going to go back to the Nintendo strategy,

maybe the people joking about like, oh, now Xbox can play Sony games on this new project

Helix actually pisses them off and they're like, oh, heck no, you're not, you know what

I mean?

Right.

There is a thing, like if you're releasing all these Sony games on PC and like the Xbox

is what it is, that now you're playing PlayStation games on your Xbox.

Yeah.

And potentially your Steam machine, potentially your Steam machine.

So like maybe all this like rise of PC in the living room actually has Sony, Sony a little

bit scared.

Yeah, I think it's probably a reaction to that because at some point, everything is going

to be on PC and everything is a PC, apart from a PlayStation, right?

So yeah, I do think it makes a lot of sense strategically, you know, to take it.

I just want to reach in the background here, Mark Triforce-Dudelson, you're a console

game, refers to and foremost, how did you feel about PlayStation ports very quickly?

Did you mind them?

He didn't mind them and he is a hardcore console guy, so you know, little data point.

I think though, you know, basically if there is a point at which an Xbox is playing PlayStation

games, you know, the ones, you know, the system sellers, the ones that we were considered

to be system sellers, it's going to get a lot of attention.

Yeah.

And the same with Steam machine, it's like, here I am on my console in the living room and

it's not a Sony console, but I'm playing Sony games.

I think the whole thing needs to be understood in the context of like this was never Sony's

primary console moving, game moving strategy in the first place.

Right, right.

They were never fully and on PC.

They never had a Sony launcher, which is probably a good thing, but you know, if they were

committed to it.

Maybe they would have had a Sony launcher or a Sony store.

They had no cross progression in those games.

It was more of a kind of half-budded PC strategy, so to speak.

And they did have those late releases, like you point out here.

So I think in that context, when you look at Steam machine and next generation Xbox,

where all of a sudden you're creating all this confusion around, okay, well, this thing

that's called an Xbox, this thing that's called a Steam machine can play my same Sony

games as I would play on PS5.

All of a sudden you're introducing a level of confusion into the marketplace that I don't

think is helpful for Sony when they are trying to push PlayStation 5 console so aggressively

and when I'm sure in the future, they'll be pushing PlayStation 6 console so aggressively.

It's also not helpful for Sony in the context that we think they have a handheld coming soon,

but going into a market that already has a large PC handheld presence, that's going

to create some confusion if you're saying, hey, you could play Ghost of Tsushima on your

PC handheld or you could play it on your Sony PSP3, you know, and that I think introduces

an additional problem for them.

So if it's just a rounding error for them, if it's just a small fraction of their overall

incomes and overall revenues as it does seem to be in console software, in game software,

that I think there's a decent case to be made that you should not confuse your brand,

you shouldn't dilute your brand by continuing to ship on PC.

If that means shipping on these boxes that are very competitive with your main console

box.

Yeah, I think there's also a quality issue as well.

Sony has a particular standard that it wants for its first party games and to be frank,

you know, Marvel Spider-Man 2 on PC wasn't particularly good.

I'm not sure that it's the way they'd want their games to be presented, you know, going

back to like Sackboy Adventures that launched with gigantic amounts of stutter, it's not

really the headlines you want.

I guess there's all manner of contributing factors that could sort of make Sony pause and

take stock on whether they should be supporting PC with these AAA single player games.

I guess something else, yeah, you're quite right to bring out the handheld because the

handheld side of things, in theory, if everything goes kind of like the way I think it's going

to go, it's going to be quite a revolution, I think, for handhelds, so it's certainly

going to be challenging to PC handhelds.

If you can imagine a PlayStation handheld that will play all of the PlayStation 4 back catalog

as is, I think you think that's an amazing straight away, then you get your PlayStation

5 games that have been expertly retooled to run on a handheld and look great.

And then you're going to get hopefully a range of PlayStation 6 software that's been sort

of ported across specifically for that device, all of those third party games as well.

Well, suddenly maybe I'm not taking my Steam Deck on holiday anymore, maybe I'll be taking

a Sony handheld instead because you're getting that curated experience that you just don't

get on PC handhelds at the moment.

So yeah, that would be another reason, perhaps not to be allowing your games to be running

on other people's hardware, which is competing with yours.

What about the multiplayer question, I guess, stuff like Hell Divers 2 on PC, obviously

marathons on multi-platform.

But then again, looking back at the beginning of the generation, Sony was all about multiplayer,

games of the service.

And in reality, they've released almost none, they've cancelled most of them.

There's like, I guess there's that fair game still happening, marathon just came out,

and then we had the failure of Concord, which is done, and then there was Hell Divers.

Was there anything else?

Any other game as a service?

I guess that horizon thing could be argued to be that, well, there are two horizon multiplayer

titles.

Hunter's gathering and C-soft was it?

Right, right, right.

I forgot about that.

And then there was the last of us, game that was cancelled factions.

So that was, yep.

There was the cancelled game at Blue Point, the kind of work game at Blue Point.

And many are going forward.

I don't know if any of the titles are in development.

So it seems like they're multiplayer, if it's probably winding down, there's not much

came out, and there's not that much in development.

I think there's always a market for them.

The question is the extent to which it's going to be a key point of their strategy going

forward.

Right.

But I do think those games deserve to be across multiple platforms and you kind of need

as many people playing them as possible to make them viable.

