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Out with the old and in with the new, Dark Souls 2 offers up the biggest technical overhaul to the series so far. With a new directorial team at the helm and a purpose-built engine bringing the eerie world of Drangleic to life, developer From Software uses the opportunity to trial new rendering techniques on PS3 and 360 in advance of their appearance on next-gen platforms. But while we're left with a string of upgrades in physics, lighting and effects, there are also some cutbacks we hadn't expected to see. Straight away we can pinpoint a clear technical advance in Dark Souls 2's resolution of choice, where it's now a full native 1280x720 on both PS3 and 360. On paper this should count as a massive boon to its presentation, but in practice the boosted pixel count only faintly improves image clarity over the original Dark Souls' 1024x720 frame-buffer. A reliance on a post-process edge filter is to blame: it's an effective aliasing-killer, but many highlights in texture-work and alpha effects are dulled, and on both Sony and Microsoft platforms alike the game produces a softer image than we'd hoped. Nevertheless, it's an improvement - and a positive start as we venture deeper into a game world that promises to be the team's largest yet.
On reining in our lossless captures for close analysis, we find visual differences between the two versions are few and far between. In a nutshell, the greatest advantage on the PS3 side is its superior texture filtering, where the cut-off distance on 360 is much closer - causing a blur to appear on floors at a nearer proximity for that platform. Perhaps more noticeable is the 360's own advantage, where higher resolution alpha effects are in place for bonfire flames, exploding projectiles and waterfalls. These effects appear to run with cut-down levels of detail on Sony's platform, which creates more pronounced aliasing artefacts when overlapping with nearby geometry.
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