Author: Game Infliction

Naughty Dog has updated both The Last of Us Part 1 on PlayStation 5 and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered to add PS5 Pro support ahead of the mid-gen console upgrade’s release next month.

PS5 Pro has an AI-powered upscaling feature called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that can automatically improve the image clarity of games, but PS5 Pro Enhanced games take particular advantage of the beefier console’s features.

Naughty Dog detailed The Last of Us Part 1 update 2.00 in patch notes published to its website. On PS5, the game has a new ‘Pro’ mode that renders at at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K “while maintaining a target of 60fps.”

Elsewhere, on PS5 Pro The Last of Us Part 1’s Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and “provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5.” Naughty Dog failed to confirm what those framerates are, however.

The Last of Us Part 1 PS5 Update 2.00 Patch Notes

PlayStation 5 Pro

• New rendering mode added that takes advantage of PlayStation® Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
  • New “Pro” mode renders at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K, while maintaining a target of 60 fps*
  • Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5*

*Enhanced features require a compatible display in addition to the PlayStation 5 Pro console.

General

• Fixed issue where New Game+ mode wasn’t being applied when using Chapter Select
• Fixed an issue where a player’s Artifact collection could become desynced with their Save Data, preventing trophy acquisition
• Fixed an issue where game could be locked at 40 fps on boot up when using a 4K, VRR monitor

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue where players could become unable to swim quickly due to rebinding conflicts with a Custom control scheme
• Fixed an issue where the speedrun timer could revert to the most recent checkpoint’s time if the player quit or the game crashed
• [Bill’s Town] Fixed an issue where Ellie and Bill would not follow the player as expected
• [Lakeside Resort] Improved Ellie’s accuracy with the hunting rifle while crouched
• [The University] Fixed issue with library generator that could affect progression
• [Bus Depot] Fixed issue where Joel’s flashlight would turn on when inspecting certain artifacts despite being in direct sunlight

Accessibility

• Added additional support so that more PlayStation 5 console Accessibility settings are now reflected in-game
• [Pittsburgh] Fixed an issue where a generator could be pinged by ‘Enhanced Listening Mode’ before intended
• [Tommy’s Dam] Fixed an issue on New Game+ where there was no prompt to turn the hand-wheel
• [Left Behind – Back in a Flash] Fixed an issue where Navigation Assistance could become disabled unintentionally

Meanwhile, Naughty Dog has detailed The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered update 1.2.0, again in patch notes published to its website. The PS5 Pro features for Part 2 are the same as those for Part 1: a new Pro mode that renders at 1440p with PSSR upscaling output to 4K while maintaining a target of 60fps, with game’s Performance and Fidelity rendering modes providing a smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5.

The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered Update 1.2.0 Patch Notes

PlayStation 5 Pro

• New rendering mode added that takes advantage of PlayStation® Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
  • New “Pro” mode renders at 1440p, with PSSR upscaling output to 4K, while maintaining a target of 60 fps*
  • Performance and Fidelity rendering modes are still available and provide smoother experience and high framerates compared to the original PS5*

*Enhanced features require a compatible display in addition to the PlayStation 5 Pro console.

General

• Fixed an issue where some trophies would not unlock after importing PS4 save data
• Fixed an issue where Abby’s torso could disappear when switching between her bonus skins

Gameplay

• [The Tunnels] Fixed an issue where Dina could be grabbed an additional time while escaping in the subway

No Return

• Fixed an issue where the stun bomb was not being accurately counted toward the player’s “Stun” stats
• Fixed an issue where some weapon kills were not accurately tracking toward player’s stats when performing stealth kills in between those weapon kills
• Fixed an issue where shiv kills were not being accurately counted toward the player’s “Shiv” stats

Audio

• [On Foot] Fixed an issue where music tracks would not progress as intended when speedrunning

Accessibility

• Added additional support so more PlayStation 5 console Accessibility settings are now reflected in-game
• [The Tunnels] Fixed an issue where code for the locked room could not be located using Enhanced Listen Mode
• [No Return] Fixed an issue where enemies specified by a Gambit were not properly identified when using High Contrast Mode

Technical leads at various developers, including Naughty Dog, have already spoken about how on the base PS5 players would often have to choose between Fidelity mode, which offers better resolution at lower framerates, typically 30fps, or Performance mode, which raises the framerate to 60 at the expense of better graphical textures and ray tracing. That choice is no longer necessary on the PS5 Pro, which can run games combining better resolution with higher framerates.