It's a long day since it's a long time since the days of Mag.

Yeah.

I think it makes a lot of sense.

First came to be cross-platforms, even to the extent of shipping Hell Divers to an Xbox.

You know, a lot of people here hold it.

That is potentially a major shift in Sony's strategy, but it doesn't really seem

to be.

It just seems to be that they want the largest player-based possible for the games like

Mirathon, for the games like Hell Divers 2, in order to sustain a really strong player-based

across platforms.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

We'll be interested to see what happens in the extent to which we actually get any kind

of official confirmation or whether we just won't see any more games beyond Death Stranding

2.

Who knows?

Guess we'll find out.

Let's move on.

Okay.

So adjacent to the whole Sony PC discussion is the release of Marathon.

It's out now.

It's out now on multiple platforms.

John, I think you participated in the quote unquote, serve a slam.

And you've got some interesting stuff you'd like to share about it.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Because I actually like it.

Really?

Yeah.

I really like it.

I think it's super cool.

I say this is someone that's largely against these kind of service games, but also did enjoy

Destiny.

I have to admit, it's among the few.

I think there's a thing that Bungie just has a certain sauce to their games.

There's a feel to them of vibe, atmosphere, the gameplay feel.

All of those things are very, very unique.

And usually with these sort of like multiplayer types of games, it just feels like, bam, game.

Like here's title screen.

Here you go.

Play game.

You press start.

These are game mechanics.

This is a game, game, game.

And that's, that's often good.

But like when speaking in multiplayer parlance, I don't love that.

Whereas you load up Marathon.

It's like, here's a weird like moth, like eating a weird thing and there's strange colors

in these menus to make any sense and look at these neon colors and what the heck is even

going on.

Like, why is this happening?

I love that stuff.

It's just like, it has that little bit of mystery that you get.

And honestly, I feel like my favorite times with Destiny were honestly the early times.

I know that's when it was at its weakest in terms of content.

But it was the time when like nothing really, you didn't understand it yet.

Like when that first like raid hit or whatever, when I first did that, I was just like in awe

and like all the stuff that happened in there.

It was so unusual and cool.

And I loved it.

But then all these other service games started hitting and every time I tried one, I just

fell off right away.

It just didn't interest me.

But there's something magical about Bungie games and Marathon, I think has that.

And even right away.

So like when I first dropped into the game, I don't understand like what is even happening

here?

Right?

It looks cool.

You're in this world.

I love the visual style.

Like it's not the most cutting edge, but it runs, I played on PC, runs super well.

There's unique contrasting colors with the rainstorm happening.

You're like sneaking into this base.

I still don't understand exactly what I'm doing.

Not huge into extraction shooters.

I don't have the loop down.

But after getting a pass at an initial sort of thing, I'm in the game world again.

And I remember I'm scavenging around looking for stuff.

And then I actually hear something happening in a room nearby and I run over and look

around the corner and it's like four dudes like spawn in.

And the thing is it's like I was just testing the game in solo at this point.

And I knew there was AI enemies around and human enemies.

But the way they like just appeared and were like with like the prox chat stuff and like

just they're like appearance in that world.

And then I kind of hid from them.

And I like go into a room and I'm looking out, try to see where they're going to go because

I don't want them to attack me.

And I see them run across like a glass bridge.

It's like on the other side of the map.

You actually see like the silhouettes of them.

Like it's so cool looking that it almost scripted.

But it was actually like, you know, like a team.

And like I'm following them around and just like watching what they're doing because

again, I don't understand what I'm doing in the game yet.

I'm just seeing what they're doing.

And like at one point, one of them breaks off and I go follow him and he like goes into

a room and it's doing stuff.

I close the door on him and then hide behind these like plastic like like protectors that

are sometimes between the doors.

And because I close the door, he immediately knows like, okay, what's going on?

He comes back out and opens the door.

And I'm hiding back there.

He runs into the room and I managed to just kill him from behind.

And it's just like, it's just like a satisfying kind of like moment, right?

Nothing major.

It's like one kill and like a series of however many thousands you're going to do in

this game.

But it just felt special because of that whole mystery of not understanding what's going

on at the time.

And just like this weird presence of these people there, like I let my imagination run

wild for a second.

And I think that's what really compelled me to keep going.

But then eventually you start to like learn more about the loop, learn what the game's

about and how to play it.

And you actually see there's a pretty compelling loop there.

And it's just somehow, I don't know, it really, it got me and I haven't had time to sit

down with the full game yet, but I'm planning to do so because it actually seems fun.

And that's why I feel like, and this is the thing is like a lot of times these, these

types of service games feel like they're built by committee where it's like, okay, we need

to make money.

How do we make money?

Let's look at the game.

It's making money and just do that.

But something like this, and I would argue something like art creators as well, which

is really cool.

They feel like they're still built by a creative team is trying to do something, right?

Right.

And I think that's, it really just shows the difference there where you can feel like

there's, there's something behind this that's beyond just like the cynical cash grabby

kind of nature that we see with a lot of this stuff.

And it shows.

And yeah, of course, you know, this being bungee, it's beyond, beyond the weirdness which

I love and that's something bungee's always been known for, like it just plays great,

like just the act of aiming your weapon and shooting at other things is awesome.

That the basic loop is good and that's ultimately what matters a lot.

But I say all this and then I check the slack chat and rich, you're like a, a played marathon

and I don't understand it.

