DF Direct Weekly: the team reacts to The Game Awards’ big reveals
Welcome the latest instalment of DF Direct Weekly – the 90th, in fact – where myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia discuss the latest gaming and technology news. It’s a week dominated by The Game Awards and the various reveals put before our eyes, where maybe – just maybe – we began to see the beginning of the end of the cross-gen period.
I’m not going to spoil the discussion but expect the Direct to cover off our thoughts on Returnal and The Last of Us Part 1 being confirmed for PC, plus we welcome Unreal Engine 5 titles like Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, Tekken 8 and The Lords of the Fallen. It’s unclear of the extent to which those UE5 games use the cutting-edge features like Lumen and Nanite, but based on The Callisto Protocol, we hope to see these games cut ties with the last generation.
It looks like the momentum is finally there to bid farewell to cross-gen thanks to the annoucement that both Horizon Forbidden West and Cyberpunk 2077 expansions will not support eighth-gen console hardware while Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2 also looks to embrace the current generation by only supporting PlayStation 5.
- 00:00:00 Introduction
- 00:00:59 News 01: Callisto Protocol PC updates
- 00:09:12 News 02: The Game Awards game reveal rundown!
- 00:50:33 News 03: Stadia dev kits dissected, analysed
- 00:54:03 News 04: Microsoft increases game prices to $70
- 01:01:21 DF Supporter Q1: Is Alex doing better this week? Has DF considered doing numbered ratings to send a message about certain issues?
- 01:04:37 DF Supporter Q2: Would you consider giving a ‘seal of quality’ to games that meet technical standards?
- 01:05:44 DF Supporter Q3: Would you prefer to play on a huge projector screen, or a top-of-the-line OLED TV?
- 01:08:46 DF Supporter Q4: Portal RTX demands DLSS, so is Quality, Balanced, or Performance the best DLSS preset?
- 01:13:04 DF Supporter Q5: Rich, do you still think that Xbox OS and PlayStation OS will become interchangeable on consoles?
We also present a quick update on The Callisto Protocol – essentially unplayable at launch on PC – which sees a key problem with the game resolved: the egregious stuttering is now fixed, with the game pre-compiling shaders at the front menu, rather than doing so in the middle of gameplay. However, there’s still profound CPU utilisation issues in the PC version and achieving a consistent 60fps with ray tracing even on a Core i9 12900K is effectively impossible in our tests.
Something we don’t address in the Direct is the addition of ray-traced reflections to Xbox Series X’s quality mode, which happened after we recorded. We can confirm that they are indeed included now – however, they appear to present at a much lower level of precision than the PS5 version’s reflections. It’s a bit of a mystery, but hopefully, the problems will be addressed in due course.
It’s been a bit of a tough time recently as we attempt to cram in 30 days’ worth of content into 20 working days – December is always a bit of a struggle – and doing so while delivering a major hardware review in the form of yesterday’s RDNA coverage added to the strain! However, I would like to send a big ‘thank you’ out for the response to last week’s call for further backing of the DF Supporter Program – it means a lot to us!