Last month, Travis McIntosh, Naughty Dog’s head of technology, told IGN that the ability to play The Last of Us at 60fps in 4K is “a huge deal.” “It makes it so we don’t have to compromise, so you don’t have to pick between high fidelity and good performance.”

“The high fidelity mode on the base PS5 actually looks even better when you’re on Pro,” McIntosh added. “And there are some minor performance issues in performance mode on the PS5 base model that are also much better. Very solid 60 [fps], a lot less frame drops when you get to the Pro.”

This week, developer Remedy detailed its approach to Alan Wake 2’s PS5 Pro update, explaining that Quality mode adds ray tracing at the expense of running at 30fps, but the patch also includes big improvements to Performance mode.

The Last of Us games join the likes of Blizzard’s Diablo 4 and Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Ragnarok in a list of over 70 games with confirmed PS5 Pro Enhanced updates, according to eagle-eyed fans who’ve been keeping an eye on the PlayStation Store (IGN has a list of all the PS5 Pro Enhanced games so far).

PS5 Pro launches November 7 priced $700.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

For most of us, the biggest penalty for making too much noise might be a scolding shush from the movie theater seat behind you, but in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead you’re only ever one creaky floorboard away from getting snuffed out by an alien threat that’s always listening out for you like it’s the most sinister form of Siri. This instant fail stealth-heavy horror story does a pretty convincing job of recreating the breath-holding tension of the films, in addition to borrowing heavily from the likes of Alien: Isolation in the way it casts you as the reluctant rodent trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse. The result is a consistently stressful undertaking from start to finish, even though my careful creep down The Road Ahead moved at a relentlessly glacial pace and occasionally snagged on some slightly curious design decisions.

A standalone story mostly set around four months after the alien invasion seen in A Quiet Place: Day One, The Road Ahead casts us as college student Alex Taylor and follows her attempts to flee her abandoned hospital hideout in order to make a silent and steady pilgrimage towards an off-shore safe haven isolated from the threat of the monsters, known as Death Angels. It’s a straightforward setup, but tender early moments spent with her likable boyfriend Martin and kindhearted father Kenneth were enough to get me invested in Alex’s cause before inevitable alien-inflicted tragedy spurs her escape plan into action. It’s a bit of a letdown that, in spite of its strong start, the payoff for The Road Ahead’s plot in its dying hours is all too predictable, and its overall story comes up noticeably lacking in impact – particularly in the wake of the far more emotionally resonant tale found in Day One earlier this year.

Still, there’s no shortage of affecting human artifacts to comb through along the way. Outside of the story’s opening chapters and the odd flashback, Alex is alone with her own thoughts – which are appropriately represented via onscreen text since any spoken sentence is only ever followed by a death sentence – for most of The Road Ahead. In lieu of any interactions with other survivors, I got a strong sense of the history of each space I shuffle-stepped through by observing the heartbreaking family portraits handcrafted in a child’s crayon tacked to the wall of a deserted safehouse, or the hilarious note about a toilet paper-related riot left by a store owner in a seaside shopping strip. There are plenty of great worldbuilding touches like this in The Road Ahead, and I had ample opportunity to study every little detail since I moved through it in a constant state of slow-motion, desperately trying to keep my every movement on mute.

Creeping with the Enemy

It might be a first-person adventure almost completely devoid of combat, but The Road Ahead is no “walking simulator;” it’s a balking simulator. Every step you take or action you perform is a reluctant one, because even the lightest door hinge-squeak or stomped-on gravel crunch can alert an alien hunter to your whereabouts and end your slow-walk to safety in an instant. Thus, most of my progress through Alex’s adventure through empty houses, camping grounds, and trainyards was made with micro movements to my controller’s thumbstick; tip-toeing through rooms at a snail’s pace and incrementally tilting forward to push doors open or carefully pulling back to slowly open desk drawers to search through. It felt a bit like coming home late from a night out and trying to find your way to bed without waking your significant other, only in this instance your significant other is a spindly-limbed extraterrestrial who wants to rip your insides out rather than simply ask you to sleep on the couch.