This kind of sucks.

It's probably going to fail.

Well, it's my, my sort of take on it was pretty straightforward.

I think if you're playing it with a bunch of people and you're working together as a

team, it makes a lot more sense.

But I wasn't.

I wasn't either.

I played some, well, somehow you managed to make work your way through it.

But from my perspective, it was basically, uh, work your way through the tutorial,

wishing fair enough.

You know, it's, it's interesting.

I mean, visually, it's very, uh, distinct, and I think that's, so it's credit, I think

it's fantastic.

It's awesome.

I was also quite abused at the PS5 pro version.

Let's you choose between PSSR, FSR2 and CMAA, which is like a sort of throwback to like,

like decades old.

NDA aliasing technology, but you know, basically I got through the trading section, uh, got into

the game and, uh, quickly gunned out, uh, nobody to revive me and that's it.

And Rich, I think that's, that just shows like, the interesting thing about a game like

this, like the mystery and the lack of understanding of what's going on to me was engaging, but to

some players may just be like annoying, right?

Like it's not going to work for everyone.

Well, you know, at least in prior Bungie games, I felt as though I stood a chance against

the other.

And I didn't feel like that in this case, you know, I guess it's early doors, but you

know, if the first sort of, uh, proper, um, fight with enemy opponents ends in death,

which then results in you exiting the level.

It's not great.

No, I agree.

I think whoever came up with that decision needs to sort of possibly have a rethink.

But yeah, that was, you know, I didn't really go into it with, um, uh, with any kind of

opinion whatsoever because, um, I was aware of there was some controversy over the graphics

back of the day, but you know, I loaded up this, I thought it looked fantastic.

It really does look great, by the way, it's so different than, uh, your typical shooter.

And I love that, you know, reminds me almost going back all the way to like the darkness

on 360, which just didn't look like any other game at the time.

And if you look at this and it looks completely unlike any other sort of extraction shooter

to, to, to its credit, but I just couldn't engage with it.

There's also the sort of things where you're sort of wandering about, you're picking

up loads and those of items into your inventory is for, do I care enough about those items

to investigate them and see, you know, not really, you know, I'm kind of like, um, just

sort of, um, checked out with the current sort of thing about, uh, loot and, uh, and,

and associated loadouts, stuff like that.

Um, and you go back to a game like the original Quake multiplayer.

Oh, yeah.

It's just so immediate and so brilliant and engaging.

It's funny.

You say that, Rich, because that's what my son is playing, actually, essentially he's

playing Quake.

He plays the game called rivals in rule blocks, right?

It's almost rule blocks, but like, he shows me playing.

It's like, they had checked us out and he's like, starts a match and he immediately rocket

jumps into the air and then he fires, no, he fires a grenade first, runs and jumps off

the grenade, goes into the air and then he rocket jumps off the wall and then goes flying

across, using some kind of blade thing to propel himself and then he pulls out like a

precision rifle and like takes out four dudes before touching the ground.

He's running around and being acrobatic and I'm just like, this is like Quake, right?

It does have level, you know, but it was ultimately like Quake and I think it's really interesting

to see a younger generation not even knowing it, just like gravitating or playing a game

like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I suspect this cave is going to be loved by the people that love it.

Does it do enough to appeal to a man's team audience?

That's my concern.

Right.

Because I bounced off it pretty quickly myself, but it's a tough still, but I think being

unique and maybe difficult to chew is possibly to its credit, I think, because it might be

what allows it to find a dedicated audience, right?

It does not feel like a game that was made for everyone.

Okay.

Well, I do feel like extraction shooters.

There's a certain brand of them that I like, which is more PVE focused extraction

shooters.

Like I covered Rainbow Six Extraction for the channel probably four years ago.

And I quite enjoyed playing the game of my time with it because it was very PVE focused

and you had this consistent level of challenge that felt very fair, felt very nice.

And I'm surprised I didn't go that route with this title given that there is a lot of

PVE in this too, though.

Yeah, but there's also a player and he's lots of player and he's as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's a little bit surprising to me, because obviously the destiny approach is mostly

to flood you with enemy AI and go that route.

So I'm a little bit surprised.

This is to the road.

I guess you could call this PVPVE.

PVPVE.

PVPVE.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But I did find one element to this title interesting.

I'm not so interested in the game itself, but I did find one element to this title interesting,

which is that people were tagging me pre-launch on Twitter about a weird line that was present

in the game's promotional materials for PS5 Pro, which is they said the game used PS5

to enhance PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution to blend 5K internal rendering into a clean

stable 4K image.

So you run a few places that stays sharp, even when the action gets hectic, which to

me suggested, hey, maybe we're using PSSR to go to 5K, downscale to 4K, weird approach,

but if the game is light enough, maybe that could work.

But then they've updated that language to say that PS5 Pro, PSSR, enhanced PSSR, leverages

higher resolution internal rendering to deliver a clean, stable 4K image that they've kind

of made the language a little bit vague or there.

But I wonder in particular that note about enhanced PSSR, that's not a creature I've

not heard from Sony before, but is that indicating that this is PSSR 2 in our own no one

creature, or the upgraded PSSR in their other materials, is that what this is indicating?

And indeed, are they going to like 5K or some crazy internal resolution with this,

and then downscaling it to 5.4K?

Yes, we can find out.

