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Nioh

After more a decade of on-off development, Nioh is finally making its way to shelves this week. This action RPG, prepare in 17th century Japan, undoubtedly takes inspiration from Night Souls. Nevertheless, it sets itself apart thanks largely to Squad Ninja's knack for clever combat systems. Even better, the developers let players decide whether to prioritize the responsiveness of 60fps or the additional visual fidelity granted past halving the frame rate.

On our sis site IGN, Nioh earned an "Amazing" score of ix.half dozen/10. Chloi Rad, the reviewer, praised the breadth of content, the fleshed-out world, and the superb combat system. And the kudos don't stop at that place – many other outlets have spoken highly of this take on the Souls formula. Based on 37 aggregated reviews on Metacritic, Nioh currently has a metascore of 87/100.

With methodical combat, demanding boss encounters, and the ability to summon co-op partners, it's tempting to write off Nioh equally yet some other Souls-like. But if you lot look closely, it'due south abundantly clear loads of care and idea went into crafting Nioh as its own entity. From Software popularized this item style, only this isn't just a cash catch clone from Koei Tecmo.

Back in spring of 2022, the public got to play a nice chunk of Nioh with a limited alpha build. Dorsum and so, it immune players to pick between a 720p60 mode or a 1080p30 fashion. This was well earlier the launch of the PS4 Pro, so this kind of toggle on a console game was yet pretty novel. But with the release of the concluding game, the rendering options are much, much more complicated.

On both PS4 and PS4 Pro, players can choose between three different options: Movie mode, variable flick manner, and activity fashion. The first mode caps the frame rate to 30fps to boost the resolution, the 2nd attempts to balance the frame rate and resolution, and the third mode makes compromises in order to stay at 60fps.

Unsurprisingly, the results vary wildly between the base of operations hardware and the PS4 Pro. The Digital Foundry team got to work pixel-counting, and found a huge diverseness of resolutions on display. On the base PS4 with action mode enabled, the resolution jumps anywhere from 1280×720 all the way up to 1600×900 at times. On the Pro, activeness mode unremarkably allows for a nice 1080p resolution, but tin driblet equally low every bit 720p on occasion.

Meanwhile, the movie mode on the vanilla model does crank up the resolution to 1080p, but the frame rate is halved, and some serious judder is introduced. The Pro's picture show manner ranges from 1440p to 2160p, and benefits from improved shadows, but the frame rate and judder issues remain.

With variable movie fashion, the compromise option, things can get a scrap unwieldy. You'll do good from the increased resolution of movie mode, but the 30fps cap is removed. Digital Foundry seems to think that the unstable frame rate exacerbates the judder, so steer clear of this mode if y'all value fluidity in the least.

While a native 4K resolution at 60fps would exist lovely, that's just not a realistic expectation on Sony's hardware. And since a PC release is nowhere in sight, it seems that action mode on the PS4 Pro is our all-time bet for the fourth dimension being.