Topic: I knew it! Castlevania: Lords of Shadow!(SPOILERS HERE, PLZ USE THE SPOILER TAG)

[Alutwon]

Just because a combat system "works" doesn't make it any good. Yes, you press the buttons and moves come out.

Or look at the graphics. Where others are wetting themselves over how amazing LoS looks, the game has abysmal image quality, jagged edges and nasty, noisy look that undermines all its art direction consistently, with a craptacular framerate to boot. Now, if I all point out all these facts(because they are, indeed, facts), does that make the graphics NOT good?

I'm not trying to be a jerk but I'm kinda wondering what you did like about the game because you just knocked the two best things about it.

[e105beta]

There's that word again: "good" things. What you may find good, others might not.

And I know I'm not alone about my complaints about Lords of Shadow, I'm not just the guy who wants to be outside the majority opinion or whatever. People complain about things that I agree with, people complain about things I don't agree with. Its up to you, as a player, to decide whether you enjoy it or not, and not if something is inherently "good".

Wanting "to be outside the majority opinion" just makes it sound like you're complaining because it makes you different. I mean, if I walked into a FF convention and said how much I hate FF7, I'd get plenty of attention, just negative.

Your thrashing of both the Classicvanias and Lords of Shadow over really minor things and your outright indefatigable praise of Symphony of the night makes it sound like you're a fanboy who just wants to be heard.

I could be wrong, but seeing as you're unwilling to present any evidence to your complaints and ignoring Jorge's obvious presentations to the contrary while hiding behind the opinion shield makes you look kind of small...

[SomaCruz90]

Wanting "to be outside the majority opinion" just makes it sound like you're complaining because it makes you different.

Did you understand the part where I said I did NOT post negative remarks just to be "outside of the majority" guy?

Your thrashing of both the Classicvanias and Lords of Shadow over really minor things and your outright indefatigable praise of Symphony of the night makes it sound like you're a fanboy who just wants to be heard.

I have problems with the Classicvanias on a very core level, right down the basic play mechanics of the game. They are not "really minor things". Lords of Shadow is a bit different.

I could be wrong, but seeing as you're unwilling to present any evidence to your complaints and ignoring Jorge's obvious presentations to the contrary while hiding behind the opinion shield makes you look kind of small...

What the fuck, do I need to sit next to you while you're playing the game and point out the graphical errors or dropped framerate and shit? Whether you choose to ignore them, or hell you don't even notice them, whatever. THEY ARE THERE, and there's no getting around that.

I never even said this was a huge deal or a big gamebreaker, but I call it like I see it.

[Kale]

There is little to no anti-aliasing in this game. It doesn't make it look bad though, I have noticed jaggies, though the noticing definitely disappeared when I got more immersed in the game.

Also noticed frame rate drops.... but none of them seem significant except one at the beginning.

[RichterB]

For the sake of spoilers, I have saved the details for another thread, but I finally got the game and am mid-way through Chapter 2, and the connections to Castlevania/feel of Castlevania is quite slim (troubling me). This feels like a very, very confused game. Fun and interesting to an extent, but bordering on tedium in its level designs and lack of camera control. 

[SomaCruz90]

The first two chapters are overlong and mediocre(and the less said about that God awful Titan battle, the better), but it gets better once you actually get to the Castle.

But keep your expectations about what you want a Castlevania game to be with LoS. Me personally, I don't care too strongly one way or the other if its "Castlevania" enough, I just want it to be good.

[Valtiel]

Again, if your personal bias is to see pass these graphical problems, thats your own thing. I'm willing to bet a large portion of the Castlevania fanbase will do so. And just because everyone else choose to ignore the flaws in the compressed video doesn't mean it isn't there. I see it. Several members of Neo-Gaf's Lords of Shadow thread see it. One of my friends on my AIM friends list see it. It really doesn't matter how many people see it though, this isn't a popularity contest.

And if you really don't see any of the jaggies in Lords of Shadow, more power to you.

In fact, I was start to wondering about the fact you sounded like you were copy-pasting Amir0x and Jett. Respectable posters (Amir0x more than Jett, because Jett is a flag in the wind who's already changing his opinion, while Amir0x's "sin" is that he's a tech-obsessed gamer who was hating on the game before it was released because it wasn't 60 fps locked). The problem here is that as usual there's no middle ground anymore in opinions; if image quality isn't perfect (as in "OMG SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE111!"!!!") then it's "fucking terrible".

Anyways, since you're selling off the opinion of a couple posters as "widespread opinions", lemme cut and paste the Digital Foundry face-off (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-castlevania-lords-of-shadow-face-off). You know, these guys know their stuff:

"....