Okay, well, anything more to add to that for you, John?

Oh, I mean, I'm always up for a pleasant surprise.

I still would have loved to have seen a proper marathon single player campaign to be

honest, but this is a lot more interesting and enjoyable than I initially had imagined.

It still, it still has some bungee magic for sure.

I think in a match respect, I wish I'd go into it playing with a team.

Yeah, maybe, man, I wish we had time to do like a DF team that would be

I wish there was just time.

Time in general would be nice.

It's not much of that.

Yeah.

Okay, well, maybe some more soon or about it, let's see.

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Let's move on.

Okay.

So Resident Evil Requiem launched last week and it's fair to say it's been a massive,

massive success.

We loaded the game, particularly in its console form on PlayStation five professional,

where you've got a combination of PSS R2 and some excellent raid facing.

But John, less than a week on the raid facing has, has been quote unquote adjusted.

It you might even consider it a downgrade.

What's going on?

Oh boy.

Yeah.

So obviously, um, there was the whole thing with the RTGI and the denoiser from Capcom.

And it definitely produced some artifacts.

Um, this always gets to a difficult part of, of talking with these games for me,

because I feel like I'm not really bothered by that stuff as much when you're doing cool stuff.

But some of the public gets really agitated by it.

And it's just like what my brain wants is so different from what a lot of other people want.

Clearly, uh, and so there were complaints and Capcom took that to heart.

It would seem and their solution to fixing it isn't to adjust the denoiser,

which I would imagine not so easy, actually.

Uh, instead they're like, well, the most egregious area, the area I could not show in my review,

by the way, is Leon section and recurring city.

Uh, they just, they just turned off the RT completely,

including reflections or just everything off.

All right.

Okay.

Now if you load up other saves,

brain tracing's theirs before.

And I already noticed there was a couple scenes where they disabled RT reflections anyway.

Uh, for whatever reason, like that city street with Leon early on right night,

which might have been just too heavy, but most of the game had all the RT stuff.

But then suddenly here, I remember there's this gas station early on in recon city,

where it is a lot of like dark light, uh, contrast and the noise, the noise could be

even for me, a little bothersome at points, I get that.

But it all that RTGI added so much nuance to the overall image in the shadows,

because it's a very gray monochromatic place, right?

And the RTGI I felt was very important in terms of making it look appealing.

And by taking that away, they did get rid of the noise.

Uh, but it just got rid of the multi.

It's just so flat.

Now I think I just don't like how that area looks without the RTGI.

And so I guess my confusion here is like,

why they decided to get rid of it entirely as opposed to like making it like an option.

I think the better solution here would have been to do have an option

when you turn off ray tracing to run at 60 hertz with PSS R.

Okay.

Because right now if you do the ray tracing off, it does the 120 motor,

though you can force I guess 60 hertz like Oliver did, but that runs without PSS R,

which looks a lot worse.

There was no middle option basically for the good image quality, but without the RT stuff.

And now they just kind of compromised it.

So like parts of the game just totally lack RT.

I don't think this is the best solution.

I think it was done just to like sort of like address those complaints.

Um, and it's probably the fastest thing they could have done.

Because again, obviously if their denoiser has major issues, but

you can't just solve that in a week.

It's not that easy, right?

This is a difficult problem to solve.

So I'm not really sure what where they go from here.

I think they should restore it, but make it optional.

Or, but I, again, that requires UI adjustments and there's a lot to deal with there.

So it's a tricky situation.

But it's the rate-facing mode available.

Um, if you don't have a 120 hertz, sorry, is that the non-veit facing the performance mode available?

If you have a one, if you don't have 120 hertz, yes, it is, but it still runs.

It still runs without PSSR, although I didn't check it after this latest patch.

But before it definitely did not, no matter what you did, it was still

running with just like normal upscaling, like if it's our one stuff.

So the point I'm trying to make is that effectively there is an already

a mode to turn off of a facing if you don't like the effect.

It's just that you don't get PSSR too.

Right.

Yeah.

So well, you know, it's, it's not ideal.

Is it, I think ultimately, if you don't, I mean, there are fades

with rate-facing always, but, you know, if people don't put anything like the effect

early off, that seems to be the most obvious thing to me.

Make it a user-selectable choice.

If that user-selectable choice does also downgrade the image quality, however,

it's not great.

But, um, the PSSR in option, I don't know.

Yeah.

Well, exactly Oliver.

Yeah, it's funny.

You mentioned that mode.

I counted it out at about 1296p.

The mode at 60 hertz with PSSR off and ray tracing off when you turn that

RTs toggle off and 1296p I think is considerably above the PlayStation 5's resolution, which is

closer to 1080p if I'm right there, John, a little bit above 1080p just above 1080p.

So it's slightly higher.

There is actually an enhancement there.

Now, I certainly would not take that enhancement over just having PSSR.

And certainly, if the GP time is there for PSSR to 4K output with ray tracing,

certainly it would be there without the ray tracing, you presume.

So that seems like a more obvious option to me for people who are uncomfortable and disappointed

with the ray tracing presentation in ReconCity.

But myself, I'm not particularly bothered by ray tracing noise because in some cases,

it's kind of a nice type of bit of RT noise because it lets you know, hey, you're dealing

with real real God-fearing ray tracing here.

You know, you're not dealing with some big lighting technique that looks perfectly stable.

