Personally not bothered if Ragnarok isn't a huge improvement visually.

GoW 2018 is already a gorgeous game. I would say it does have some consistency issues visually, but at it's best, it is pretty darn good.

This definitely will add some to the silly "GoW Ragnarok looks the same" argument, but for me, it just shows how insanely optimized Santa Monica's in-house engine is to release such a high-quality game that it doesn't matter if you're on a 9 year-old console or a 2 year-old console, you're going to get a high-quality experience with very little in terms of compromises. 

This, to me, is an amazing accomplishment! Can't wait to pick up my copy later today.

Performance wise it runs great on PS4 and superb on PS5. Visual wise in some areas it is up to par with current gen games and in some others it is below but nothing that takes away from the experience. I'm truly curious to see what they would have done with a ground up PS5 title, maybe Cory Barlog will make us speachless.

I do feel like it needs to be said but the whole 'cross-generation' thing crippling games isn't really a thing anymore. PC has been scaling for dozens of different sliders and factors over time and PC has been considered the pinnacle of performance for a very long time now. I don't believe a PS4 version was holding this back, no more than a mediocre PC would hold back something like Red Dead Redemption II or something from those who have the higher end PCs. 

Eh, I don't know about that. There are minimum requirements for some games on PC after all. 

I do feel like it needs to be said but the whole 'cross-generation' thing crippling games isn't really a thing anymore. PC has been scaling for dozens of different sliders and factors over time and PC has been considered the pinnacle of performance for a very long time now. I don't believe a PS4 version was holding this back, no more than a mediocre PC would hold back something like Red Dead Redemption II or something from those who have the higher end PCs. 

Yeah, but PC has so many more factors to consider. with consoles, I don't imagine most devs are incapable of scaling the texture resolution and framerate to a PS4, a PS4 pro, and a PS5. I'm not saying it's not a factor, just that I really don't think the issue is the different hardware. 

Like I said before, I genuinely feel that we've reached a point where the fidelity of the graphics isn't gonna get too much better because the amount of time and effort needed to get any more detailed than we're at is going to outreach the cost people are willing to pump into a game like this. God of War Ragnarok looks AMAZING and I don't disagree, but I also don't think that, from a detail level, it's much different than God of War 2018. there is a difference, but the closer to photorealistic we get the more it's gonna cost for less of a noticeable difference. 

The uncanny valley is a sine curve, so to speak. Once we hit a certain point it's not going to be worth the dev costs to go any more realistic or detailed. and I think somewhere between PS4 and PS5 (or XBO and XSX) we hit that point. All this talk of how cross-generational games are bad for the production of the new generation games is just silly. With consoles being more like the architecture and hardware of PCs, making it easier to cross-develop and forward-adapt material, I just don't see any good argument that cross-generational games are being crippled by also being released on last generation hardware. 

COULD resources be diverted from maximizing potential on the new consoles and put towards editing it to fit on old hardware? sure, of course. I just don't think the scaling efforts are going to take that many resources and I don't think they're going to NOT give the next gen versions the performance and features that only the new console can provide due to some weird take on parity. Why would Sony (or anyone, really) cripple the new hot thing just to appease the old thing? they want people to move forward, but they know that getting the new hot thing is hard and expensive. 

I just don't think that being cross generational is having the effect people claim it does. 

Even SSM team have said the PS4 held the game back and that it is essentially a PS4 game.