DF Direct Weekly on the PS5 State of Play event and the Sonic Frontiers gameplay reveal

The latest DF Direct Weekly has arrived, in which myself, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing Sony’s latest State of Play stream. While it may have been short on ‘gigaton’ news and reveals, the showing was strong overall, concentrating on 2022 and 2023 titles, going large on PlayStation VR2 and – in a welcome turn – taking transparency to a new level. It was made clear that everything we saw was running in real-time on console hardware and if it wasn’t, captions popped up to explain what it was we were actually seeing.

This latter point may not sound like a big deal, but it’s been a bugbear of ours for years. When so many gaming events have relied on pre-rendered CG trailers, questions have to be asked about how representative the content is of the end product. Can you imagine any other form of entertainment teasing the audience with trailers that bear little or no relation to the actual end product, often looking a lot better? Sony has been pretty good with this on prior State of Plays and it’s the way forward – as is showing us real meat as opposed to ‘pre-announcement’ announcements.

Onto the content, where after an excellent Resident Evil 4 Remake reveal (in itself an endorsement of in-house engine development in a world where UE5 is set to dominate), it was straight into the PSVR2 reveal. The news of bolt-on content for RE4 was welcome, as was the upgrade for Resident Evil Village. As John points out, while RE7 had PSVR1 support, it still relied on DualShock 4 for input, so over and above the visual upgrade, the actual nuts and bolts of playing the game should also be much improved. Horizon: Call of the Mountain also looked great, but we’re curious about the technical underpinnings – the Decima Engine as seen in Forbidden West may not be the best fit for a VR experience, so it’ll be interesting to see where Guerrilla goes with this one.

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