Almost every environment you explore in The Road Ahead is purpose-built to test your coordination and fine-motor skills. Rooms are cramped and cluttered with beast-stirring booby traps to avoid and – if you’re not careful – simply brushing past hollow barrels or pulling open the cover of an air vent too eagerly can bring your swift undoing. Thankfully, Alex is given a homemade phonometer early on which, when carried in her left hand, indicates the decibel level produced by her movements relative to the overall volume of the ambient sounds around her. I basically spent the entire seven-hour journey anxiously trying to prevent its meter from lighting up as a result of each steady-handed interaction I performed, not unlike trying to extract the wishbone in a game of Operation without suddenly triggering the patient’s buzzer and blinking red nose.

Some of the ways The Road Ahead conjures up a life-ending crunch or clang do feel a little contrived, though. It makes total sense for there to be shards of broken glass lining the paths beside the shattered windows of an upturned train carriage, but the number of discarded paint cans to be found on remote forest hiking trails does seem a touch too improbable, like rolling out from under the Simpsons’ family car and finding yourself in a carpark that’s inexplicably full of garden rakes to step on. I managed to suspend my disbelief and just abide by the noise-making obstacle course that the developers have created, but I do wish they’d been able to disguise their monster-rousing trip-ups a little more organically.

The threats to blowing Alex’s cover aren’t only found in the world around her, though; they’re also within. Alex is an asthmatic, so actions of overexertion – like pulling herself up onto ledges or carrying heavy planks to use as makeshift bridges, as well as moments of heightened stress such as finding herself in close proximity to one of the alien stalkers – can push her into a state of noisy hyperventilation, which acts as a heavy-breathing beacon to any monsters in the area. This brings the welcome challenge of identifying when to best use the inhalers that can be collected along the way, even if it does seem a little silly that they’re single-use only, as though their previous owners huffed each of them right up to the limit.

Quiet Riot

The Road Ahead isn’t only about stalking around in silence like some sort of survival-horror street mime, and along with the phonometer you are provided with some other basic tools to keep the keen-eared killers at bay. Bricks and bottles can be picked up and lobbed to temporarily distract them in fairly standard stealth-game style, while some other items serve dual purposes, like the hand flares that can be sparked to either light up darker environments or tossed away to confuse your petal-faced pursuers with their crackling hiss. It does feel a bit arbitrary the way certain items in Alex’s inventory can only be wielded in certain hands, though. It may create an added layer of tension to be forced to choose between measuring sound with the phonometer and illuminating the path forward with Alex’s flashlight, for example, since they can each only be wielded in her left hand, but it hardly makes any logical sense. Where was this flashlight purchased, at Ned Flanders’ Leftorium?

Occasionally, I’d find myself caught in close quarters with a monster and not have any noise-making tools in either hand, which put me in the lose-lose situation of either trying to make a run for it and getting instantly slashed in the back, or standing perfectly still only for the blind beast to accidentally bump straight into my nose and strike me down on the spot. It didn’t seem to matter if I chose to stick or twist, since either way I was going to find myself stuck and twisted apart. Thankfully, The Road Ahead’s generous auto-save system meant I was rarely penalised too heavily each time I perished, so although the slightly scripted feel of its enemy encounters mean it’s never as outright terrifying as Alien: Isolation, it is at the very least more lenient and less likely to frustrate because you couldn’t reach a manual save point.

The quarter-speed crawl along The Road Ahead does eventually run out of steam, though, even despite the fact that encounters with the aliens do evolve in some ways. There’s only ever one enemy type, but midway through they develop the ability to sense your movements even if the sounds you make are masked by the threshold of the ambient noise, effectively forcing you to simply take your hands off the controls and stand as still as a statue until the concussive effects of their scanning is completed, as an example. These modest changes help preserve the tension level throughout, but they struggle to completely disguise the fact that you’re otherwise mostly doing tedious tasks like turning valves and searching through drawers for supplies like any other survival-horror game, only at a considerably slower pace and without any combat sequences to release that tension in. There is one short flashback sequence that allows you to briefly blaze away with a shotgun out of the back of a speeding van, but The Road Ahead could have done with a few more of these dynamic detours to help break up the bit-by-bit crawl even more.

