DF Direct Weekly on the PS5 State of Play event and the Sonic Frontiers gameplay reveal

The latest DF Direct Weekly has arrived, in which myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing Sony’s latest State of Play stream. While it may have lacked ‘gigaton’ news and reveals, the broadcast was solid overall, focusing on 2022 and 2023 titles, expanding to PlayStation VR2 and – in a welcome twist – bringing transparency to a new level. It was clear that everything we were seeing was working in real time on the console hardware and if it wasn’t, captions would pop up to explain what we were actually seeing.

This last point may not seem very important, but it has been our problem for years. When so many gaming events have relied on pre-rendered CG trailers, questions have to be asked about how representative the content of the final product is. Can you imagine any other form of entertainment teasing audiences with trailers that bear little or no relation to the actual, often much better, end product? Sony has been pretty good with this on State of Plays and it’s the way to go – much like showing us real meat as opposed to ‘pre-announce’ ads.

On content, where after an excellent Resident Evil 4 Remake reveal (in itself an endorsement of in-engine development in a world where UE5 is poised to dominate), it was straight into the PSVR2 reveal. The news of bolted content for RE4 was welcome, as was the upgrade for Resident Evil Village. As John points out, while RE7 had PSVR1 support, it still relied on DualShock 4 for input, so beyond the visual upgrade, the actual nuts and bolts of the game should also be much improved. Horizon: Call of the Mountain also looked great, but we’re curious about the technical underpinnings – the Decima engine as seen in Forbidden West might not be the best choice for a VR experience, it will so interesting to see where Guerrilla is going with this one.

Watch the DF Direct as a hands-on video to find out why Alex is making that face.

00:00:00 Presentations
00:00:59 News 1: State of play June 2022
00:41:38 News 2: Sonic Frontiers gameplay is disappointing
00:48:25 News 3: PS+ Japan Gets NTSC Classics
00:52:08 News 4: God of War and Horizon Forbidden West are getting updates
00:55:31 DF Content Discussion: DF Retro PS3 1080p Video Update
01:01:53 DF Supporter Q1: Any thoughts on jaw-dropping stories that RTX cards are “back to MSRP”?
01:07:41 DF Supporter Q2: What do you think AMD has to pull out of the hat to outperform Nvidia in the PC market?
01:20:31 DF Supporter Q3: How about a full explainer video on tech terms and techniques?
01:22:46 DF Supporter Q4: Why do Japanese Genesis/Mega Drive games sound so much better musically?
01:26:32 DF Supporter Q5: With all the games you’ve reviewed over the years, which post-processing effect is your favorite?

We also spend some time discussing the Sonic Frontiers gameplay reveal, which – in common with much of the “internet”, it seems – didn’t really wow us. I guess the major problem for me is pretty simple: cut out the rings and replace Sonic with another character (Ugly Sonic?) and there’s nothing definitively Sonic about what we’ve seen. Meanwhile, from a technical point of view, the frame rate and pop-in issues seemed quite difficult. We also quickly talk about the FSR 2.0 update of God of War and the new patch of Horizon Forbidden West which polishes the presentation of the controversial performance mode. We’ll be back with the analysis of God of War later in the week and we also want to revisit Horizon – although with 40Hz and VRR support coming we may defer our work until those particular updates arrive. .

Beyond all that, John is also spending time talking about his next project DF Retro: PlayStation 3 – The 1080p Dream, an analysis of Sony’s claims and possible 1080p games we’ve received from across the gen. This is the kind of content that is only possible through the DF Supporter program. We’re not sure we’ve included all the 1080p games, but we’ve certainly covered the vast majority of them in a video that’s around 3.25 hours (!) long. In the process, we researched every 1080p report we could find, securing the games and testing them. Where the Xbox 360 also supported 1080p, we cover that too! This is a timed exclusive for Retro tier supporters and should be available in the coming days. For non-supporters, it will be separated into three or four separate episodes, released in July. But seriously, take a look at our support program. If you love what Digital Foundry does, if you want to get involved, if you want to join our amazing community and receive a ton of bonus material and early access, please head over to Patreon. You know that makes sense!

And finally, with State of Play having shown us some tantalizing footage of The Callisto Protocol – which looks a lot like a Dead Space game – we’re puzzled by recent news that the game no longer takes place in the PUBG universe. Uh, what? How? Isn’t the question really how this doesn’t happen in the Dead Space universe? Anyway, the game looks great and the fact that we will play it – hopefully! – in 2022 is great news.

In the meantime, DF Direct Weekly will return next week, and a day earlier than usual. We’re cleaning up for the Microsoft/Bethesda conference, where we’ll be producing a bonus episode after the fact. See you next week!