I have long wondered the same thing, but I assume there must be a reason for it. Windows 10 didn’t even have the SDR brightness slider!
After lowering that slider in 11 I’ve found the desktop looks identical whether I have HDR turned on or off, as far as I can tell anyway. But I’m using an OLED TV and not a monitor, not sure what else might be different.
Well, what I observe is lowering the brightness restores color vibrancy but at the cost of brights in things like text (like I mentioned) - white or the glowing green text Steam uses is where I see it most readily. If I raise it up I get those brights back, but at the cost of crushing my blacks and washing out color. I’ll just manually keep it off until I launch God of War - there aren’t a lot of HDR enabled games I have on PC to worry about it. I did submit feedback to Microsoft - it seems like an easy solution, just have HDR off unless it detects an app that can actually use it.
And how easy is that to do? ;)
Unless you want to play HDR video or use the AutoHDR feature, just keep it turned off in Windows then. It’ll still work in full-screen HDR games.
Quite entertaining interview.
I’m tempted but I have Mooncrash and Squadrons on the go right now. Plus MSFS. And Disco E lurks as ever.
I mean, my TV has been doing it since 2016. /shrug
I think an HDR display device detecting HDR content in a stream is different from an operating system detecting whether or not a game supports an HDR display device.
I guess it should be easy in the case of playing HDR videos on the PC though.
Thanks. That interview was the motivation I needed to start the game for the first time. (I’ve owned it for years but never launched it).
One of the reasons I insisted on playing through God of War 3 Remastered before I got to Dad of War is because I was assuming I would meet the character who would be the kid’s mother.
But that did not happen. There’s no reason for anyone to play God of War 3 before getting to Dad of War. There’s no story elements or characters that survive that game other than Kratos.
The beginning of this game: Wow, I had no idea how much of a difference the one-camera-shot thing would make a difference. Obviously that whole thing depends on the content, but here they clearly want to show more than just Kratos, so in order to do that without any cuts, the camera has to smoothly follow other characters. That’s interesting, and it creates a pretty unique feeling to the game, I’ve never played a game that does the camera-work the way this one does, as a result of that decision.
I’m playing this. Which is an interesting change of the usual indie pc games I play. Here is a big AAA console cinematic action-adventure game, so it couldn’t be anymore different.
It is… lavish and spectacular (dare I say, visually stunning?), that’s for sure. It is a well crafted product, from the art to the music, to the voice acting and lip syncing to the combat.
I had heard how this God of War was different than the classic ones, this was more ‘modern’, so they had made it more cinematic, the combat a bit more grounded, the characters more nuanced. I am surprised how well it works, for example how good is the relationship between the father and son, supported by great voice acting. Great way to start the story, with the preparation of the funeral of the mother, it sets up the tone nicely.
That said, the game uses 100% the AAA template to a t. Action adventure game, where you combine an action game, with 10% exploration with hidden chests and collectathons, 10% puzzles (easish puzzles, the idea is to bring variety not to make things hard), 5% some cutscenes and story centric moments, and of course the other 5%, a bit of rpg progression and loot. Mix it, shake it, and your AAA will be ready.
Of course, they follow the formula because a reason: it actually works. Provided each individual part is good and it’s well assembled, it’s a great formula to use.
The issues I see are more outside the graphics and story. The combat is competent, it feels well made, and it’s of course ‘visceral’, but… I don’t think it’s actually that fun? It’s hard to determine the real issue here, something about the pace and the tanky enemies, and the lack of mobility I think.
It isn’t my favorite part of the game.
The other issue is going a bit too much in the obligatory & trite collectathon aspect. Some of this stuff is good, requiring exploring and being observant, other not so much and it’s there as busywork, to cross another bullet point check from the list.
This, together the length of the game and me not loving the combat makes the game feel padded with cruft.
Finally, I have some issues with the pc version. Depth of field and TAA.can’t be turned off, and I hate DoF. It has negative mouse acceleration (ie, turning the mouse fast makes it slower than turning it slowly). And the performance is somewhat uneven and not as good as I hoped, with lots of places where it can fall to 40 fps, even when limiting myself to the ‘original’ quality.
Thanks, I will search it on options…
I’m 22 hours in, and I’m kinda ready to finish the game already. But it seems the game still has ~8 hours more to go. As I said, I wish it was a bit better paced.
I finished in 27 hours, so not as much as I feared. Still, the game gets a bit too long in the tooth, I was tired of fighting the same enemies on the last six hours, for example.
There is a black spot in the story in this last third, as how Atreus gets super cocky and stupid when he learns he is a god. Like, I get it, he is a kid, so he isn’t mature enough to accept it responsibly, he gets cocky, until something bad happens because his attitude. That was the planned arc. But he changes in… 20 minutes tops! and his personality turns180º. It feels totally cartoony, from a sensible kid to ‘we can kill whoever we want, fuck you!’, while up to this point, the character had maintained well the illusion of reality. Not only that, there is really no character growth, he returns to normal when is convenient for the story.
Haha! PC Dad of War ho!
Man, I don’t know who I am but I’m glad I can punch through rocks :)
This is a lot of fun. When I say the gameplay is the weakest part, it’s not because gameplay’s bad :)
25 hours here and it is getting a bit repetitive. In my case I have zero chance of remembering these combos, so it’s not like combat is mixed up much.
I finally got a few hours in of Dad of War.
The boy killed his first humans today. He’s shook up. Oh, and I met the blacksmith, so I finally know why I’ve been collecting money. That made no sense up to that point. The previous God of War games didn’t have money, so I was wondering what the heck I was doing collecting sheckles, or whatever they’re called.
I’m really enjoying this game so far, just got past the shadow spell to continue into the mountain. Can’t wait to replay this with the QD-OLED Alienware display I predered and its HDR support.
I started fighting a guy yesterday who has weak points on his left knee, his right shoulder and on top of the giant stone he’s using as a weapon. That’s crazy you guys.
Are you able to hit any of these spots? After trying for several deaths (on Balanced difficulty), I managed to hit his right shoulder once, and never any of the other spots. It’s the craziest, hardest weak spots on a boss I’ve ever seen. I wonder if I’m just approaching things wrong, aiming wrong somehow or what.
You can throw the axe, dude!