Techland’s game doesn’t reach the Ultra level on Sony’s half-gen console that we see on PC, but it’s not that far off.
Dead Island 2 has recently reached the Ultimate Edition version, which includes the two DLCs alongside the base game, as well as lots of weapons and skin packs. A Horde mode (Neighborhood Watch) has been added, a New Game+ mode has been added, and it now supports PlayStation 5 Pro. WCCFTech caught up with Andrew Mitchell, Dambuster’s Chief Technology Officer, to find out more. He explained how long it took to get the support and how it’s better than the base model.
“It took us about a month, split between the engineering and QA teams, to prepare the PlayStation 5 Pro update. First, we had to do an SDK update to make Dead Island 2 ‘Pro’ compatible. Fortunately, we’d already put a lot of effort into making the game scalable across two generations of consoles and high-end PCs, so we were able to leverage existing scalability options to make Dead Island 2 the best it could be on PlayStation 5 Pro. After making various changes to the Pro build, we ran the game through both manual QA testing and our automated performance testing environment to ensure that the improved fidelity was realized without compromising a solid 60fps experience.
The PlayStation 5 Pro offers significant improvements over the base console, particularly in the area of GPU performance. The improved GPU performance was something that Dead Island 2 could really lean on as we were making a graphically demanding game. Both Pro models offer upgrades to CPU and GPU performance, but the main improvement is in the GPU, so they are similar in that these mid-gen updates can achieve higher visual fidelity, which is a real plus for gamers. I’m sure the best is yet to come in terms of how new titles can take advantage of the power of PlayStation 5 Pro,” said Mitchell.
How has Dead Island 2 been improved on the PlayStation 5 Pro, and how does it compare to the PC version? “We were able to improve the visual fidelity and increase the resolution of Dead Island 2 for PlayStation 5 Pro. These quality improvements included shadows, draw distances, contact shadows on all objects and lights, motion blur, depth of field, and texture filtering. For resolution, we unlocked our dynamic resolution cap to native 4K, and in most cases the game was able to achieve this goal. We do not use PSSR. The PlayStation 5 Pro has the same visual settings as the ‘High’ spec on PC. We do offer an ‘Ultra’ spec mode on PC, but it goes beyond that. When considering the upgrade options for Pro, we wanted to make sure we didn’t compromise the solid 60fps frame rate target that gives users the best gaming experience,” Mitchell added.
It’s fine if it doesn’t run at maximum graphics.
Source: WCCFTech