All of our split-screen vids are hand-encoded directly from the lossless source to ensure optimum quality, but Castlevania gave us real headaches. The game is so detail-rich that even the x264 compressor has real issues in retaining quality in a streaming video without the bandwidth requirement going stratospheric. We had to slow the video down to one-third speed, and really go to town on the encoding itself to get the full quality retained in the final presentation. Hopefully the effort has been worth it.

Retaining as much of the detail as possible is a must for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you've not played the demo, you've really got to see it to believe it. Even if you're not particularly interested in the comparison aspect, we really want to showcase the quality of the visuals being pumped out by this engine.

Secondly, hopefully the video will accurately represent the stunning quality of the cross-platform achievement: it really is exceptionally close between both platforms and we wanted to make sure that every pixel was represented, so be sure to use the full-screen button to get full HD resolution.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow operates at native 720p on both systems, but neither uses any anti-aliasing. This level of parity extends to all aspects of the game's visual make-up: lighting is effectively identical, shadowing is exactly like-for-like right down to the filtering technique used, and the texture quality and filtering are the same.

Developer Mercury Steam appears to have opted for a zero-compromise approach to its work here: it's basically impossible to find fault with either version as they truly are almost completely identical. The fact that the team has managed to achieve this while creating an engine technology that is state of the art in so many ways is even more impressive, and that's something we hope to look at in more depth in the near future.

...

It's also apparent that Mercury Steam values image integrity, because Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is completely v-synced on both platforms, without a single torn frame in sight. On the one hand, when you have visuals on the level that the developer has achieved here, you don't really want to see them blighted with screen-tear. On the other, you do have to wonder if running with a soft v-sync could have produced a smoother look - there's no doubt that Castlevania is often noticeably jerky, and not just in the cut-scenes.

...

It's worth pointing out that Castlevania's cut-scenes look really decent - far, far removed from the horrors  of FFXIII 360. However, what is equally important is the way that Mercury Steam achieved this. Yes, the encoding is better than Square Enix's, but the game itself has almost exactly 53 minutes of cut-scenes, and a further three minutes or thereabouts of credits and logos. An hour of HD video occupying 7.5GB is a pretty extravagant use of bandwidth compared to what well-encoded h.264 video is capable of these days.

...

It can't have been an easy decision for Konami in deciding to put the Xbox 360 version of Lords of Shadow onto two DVDs - for starters, the basic cost of manufacture is likely to be very much higher, impacting its profit margin - so the publisher is to be congratulated on not taking the easy route in re-encoding the movies to a smaller size using the existing codec, cramming the vids onto one disc and compromising the appearance of key scenes as a result. "


Read it: the verdict is clear, LoS is an objectively amazing visual achievement, and the only two real issues it has are frame rates (which is problematic but also not present through the whole game) and the Bink compression, which is an industry standard you will meet on ALL no PS3 games and still they did all they could to undo its negative side effects, even at their own cost.

Once again, facts are facts. Just because a NeoGAF moderator with extragavant tastes stated that "the image quality is terrible", it doesn't make it true. It just makes him wrong.

[JR]

Hey, for those of you importing to get the God Mask, has anyone been able to order from anywhere successfully? Both Amazon Japan and Amazon UK both have the LE listed, but neither of them will deliver to the US. Also, when I try to order from Game.co.uk, it just says I can't complete my order for security reasons. Anyone else having trouble?

[corneliab]

Just got Platinum. I did all the trials on Paladin, to boot.

[Alutwon]

Just got Platinum. I did all the trials on Paladin, to boot.

dang man dats hurdcur. The 4-1 trial was fun on paladin

[crisis]

Hey, for those of you importing to get the God Mask, has anyone been able to order from anywhere successfully? Both Amazon Japan and Amazon UK both have the LE listed, but neither of them will deliver to the US. Also, when I try to order from Game.co.uk, it just says I can't complete my order for security reasons. Anyone else having trouble?

Getting mine from eBay.

[Heuss]

It's huge and ugly Reebot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKc514_4j8o&feature=player_embedded#!



"this cool game called devil may cry"

"its got this lead protagonist"

"Everyone KNOWS him"

"Everyone LOVES him"

"But lets CHANGE all that"

[Mr.Bushido]

Yeah just like happen with LoS 

[Alutwon]

There are many protagonist in the CV universe


We don't speak of DmC or Dmc2..........

[Heuss]

Yeah just like happen with LoS  

They aren't comparable

DMC has a single protagonist.