Just as they did with Beyond: Two Souls, Digital Foundry took a look at Heavy Rain, comparing the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 versions.
In their analysis, Digital Foundry says Heavy Rain on PS4 “delivers a significant boost in consistency and visual quality across the board,” with screen-tearing reduced in many scenes. Along with the 1080p visuals, the frame-rate remained steady at 30fps throughout their time with the game, and “nearly every single texture in the game is re-created at a greater level of quality.”
Despite the visual enhancements, Digital Foundry discovered that the pre-rendered videos in key sequences have issues:
These videos appear to have been remade on PS4 at a higher resolution but the results are disappointing due to playback issues. Namely, these videos now exhibit screen tearing, judder, and severe macro-blocking. While the PS3 original makes use of 720p videos, the bitrate appears to be much higher while playback is more fluid. Effects work, such as motion blur, has even been toned down for reasons unknown – something that also applies to the few sections which employ motion blur in real-time.
On top of this, “a surprising number of show-stopping bugs and glitches” were found. In addition to a strobing image effect (3:40 of the above video), sluggish animations, and Ethan moving in slow motion while text continued to flash (these issues required a full PS4 reboot), they experienced positioning bugs:
While attempting to feed Shawn early in the game, for instance, Ethan warped from the refrigerator over to the kitchen table and started vibrating wildly as the frozen pizza clipped through his left leg. We had to restart the entire scene to push beyond this. In other instances, characters would randomly warp to other rooms or areas when attempting to interact with something. In other instances, visual glitches would pop-up at random when transitioning between different camera angles.
Although these bugs and issues “don’t exactly ruin the game,” they weren’t present in the PS3 version and Digital Foundry can’t strongly recommend the PS4 version of Heavy Rain until they’re fixed.
Have you played Heavy Rain on PS4 yet? What did you think of it?
[Source: Eurogamer]
