God of War – the 2018 sequel to PlayStation 4 – has finally received a patch for PlayStation 5 and, in common with similar updates for Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima, opens the door to a classic game running at 60 frames per second – and at common with those other Sony juggernauts, the impact is really transformative. It’s almost like the final piece of the puzzle: the original release was extremely impressive with its 4K graphics, extreme details, phenomenal lighting and excellent performances. Nearly perfect 60 frames per second is the final flourish for a game that has pushed the PS4 and PS4 Pro to its limit.
In fact, before we talk about gross performance numbers, we should probably address what you might call improving quality of life. By extracting so much of the next-generation silicon, Santa Monica Studio inadvertently ran into another problem – the cooling design of the PS4 and PS4 Pro. God of War has actually become our preferred title for testing energy consumption, the PlayStation hardware’s acoustics and thermal performance. Especially when it comes to noise, this game caused the fans to spin at an obstructive level, depending on what hardware iteration you have. In addition to what is happening with the software, God of War on PS5 is a much more enjoyable experience simply because a story full of nuances of deep loss and paternity unfolds without acute fans running at full speed in the background.
And when I returned to God of War, what struck me was how risky that title would have been for SIE and Santa Monica Studio. A number of bets here pay off spectacularly. A series that started out as a technologically cutting-edge arcade fighter with predefined bosses has slowed down, there is a genuine story here and fully developed characters. In comparison, the older titles of God of War almost look like exaggerated word of mouth legends. Anyway, Santa Monica Studio has changed, the story has changed and maybe the audience has changed too.
A deep dive into the performance of God of War – the PS5 is in the center of the stage, but there is an interesting story to tell on PS4 and PS4 Pro as well.
The point is that the franchise is reinvigorated – not restarted. I say this because everything that made God of War so epic in previous episodes is still there in 2018 – the fantastic environments, the giant beasts, the visceral and ultraviolent fighting – and, of course, the state-of-the-art rendering of Santa Monica Studios. But while the studio has clearly changed, God of War 2018 is a game that respects its technological legacy in making the most of its generation of console hardware. The 1.35 patch for the game is fascinating – the 4K and 1080p modes of the Pro version (targeting 30fps and 60fps with varying degrees of success) are gone, replaced by direct 30fps and 60fps modes still using 2160p checkerboard rendering. Not surprisingly, the 30fps mode is completely blocked from start to finish, fixing some relatively minor slowdowns displayed on the PS4 Pro, but the revelation here is how solid the 60fps experience is.
Let’s put it this way, over the course of an hour and 45 minutes of play, only 33 frames were lost out of a total of more than 378,000 – and those were in an unplayable cutscene. To be honest, I didn’t even notice, since the ‘portable’ camera used by God of War is by nature a little inconsistent. You can expect the lowest performance to fall elsewhere in the adventure, but nothing you are likely to notice. We usually talk about ’60 frames per second blocked’, but there are usually exceptions to the rule – God of War is basically perfect and combined with a presentation like this, it is an experience not to be missed.
Days Gone – another title in the PlayStation Plus collection – also has a tremendous 60fps update for PS5.
There’s a bit more spice to the story, however, where it’s really possible to play God of War on the 4K 60fps checkerboard since the first day of PlayStation 5 hardware launch. In common with a handful of other games – like The Last Guardian, for example – the version 1.0 master gold code basically runs with an unlocked frame-rate. It is not ideal on both PS4 and PS4 Pro, as it basically exceeds 30fps anyway, and this presentation style was fixed in one of the zero patches that Santa Monica Studio released during the review period. But the code for the master gold disc still has it and the PlayStation 5 exploits it, effectively delivering the same result you are seeing with patch 1.35.
Of course, this presented problems: if your saved games came from a later code, they didn’t work. In addition, you missed the bug fixes and optimizations that Santa Monica Studio made in the post-launch of the title. Still, the unlocked frame-rate also offers some interesting data: we can more accurately compare the scalability between 1080p and the 4K checkerboard on PS4 and Pro systems and how well the programmer balanced the performance on both consoles. On the Pro, you can also compare the unlocked performance of 1.0 4K with the 1.080p mode of 1.35 and get an idea of scalability there. I have always assumed that the performance mode could not crash at 60 fps due to CPU limitations in the latest generation hardware, but the comparison suggests bottlenecks across the board.
Ghost of Tsushima – yes, 60fps on PS5 and much improved as a result.
But it’s the PlayStation 5 experience that is at the center here, and to be honest, it’s incredible – and also easily accessible. If you own a PS5, you are likely to be the game owner by default. God of War joins Days Gone, also improved, in the PlayStation Plus Collection, a series of games that PlayStation 5 owners receive as extra bonuses if they subscribe to Sony’s subscription service. Both games are updated and refreshed with their 60fps upgrades and while not part of the same collection, I recommend taking a look at Ghost of Tsushima too – it’s fantastic. It is a pity that The Last Guardian has not yet been fixed to 60fps on PS5 – we know it is possible, because the code on the disc does this and the performance increase goes even deeper, as we discussed in the past. It would be great to see this game receive a similar update, but realistically, we need to accept that porting older titles to the latest SDK is not always that simple.
And, of course, there is the elephant in the room. What’s going on with The Last of Us Part 2? Why didn’t the Naughty Dog epic receive a similar 60fps update? What we can say with some degree of certainty is that the other titles are reasonably easy to unlock, to give you that extra frame-rate – but that doesn’t presume it’s that easy in other games. Different engines are designed in different ways. If you look at the effort that was made to make Death Stranding run at high frame rates on the PC and the difficulties encountered with Horizon Zero Dawn doing the same, it is clear that simply removing a 30fps limit does not guarantee automatic magic results. I’m wondering if Naughty Dog is going for a complete remastering in a vein similar to Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered – but I’m sure everything will become clear with time.
Meanwhile, it goes without saying that revisiting God of War on PlayStation 5 is an experience to be savored and sets the stage for the sequel, apparently scheduled for release later this year. If there is a possible criticism you can make with this patch, it is that while it exerts the power of the PlayStation 5, it is still the same game with the same visuals – it is a pure performance boost. The Ragnarok will be designed with the hardware in mind – and the prospects are mouthwatering.