Some probes are some light maps that you can't really tell that it's being done in real

time because it's not being done in real time.

I would hope that they would bring this back after some tweaking, hopefully after some improvements

to their dinoiser, which would be appreciated across all platforms here.

My worry, though, is that they won't because of the user backlash,

but I did actually see some footage of the game before this update operating in ReconCity

with that ray tracing enabled with PSSR enabled and ray tracing enabled.

And it did not look too handsome.

It looked conspicuously bad in a way that I didn't really see in other areas of the game.

You know, there's like maybe one or two areas in the early game where you do see more ray tracing

noise like in that area with grace right after the cutscene with the police officer,

the very beginning of the game and you're looking around there and the RT is like really shaking

and speckling and it kind of blends in nicely with the raindrops, but it is very,

very noisy in that area as well.

So I can tell that if it's, if it's a similar presentation to what I saw there,

but throughout a much larger fraction of the game, that is obviously something that should be addressed,

but it should be addressed hopefully through improving the ray tracing presentation and not turning it off.

And certainly, I don't think turning ray tracing reflections off makes really any sense in that environment

either because I don't think the ray tracing reflections were the cause of most of that visual annoyance

in that area. Final thoughts, John?

Yeah, I mean, it's a bummer because they're so close to just having such a cool thing here,

but that all stems from that denoys are just not being good enough.

But I don't know, I don't know where they go from here.

It's a difficult problem to solve.

But yeah, I'm pretty sure Nvidia has its own denoys that isn't related to ML.

So, you know, there are denoys as out there that they possibly could have used.

I don't know, obviously, we're sort of operating within an area where we end up limiting knowledge.

Well, let's hope for improvements further on down the line then, but with that, let's move on.

Okay, then.

So, infesting story that emerged on X from Bill Bileekun, a noted leaker confirming as much as it

can be confirmed by a leaker.

The staff field is coming to PlayStation 5 and it looks like it's going to be appearing also in

physical form on April the 7th, 2026.

So, you know, pretty much just like a month from the time of taping this particular direct.

It's quite interesting that, you know, if this had happened a couple of years ago,

then it would have been big, big news.

In the year of our Lord's 2026, it's kind of like us debating whether there's a included in the

direct at all.

It's just kind of a thing that, a thing that happens now, isn't it?

I would think that the surprising thing about this announcement is that it's taken so long at

this point because we're used to a faster clip between the Xbox release and the PlayStation

release by this point.

Certainly we've seen many, many 2024 titles and 2025 titles shipping on PlayStation 5.

So, this is quite a quite a long lag here.

I think this is good.

It seems to be part of a, part of a vehicle for like some wider technical update to the game,

which maybe could improve performance elsewhere.

That's what I'd hope for indeed.

Starfield's performance is pretty good across the game.

I would say at this point, except for in cities like Akila and New Atlantis.

It's quite problematic there.

So, hopefully there could be some engine upgrades.

And hopefully that might dovetail with another thing that I'm possibly looking forward to.

Well, I don't know if this is coming or not.

But if there was to be a switch to port because Bethesda's been shipping all their other

recent titles on Switch 2, we've seen Fallout 4, we've seen Oblivion Remastered,

we've seen Skyrim anniversary edition with somewhat mixed results in the latter title.

But that was patched up eventually as thought noted and improved quite a bit.

So could a version of this game work on Switch 2?

I think basically everything outside the city is feels like it could, could work pretty

well, I think.

And then if they were able to improve performance in the cities to a level where it was

hopefully, you know, not too far off that 30 FPS marker, perhaps it could be a good

experience overall.

So that's what I would hope for.

But in terms of the PlayStation port, I mean, the only area of real interest to me

with Starfield, I believe Starfield, I covered it on Xbox consoles a couple times.

It seemed to be fixed resolution, I believe, upscaled to 4K, 4K 30 on on Series X,

1440p, 30 roughly speaking on on Series S.

And then of course, I had the 60 FPS modes coming in later on.

On PS5, I would presume they would basically duplicate that.

Maybe some slight alterations, but they'd basically have a very similar setup.

PS5 Pro could be a little bit different.

Maybe they issue the FSR2 over to the next generation PSSR.

That would be quite nice.

With these Microsoft efforts, though, they don't seem to often be that big of pro

upgrades.

The one major exceptions, that would be Forza Horizon 5, which had some

excellent PS5 Pro upgrades.

So I'd hope to see them actually putting some elbow grease into the PS5 Pro version

and delivering maybe hopefully much better image quality would be the only thing I could

really think of because there's no real like bag of ray tracing goodies or

draw distance, whatever.

There's not too much else that could do with this title outside of improving

image quality substantially through the use of that upscaler.

Yeah, I'm not anticipating any huge upgrades.

And I don't think it really needs them as such.

I'd be interested in to see what they do with the professional, though.

What do you want to see from it, John?

I think Oliver, you're barking up the wrong tree here.

I don't think that this is about resolution and performance.

That stuff's not really a big deal right now.

I think what's going to happen, and we'll see.

I think the game itself is going to be massively overhauled.

Okay.

This is my guess is that they're going to try to do.

And I don't know for sure, but I suspect the reason it's taking so long

isn't that they just are porting Starfield to PS5.

I think this is going to be part of a whole campaign to sort of like a Starfield 2.0.

