Dark Souls PC modder returns with GeDoSaTo mod for Dark Souls 2

Admitting that Bandai Namco offers gamers "a good PC port," Thoman criticizes a few aspects of the game, calling them "significant shortcomings." For example, HBAO+ is of "terrific quality," but is buggy and can only be used on NVIDIA cards. SGSAA takes too much of a performance hit, and SweetFX negatively affects the HUD and UI. "We can do better than that," he says.

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The PC version of Dark Souls 2 is significantly better than its predecessor. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. Peter "Durante" Thoman, the man responsible behind the popular DSfix mod for the original PC version of Dark Souls, is back with yet another mod--one that unlocks more of the full potential of its sequel.

Admitting that Bandai Namco offers gamers "a good PC port," Thoman criticizes a few aspects of the game, calling them "significant shortcomings." For example, HBAO+ is of "terrific quality," but is buggy and can only be used on NVIDIA cards. SGSAA takes too much of a performance hit, and SweetFX negatively affects the HUD and UI. "We can do better than that," he says.

For example, one feature that's currently broken in the PC release is ambient occlusion. It currently renders at 1/16th of the display resolution, is then upscaled, blurred twiced, and then added to the shadow map. "This means that ambient occlusion for e.g. a 1080p target resolution is rendered at 480x270. Such a drastic performance-saving measure may be required on 7-year-old consoles, but most modern gaming PCs can deal with a higher quality effect," he told PC Gamer.

With the alpha release of his GeDoSaTo mod, he aims address many of these issues, while enabling game downsampling without hardware limitations, and texture modification that works "out of the box" with Dark Souls 2. It allows for ridiculous resolutions, including a 4320p resolution.

It's an early release, one that will undoubtedly be updated in the future. But probably not for a while. "I'm looking forward to truly diving into Dark Souls 2's gameplay for a while," he said. "Instead of focusing on analyzing, tweaking and modifying its technical aspects."

Andrew Yoon was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    April 25, 2014 11:00 AM

    Andrew Yoon posted a new article, Dark Souls PC modder returns with GeDoSaTo mod for Dark Souls 2.

    Admitting that Bandai Namco offers gamers "a good PC port," Thoman criticizes a few aspects of the game, calling them "significant shortcomings." For example, HBAO+ is of "terrific quality," but is buggy and can only be used on NVIDIA cards. SGSAA takes too much of a performance hit, and SweetFX negatively affects the HUD and UI. "We can do better than that," he says.

    • reply
      April 25, 2014 11:41 AM

      [deleted]

      • reply
        April 26, 2014 2:48 AM

        Yeah, I can't get AO to work at all except the ingame setting.

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      April 25, 2014 4:34 PM

      This dude is a badass

    • reply
      April 26, 2014 1:47 AM

      It would be really awesome if the developer hires this guy like Bethesda did, or at least send him some kind of reward because he improves the game and makes it much more enjoyable!

    • reply
      April 26, 2014 2:46 AM

      I was getting a bad issue using this mod where any time a steam notification popped up it knocked my image out of whack. Disabling steam notifications fixed this until they can patch it.

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