Brad

Thanks for maintaining this, it's proven quite handy several times lately.

If you want to start dabbling with some video editing for the low, low price of zero dollars, the PS5's built-in video recording is quite high quality and can record in chunks of at least an hour at a time. You can pull those files off the console with a USB drive, and there are some free video editing options out there like Davinci Resolve or Kdenlive you can use to try editing some stuff together.

This is probably not any kind of permanent workflow, but you could get a decent amount done with it, and it's more than enough to let you get a feel for things before you start investing in capture boxes and a Premiere license.

Some real "lazy devs could have added multiplayer to No Man's Sky in one week" energy going on here.

I'm not remotely "primarily a PC gamer" and still play damn near everything that isn't explicitly a mouse-and-keyboard game on console.

Also, no, this isn't like every other console launch. It's easily the barest collective launch lineup we've ever seen. There's one remake of a 12-year-old game, one last-gen port, and...?

@cikame: You're kind of reinforcing my point with that image -- it's going to take time and a bigger installed base for developers to adapt their visual design to the new tech to achieve the look they want.

That said, I don't agree that the RT version of that scene looks worse. Here's another example, where the entire cave on the left is lit with the same flat, even lighting that makes the scene look unnatural and even a little garish. There's no depth to it. The one on the right has a much more dramatic, moody look as the sunlight falls off the deeper you go into the cave.

Ray tracing means the difference between huge swaths of a game being lit uniformly, vs. every inch of a game having a unique look and atmosphere due to the characteristics of its scenery and the lighting around it. The results of that will range from dazzling to mundane; sometimes a dark room is just a dark room.

@johncallahan: I take it this is a regular thing with this guy.

The definitive ray tracing showcase doesn't exist yet. There hasn't been enough market penetration of RT-capable hardware for developers to really start exploiting it artistically, just some relatively subdued examples of games partially integrating it into their existing lighting model (Control, Metro, the most recent Tomb Raider).

I'd guess it will be late next year at the earliest before we start seeing many examples of games where the art direction is significantly influenced by and more fully built around ray tracing capabilities.

I got halfway through world 2 and it hit me out of nowhere that this might be the game that makes me buy my own PSVR. Think it was the beach level, right around the time they lower you down into the ocean and you just keep going. What a great use of VR.

Wonder if there are any new bundles or Black Friday deals or anything on the way...

What model is your TV? A lot of LCDs just aren't great at low-contrast detail, which is the big reason OLED is getting so popular.

Mummy Demastered is better than it has any right to be and the soundtrack is killer, I'd lean toward that if you want some Contra in your Metroid.