Been watching a guy who aligns with my taste in games play Death Stranding 1, only Uber eats delivers for trophies not spoilers about the story and yeah I think I'm in.
I'm buying Director's Cut this friday. Not sure if I'm going to play the second one right after but September, November and December are free so before the year ends I'm going to play that one too.

Yotei taking October?

I'm in a bit of a conundrum. I went through the first several chapters of Death Stranding, and after the high of the prologue ending, the game just didn't resonate with me. I've always been a gameplay first player, and the reliance of walking and deliveries just wasn't doing it for me. I loved the gameplay Kojima had in the Metal Gear Solid and Zone of the Enders series, which is why I was able to overlook the absurdly long cutscenes that typically turn me off on a game, but Death Stranding just wasn't it for me in the gameplay. There were some good gameplay moments, but just not consistent enough to keep me going.

But........seeing that the gameplay in DS2 is supposed to be more along the lines of Metal Gear, has me REALLY wanting to check the game out lol. I'll probably hold off a month to see how well those comparisons hold up.

Decima is a beast. Rock solid 60fps even on base PS5. 

Unreal Engine 5.6 has also shown some big performance increases (like the Witcher 4 tech demo) so we should see better running games on that engine in the future too. 

Disappointing that only Guerilla and KojiPro use it. Probably the best engine of this gen so far.

I'm currently playing "Death Stranding 2" on my PlayStation 5 Pro and oh my god, it's so incredible! its fantastic. I'm also really looking forward to "Ghost of Yotei" in October.

It shouldn't be taken for granted that the same teams are making console exclusives and taking all the appropriate choices & time for optimisation, most notably no ray tracing.

Looking at the rock solid 1080/30fps experiences we had from PS4's highlights like The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spiderman and even the OG FFVII R. I think this is really the sort of performance we should be seeing on base PS5.

I think people defaulting to UE5's most expensive tools (Lumen & Naninte) and rushed development are actually the main causes for Ureal Engine games disappointing (outside of transversal stutter). This game is another great example of RT really being misused a lot this generation. At a glance both the lighting and reflections looking better than most RT featuring games.

Recently playing Clair Obscure and in many ways the game would look so much better if it dropped both lumen and nanite, upped  the resolution and quality of individual assets & traditional lighting FX. For many developers these tools are the quick way to "take advantage" of modern hardware and they do speed up development a bit (less time creating cubemaps, baked lighting etc) but actually make the output of their games worse 

That's a fair assessment if you were OK with playing Clair Obscur in 2027 only. Saying lumen and especially nanite speed up development "a bit" is underselling either.

Most of these non-UE games from these companies have much, much greater budgets and teams working on them.

You think Nanite and Lumen shaved 2 years off the development? 

I think its closer to a few months max and a knock in realism in favour of a more stable image/performance. Bare in mind the game's lighting isn't fully path traced or anything, so lots of manual work still being done there. Especially considering the art direction too. 

Yessir. I'm not expecting it to last one whole month, Ghost of Tsushima took me around 3 weeks to finish and platinum but the budget for that month will be exclusive for Yotei lol.