It's funny.

You said that because I think Todd Howard basically specifically shot down claims

that there would be a Starfield 2.0 in a recent in a recent interview.

He said, it is not Starfield 2.0.

I've seen some of that for an expectation setting.

I think that's the kind of thing where if you like Starfield, we think you're going

to love this.

It's updates and things that change the game, but in not a way that's indicative

of some kind of massive overhaul to the game.

So I think they are doing some of that work.

I think they are updating the game.

I think they probably will have some UI tweaks, some changes to the way that things work.

But he's specifically saying it is not Starfield 2.0 in this particular interview.

So I guess I just threw down 2.0 not to say that it's just like I think the game

is probably going to undergo some change.

But how about we throw down right now?

Let's take a bit.

I bet you, one, I don't know, you have to do an FPS video for me and I have to do one

for you in the Victor.

If it's exactly the same game as Xbox, then you win.

If it's changed and gameplay-wise, then I'll take it so let's go.

Well, I think the gameplay changes will be across all platforms.

One day, I don't think there'll be a difference.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But if you're suggesting that there's going to be a significant change to the actual game itself,

what do you mean by that?

Do you think maybe like, you know, like what they did with Cyberpunk, for instance?

Yeah, closer to that, maybe something like that, not like a completely different game,

but I think there's going to be some changes that will come off platforms, including PS5.

So that's my guess.

I could be completely wrong.

I'm just guessing here.

So I don't have Todd Howard said that, then that's more likely as well.

But since I already threw it out there, let's, I think it'd be fun to have that wager.

When we find out for sure, Oliver, when you turn out to be right,

you can glue it on the DF-director.

OK.

All right.

I've never heard of this before, wagering to do favorite videos.

I mean, crazy stuff.

I don't know whether I should step in as a manager to prevent gambling in the world.

I don't know.

Well, it looks as though regardless,

you've only got like a month or so to wait until we find out the outcome.

I know.

But with that, let's move on.

OK, so there's been some really interesting stuff happening in terms of the budget GPU market,

which is having to kind of like reposition itself in the light of RAM again.

But I didn't quite sort of anticipate that it would be reconfiguring itself like this.

There's talk now of a new version of the Nvidia RTX 5050,

which we'll actually ship with an improved amount of memory over the existing model.

There's talk of a nine gigabyte version of the 5050,

as opposed to the existing eight gigabyte version.

The way in which they're going to achieve this, apparently,

according to the leak, which is unconfirmed,

is that the 128-bit memory bus is going to be reduced to 96-bit,

which historically has been, oh, no, reduced memory bandwidth reduced performance.

However, they're going to be shifting from GDDR6 to GDDR7 memory,

which basically means that net, you get a slight increase in memory bandwidth.

So in theory, then, a model that we suspect is coming to market

because of memory IC shortages,

typically that means a bad deal for the gamer.

This one could actually be on, you know, on aggregate, a slight win.

Simply by virtue of the fact that they'll be using a different type of memory module.

So you can get away with using fewer of them,

and you end up with more RAM and slightly more memory bandwidth.

Concurrent to that, there is also a parent confirmation from the channel

that there is going to be the return of the RTX 3060, possibly later in the month.

I'm not sure what to think about that.

But Oliver, this is kind of curious, right?

Yeah, I mean, gamers did ask for more VRAM,

so I guess that's one extra gig.

It's got a satisfaction of what they wanted.

I mean, it seems reasonable enough, I suppose.

You know, normally the route here would be to do like some kind of super serious,

you'd think, with 5th-degree gigabyte modules,

and have a carptain sheet with 12 gigabytes of a framework for a VRAM there.

But in this case, like you said,

by basically decreasing the number of memory channels in there,

and increasing the size of the modules,

they're getting a much more modest, like 12 percent, I guess,

increase in memory, which is not quite as exciting.

And the memory bandwidth situation just seems to be basically equals there.

On the RTX 3060 side of things,

I think our comment from Nvidia when Alex and I asked at CES

was technically that the RTX 3060 has never left inventory channels.

But I guess in this case,

they may be bringing it back into water supply in accordance with market pushes.

But I don't think they specified what kind of RTX 3060 would be coming back.

If it's the 12 gigabyte module,

I think that's very promising.

I think it's a lot less exciting if it's that 8 gigabyte GPU.

But honestly, any way you can get new capacity into the market at reasonable prices,

I think it's something you have to support at this point.

And the RTX 3060, you know, it's still a fast enough card with TLSS.

It can do 1080p, it can do 1440p in at 12 gigabytes.

You basically can run just about anything you want to

from the console suite of AAA at good settings

and have a reasonable experience,

even if like in raster terms, it's not as powerful as like a series X.

I think it's a fair bit off that mark.

It's still capable of delivering a good experience in console software

when you tie it in with upscaling.

So I think that's a good, good route to go down.

And even though these cards are quite aged at this point,

you know, six year old cards, five year old cards,

I think they're still in a reasonable position

to actually deliver quite a lot of value for gamers in 2026,

which is maybe an indictment of Moore's law

or the broader GPU market as a whole or AI,

or however you want to take that.

But I think it's probably a positive move for gamers,

even if it's not necessarily a positive sign

that Nvidia is considering doing this

on the back of a pressure elsewhere.

Okay, so John, I'll come to you for a bit of comment on that,

although I know that you're not particularly interested

in the budget GPU market.

