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Dark Souls 2: PC vs Xbox 360 - Gameplay & Differences (Review)

2014-04-28
today's video is made possible by Squarespace what's up Tech fans Kevin here on teka tomorrow now many of you will remember that about a month and a half ago we brought you guys a review of the console version of Dark Souls 2 just to get an idea of how the actual game itself was but we also promised that once the PC version came out we got our hands on it we'd bring you guys an update letting you know how it performs and just how the port was handled now anyone that's played the first Dark Souls on PC continue that that port just was not handled very well at all there are a lot of problems with it including the fact that it was locked at 1024 by 7 regardless of your native resolution and it was locked at 30 frames per second and thankfully this is one respect the Dark Souls 2 has not continued from that so let's check it out okay so in this video we're gonna be showing you gameplay from both the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game now obviously since this has been uploaded YouTube it is gonna be compressed you're not going to notice all the differences as well as you would have otherwise but it will give you some idea now depending which scenes you're seeing we will let you know in the corner of the screen whether it's the 360 or PC version and which character I use is different for them I'm gonna have a heavily armored Knight character for the Xbox and a major looking character for PC so the first big thing to note right away between these two versions is of course the resolution the Xbox 360 and ps3 versions of Dark Souls 2 were both only at 720p whereas on PC it supports whatever your native resolution is meaning you can of course watch it in 1080p or even as high as 4k if you've got the setup for it this results in much crisper cleaner looking gameplay with the various little odd effects and details becoming much more noticeable like Tabriz floating in the air well it makes an even bigger difference though is its frame rate on console people were only getting 30 frames per second and even less at times with a lot of screen tearing issues as well whereas the PC version runs smoothly at 60 frames per second now this is an FPS limit once again but it's 60 euros and 30 fps in our system which includes a GTX 780 and an i7 4770k processor with all the settings at max and the resolution at 2560 by 1440 we didn't see it dip once from the consistent reading of 60 frames per second no matter how much action was going on on screen now this brings up another couple issues that are really important in regards to how the port was handled there were a lot of things that just weren't really taken care of in the first Dark Souls game as far as how you should treat a PC port and that's been addressed this time with Dark Souls 2 first off video settings are actually a thing the first game only featured two checkmark boxes for anti-aliasing and motion blur whereas two gives users options to tweak model details draw distance shadows water effects and more so you can really push the game to look its best or make it easier in your system if you're running something with less power one other small detail that just brighten my day right away when I noticed it is the fact that you can actually skip the opening logos this time rather than having to sit through them every time you start up the game or quits the main menu like you had to deal with in the first Dark Souls now control wise the game is still very much all about gamepad keyboard and mouse controls are a bit more refined than they were the first time around but the opening tutorial still assumes gamepad commands for doing things still get prompts in the form of press a to activate or press select button for help you can take your time reading the key bindings or customizing them to your preference and practice with it awhile if you really want to play on keyboard rather than a gamepad but the experience definitely lends itself more to the latter as the preferred and more comfortable form of control so what this means is that this time around from software really paid attention to what it means to make a PC port and give people what they want and made it look even better than its console counterparts to boot it still doesn't look quite as good as the previews that we saw back before the game was released a disturbing trend we've seen across a lot of games these days but it's still a huge step forward not to mention of course the fact that this is a PC version meaning community mods are already in the works to make this even better in fact the original modder who fixed Dark Souls 1 already has some beta patches out for further graphical updates - - so those of you that waited patiently for the PC version since the console released two months ago can be happy knowing that while you waited longer you are getting the visually better experience now for those of you that haven't heard of Dark Souls or have heard about it but haven't played yet and aren't sure about it you can check out a flow review we posted two months ago at this link right here or we'll have it linked in the description as well they per - lazy to click on that here's the cliffnotes version in many ways Dark Souls 2 is a mechanical improvement of the first with a much heavier emphasis on giving players early on freedom and a lack of direction this hurts the game sense of storytelling a bit but in return gives players a greater sense of agency and exploration and an overall easier experience since you can spend more time levelling up and going at the pace you want multiplayer aspects in general have been improved with an easier method of co-op with friends and new covenants offers similar yet interesting spins on different forms of PvE and PvP it's the easiest of the souls games but still a hard game overall and a great introduction for those of you that were scared off by the initial learning cliff of Demon Souls or dark souls so there's the short short version if you want a more in-depth floor of you with more gameplay just go ahead and check out those links I mentioned earlier now before I get out of here I do want to take a moment to thank Squarespace for helping us make today's video possible Squarespace is one of the fastest and easiest ways to make your own website thanks to drag-and-drop functionality and everything is optimized to look great no matter what device you're viewing from whether it be a desktop tablet or smartphone they've got a great support staff hooking up in New York available all day every day and pricing starts out as low as 8 bucks a month and even with a free domain if you for the year if you want to give it a shot they were awesome enough to give our viewers the chance to sign up for a 7-day free trial and those who that end up liking and want to keep using it will also get 10% off your final order all you got to do is use the promo code t ot at checkout and make sure to use that code so you get and get those benefits and help show us some support well that was our little update video for the PC release of Dark Souls 2 if you want to grab a copy of it for yourself check out the link in the description and while you're down there if you enjoyed this vid please make sure to hit that thumbs up button to let us know and if you want more up-to-date content please make sure to subscribe to the channel if you're not already as well as follow me on my personal Twitter at Kevin Kenton until next time guys I'm Kevin for Tekken tomorrow and we'll see you later you
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