Remedy Games detailed its approach to Alan Wake 2’s PS5 Pro update in a new post on its official site, explaining that Quality Mode will add ray tracing at the expense of running at 30 FPS, but that the patch will also include big improvements to Performance Mode.

According to the official post, Alan Wake 2’s Quality Mode will run at 30 FPS with ray tracing while outputting at 3840 x 2160 (4K). Its render resolution will be 2176 x 1224. In some ways it’s not surprising given Alan Wake 2’s hefty PC requirements, which recommend at least an RTX 4080 for good performance with ray tracing turned up.

That said, there are still meaningful improvements to be found in the PS5 Pro version of Alan Wake 2 without sacrifing frame-rate. Among other things, Remedy promises “significantly higher output resolution” roughly on par with the base PS5’s Quality mode by pushing the resolution to 4K, aligning it with Sony’s overall sales pitch for the console. It also includes overall improvements to “stability, fog, volumetric lighting, and shadow accuracy.”

“We did multiple experiments, including upgrading the 60fps Performance mode output from 1440p to 4k and adding PSSR (Sony’s AI-based upscaling method), which positively impacted image crispness and stability under motion,” Remedy explained.

“Increasing the internal rendering resolution consumes a lot of processing power, no matter how powerful your hardware is. However, in our experiments, even putting all the added power to increased rendering resolution provided a barely noticeable difference in the output image or its quality. Adding more pixels to gain visual quality is not straightforward with the new AI-based upscaling methods.”

Remedy’s post goes on to detail the ways that the console version incorporates ray tracing as well as its cost, noting how each ray must be “traced, and its hit evaluated and shaded.”

“In a game like Alan Wake 2, its complex light-material interactions and rich environments can make tracing, shading, and denoising even a single ray tracing effect too expensive to justify the cost depending on the hardware,” the post says. “Geometrically Alan Wake 2 is a very dense game. The usage of a GPU-driven rendering pipeline and its fine-grained culling with the skinning ran on GPU made it possible to create densely populated forest scenes with layers and layers of foliage and trees encountered during Saga’s gameplay segments taking place in the lush environments of the Pacific North-West.”

Ultimately, Alan Wake 2 is one of the best-looking games out there right now, so the results should be impressive no matter which mode you choose. It’ll join a handful of other games that are getting major upgrades on the PS5 Pro, including Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and several first-party releases. Go here to check out our full impressions of the PS5 Pro, which launches on November 7.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

Hit indie title Vampire Survivors is getting its biggest chunk of downloadable content to date in the Ode to Castlevania expansion releasing on Halloween.

Developer poncle revealed a trailer for the DLC on X/Twitter, below. It contains more than 20 characters and 40 weapons alongside one massive stage “and more” for $3.99. “There’s so much content you’re guaranteed at least another 10 hours of gameplay,” poncle said.

A stylish animated trailer shows a combination of Vampire Survivors’ pixel art gameplay with slick Castlevania animations showing off a handful of the characters arriving in the game. Ode to Castlevania will come to all platforms where Vampire Survivors is available on Halloween.

the new Vampire Survivors DLC NO ONE expected! Ode to Castlevania is coming October 31st to all platforms 🍷

our biggest DLC to date, there’s so much content you’re guaranteed at least another 10 hours of gameplay 😈

🧄 20+ characters
💥 40+ weapons
🗺️ 1 MASSIVE stage + more! pic.twitter.com/lHjFm3cUFi

— Vampire Survivors 🦇🧄 Ode to Castlevania 31st Oct (@poncle_vampire) October 21, 2024

Vampire Survivors is a fast-paced and over the top gothic horror game with rogue-lite elements, where your choices can allow you to quickly snowball against the hundreds of monsters that get thrown at you. It became one of the biggest surprise hits of the last few years as what launched as a humble indie game on Steam blew up in popularity and snowballed itself.

Poncle soon added layers of new content to the game and the core experience now offers 50 playable characters and 80 weapons to play with. That’s before the two major expansions too, not to mention the Ode to Castlevania DLC.

In our 8/10 review, IGN said: “Need a game to play while listening to podcasts? This is it. Vampire Survivors is outwardly simple but turns out to be an incredibly deep hole to fall down — though it’s not without extended dull periods when you get ahead of its curve.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.