I know that's the thing is I really don't have any interest

in budget GPUs personally,

so it's hard to get excited about it.

Or horrified as well.

You don't care either way, that's good.

Right.

So this is sort of a silver lining to it.

Yeah, I mean, I'm quite interested in looking at this 5050.

I have to admit, because the concept of a nine gigabyte GPU,

I mean, we've kind of gone from like eight to 10 in the past

and the 10 gigabyte GPUs obviously have a considerable advantage

over the eight, although they have limitations of their own.

That's quite interesting, but nine gigabytes,

I'm kind of almost want to get hold of one of these things

and compare it to the eight gigabyte version,

just to see what difference that one gigabyte

actually makes.

Do you mean how much more memory do you really need?

Because I've noticed with the 11 gigabyte 2080 Ti,

that actually seems fine.

And yeah, so it's kind of curious about that.

I'm also, I've never reviewed the 5050 generally, to be honest.

I missed out on that.

It looks like just a sort of Blackwell version of the 4060,

which isn't particularly exciting,

but at the same time,

it's not the sort of complete disaster

that everyone else seemed to think it was,

because it's a fairly capable PS5 performance level card.

It just doesn't have a lot of memory,

that's the bottom line there.

The 3060 returning,

I think we have to kind of like embrace reality

and it probably is the eight gigabyte version,

which not great, I think you should consider going out

and getting a used 12 gigabyte model,

because that dirt sheet now.

But, you know, it's all going to come down to the pricing

on that one.

I think that's the bottom line on that.

It's all.

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I've got to say about that.

But with that, let's move on.

Okay, so to round off the directs,

typically we talk about content that we've produced.

For this one, we're going to be talking about content

we haven't produced yet.

And it's really interesting,

because last week we put out a video showing Crimson Desert

running on ultra settings on PC,

on a radio on 7,900 XTX.

And the game actually scales higher than that,

but the point is with that particular class of GPU,

you could run 4K native at 60 frames per second,

showcase all of these amazing features at it.

Everyone online seems to be particularly caught up

with the fact that there hasn't been a lot shown

of the console version of the game.

And I guess a lot of people have,

I don't know, some sort of gaming level PTSD

about Cyberpunk 2077,

where we didn't actually see much of the console build,

pre-launched it, launched,

and it wasn't particularly great.

Similar accusations have been sent towards Pearl Abyss.

However, we've got an interview here

from Fighting Cowboys Preview,

where he's saying, I did ask about console performance

since all the footage, including my own up until now,

has been on PC.

And the answer I got from then was actually quite respectable.

They said, quote unquote,

regardless of what we say, people probably won't believe us.

Fair point.

So instead, we're sending the game to digital foundry

and hour for analysis of performance

across all the platforms at launch.

So I guess that is a pretty respectable response.

And we will be looking at Crimson Desert.

We'll try to get something out at launch.

Regardless of whatever happens,

we'll certainly be able to tell you at launch,

you know, if there are any specific problems,

even if our review isn't ready or full review isn't ready.

But, John, I think it's fair to say

that Pearl Abyss have been actually very open with us,

far more open than a lot of other developers

in this sort of crucial run up to launch.

And they are going to make this stuff happen.

And they seem to be genuinely proud of everything they've done.

And they're not opening doors for us

rather than slamming them in our faces.

It's very refreshing to see, I think.

I'm super, it's really exciting.

And I can tell that they have a lot of pride in what they're doing.

And what they're doing is pretty darn ambitious, right?

Because they're like,

out here trying to build this massive,

like wide open, open world experience

with a lot of unique mechanics and ideas

that can separate it from the pack.

And they're doing it all with their own engine.

Right.

With lots of ray tracing and all that.

So obviously, the console version then becomes a bit of a question.

Because it does seem very ambitious.

You saw that PC video.

It looks insanely good.

So, but we will be looking at the console version indeed.

Mm-hmm.

That's what you'd say.

Yeah.

Father, is it really the case that there hasn't been any footage

released on console so far?

Well, I did a bit of digging.

I don't think it's strictly true.

Because there was some footage that was released in September

when they announced the release date for the game,

which I think was March 19th.

And that was PS5 Pro footage.

And it did look pretty good,

although it was unlocked for that showing.

So some was 60.

A lot of it wasn't kind of the 30s.

Not running too hot there did not have a framerate cap

with that game.

Now, I actually think I spoke to their marketing director at CES.

I think his name is Will Powers.

Alex and I spoke to him at CES.

And at that point, they indicated

that their console specs were still in flux.

And they did not really want to commit

any particular console targets.

They said they would be talking about it closer to launch.

And I suppose they will, although this is awfully close

to launch to not be talking about your console spec

in too much detail or reshowing off console footage.

Although, obviously, I respect that hopefully

we'll have a good story on that in the future

when we do take a look at the game.

But there are some interesting details

in the PlayStation blog entry that was published alongside

this most recent update.

They say they're making heavy use of the PS5's pros

high CPU frequency mode, which I believe that mode takes

the PS5 pro up to a maximum of 3.85 gigahertz on the CPU there.

Now, that isn't super promising necessarily

for keeping the CPU bound framerates very high

on the base console in particular,

which operates the lower frequency that

could be an area of some concern streaming and all that

in this game.

And they also talk about making it possible for Crimson Desert

to hit 4K resolutions at higher framerates

with the use of PSSR2, which is an interesting sentiment

on the plus that I think PSSR2,

very promising upscaler for this kind of game.

But obviously, only specifying higher framerates

again, they're waffling a little bit

on exactly what those framerate targets would be.

Ultimately, I just think we need to see this game

actually deliver the visual quality that we see on PC.

I think we need to deliver a good fraction

that I'm console hopefully.

And it does seem like a game that's reasonably scalable

and reasonably friendly on AMD GPU architectures.

So hopefully we'll be able to do that

on PlayStation 5 Pro and PlayStation 5.

And obviously they expect series machines.

It's just an unusual rollout where they aren't showing

off console footage or talking much

about the console builds.

And the game is coming out in like two weeks.

I suggest that's not the best strategy in the world.

Even if we might have the ability

to take a look at that in due course here,

I think they really should be a little bit more open

about their expectations for the console build

and actually show off more console footage.

Okay, well, I think it's fair to say that I are trying

to help us here in terms of getting hold of the actual game

and putting it through the paces,

digital foundry style.

And that's not really stoically what happens

when a developer has got something to hide pre-launch.

Maybe it is just the case that,

hey, it's coming in a bit hot,

but where you stand by the work.

And I guess we're going to find out very, very soon, right John?

Yes, indeed.

I think we will find out very soon.

Yeah, and I can't wait to find out myself.

Yeah, I mean, I've got to admit,

the level of expectation and excitement for the game,

I think is something I haven't seen for a long, long time.

So to put that into perspective, last week,

we put out three really good resident evil,

recreate videos, all of which had compelling stories to tell,

all of which did really, really well for us.

And then the very next day after we released that video,

Alex put out his video on Crimson Desert.

And in terms of view counts and excitement level,

it was basically like a two X multiplier

on the best of what we'd done with resident evil, recreate,

which I knew it was going to be hot, right?

But I had no idea the level of expectation for this game

was that high.

So if we can actually replicate that with the console versions,

and if the quality of the game is everything that Pearl Abyss says it is,

and they're willing to give it to us,

no holds barred coverage,

I think that's going to be very, very, very interesting

and I can't wait to find out what the game looks like.

And there's another thing that's really cool about this whole situation

is this company sort of did the inverse

what we saw in a lot of Western studios this year,

where they built themselves up with black desert online, right?

They focused on mobile and sort of massively multiplayer online games.

And then they leveraged all the money that they made doing that

into making a gigantic single-player game.

And I think that's super cool.

They're like, hey, we've made a ton of money doing this

rather than just keep doing that.

Let's also make this big single-player adventure and just go nuts.

And I think that's really commendable and cool.

And I hope it pays off for them.

OK, so I guess basically pretty much in the same way

I've concluded every new story this direct

can't wait to find out more, let's wait and see.

But I'm particularly interested in seeing

what's going to happen on this one, based on the quality of Alex's video

and that what we saw in it.

Because the stuff we were seeing there was just absolutely fantastic.

But I kind of do think it's fireball, certainly

from a GPU perspective, because 7900 XTX, native 4K, ultra settings.

Maybe you don't need ultra settings on a console.

You certainly don't need native 4K resolution.

There are upscales that can be done there.

Obviously, you'd like to see 60 frames per second,

but it's not given.

If it was at 30, then that basically reduces

the requirements still further.

If they've got 30, 40, 60 modes in there, brilliant.

I mean, there's a lot of leeway, I think,

based on what Alex's video showed there.

It's nothing in there that was going to rule out

the console level GPU, based on what we know about the way

these GPUs kind of scale down.

And it also, I think, more importantly,

means that if there is that level of scalability in there,

it also means that PC uses with less capable GPUs,

are probably in for a pretty decent experience

to assuming all of this pans out.

Yep, but any final thoughts on of us?

No, my understanding at the time from speaking

to their marketing director was that they

had high expectations and that they thought

the console versions were going to come in in good shape,

but console performance and console performance targets

were a moving target.

So it was hard to commit to the specifics at that stage.

And indeed, they have not committed

to those specifics in public.

But again, based on the PC showing,

I would have fairly high hopes and fairly high confidence

in this game on consoles, given that, you know,

said in 100 XTX is a lot more powerful than the consoles

in terms of rasterization in terms of ray tracing

in terms of all this stuff.

But at native 4K, like you don't mute the console

operating native 4K, you've got FSR,

you've got PSSR2, you've got a lot of tools in your workshop

to get that game up to a good performance level.

To me, the key question would be, okay,

that makes sense for 30 FPS, it makes sense for 40 FPS,

but how do the CPU bound frame times look

at something like 60 FPS?

Are they able to maintain that?

That's more of an open question for me at that point,

but it's one that I would not be surprised

if that's resolved pretty satisfactorily.

I just don't know,

because I have not seen the game running

on these consoles as of yet, right?

Man, I love this Oliver moments.

I call them ridges.

This happens often where Rich is like,

any more thoughts Oliver and he's like, no,

but and then proceeds to talk for like two or three minutes.

Oh, it's so good.

Okay, well, I don't think we got too much more to say

about this particular juncture,

but that was the last discussion point there

for the end of the show.

We'll be back with the Q&A offshoot in a couple of days.

But for now, well, what can I say?

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