Hey Lloyd, I hope you're reading this
I recently had the opportunity to test Elite Dangerous on the PS4 Pro. One of the major things that tempted me to purchase a Pro was the promise of better shadows in Elite Dangerous. And yes, shadows are pretty darn amazing in ED's quality mode on the PS4 Pro! However, for reasons I saved for another thread, I'm returning the Pro and sticking with my Slim. While I may be the exception in the forums, I believe overall I'm the 'rule', in that many more PS4 gamers in general own the 'vanilla' PS4 instead of the Pro. So about those 'vanilla' shadows...
I do not expect the very sharp, dynamic, and long-range shadows that PS4 Pro gets in quality mode. I realize that has to be GPU intensive. I'm okay with soft or even a bit blurry shadows, to a point. My biggest complaint with ED's shadows is the extreme flickering, which creates these "Yars revenge" patterns on the mailslot and flashing, strobe-like patches everywhere else. I already submitted this as a bug back when 2.4 dropped, and it sounded like it was being treated as such, yet here we are many months later and it's still really bad.
Speaking of the PS4 Pro, these exact shadows are seen in performance mode, so to everyone who said my Slim was dying.
There has got to be a way to give us something in between the laser-sharp shadows of the Pro's quality mode and what we currently have on PS4 Vanilla. Just get rid of that flickering, please. I noticed in some PSVR games that LOD is emphasized toward the center-of-view and softened more toward the edges. Would it be possible for you guys to have quality "zones" in ED? For example, the mailslot is always a focal-point in the game when we are docking, so perhaps you could code mailslot shadows to be a higher quality while keeping the lower quality, higher performance shadows for the periphery items.
So long story short, both the PS4 Slim and the XBox One are the two 'popular' consoles, so please Frontier, keep developing ED with these in mind. The more you optimize for the base consoles, the easier it will be to someday offer 4K and other enhancements to those who own the Pro and XB1X.
Thank you! [heart] [heart] [heart]
ps - I know you can make this happen, I have renewed faith
I play on Xbox one X and those bloody strobing shadows are doing my nut. Every station I approach looks like a rave is kicking into high gear. I've also noticed that the distance with which assets load in has been severely reduced, so its basically popping right in front of your face. Others dont seem to be noticing this, but I've been playing for a long time now and I notice it. Put it in a bug report and it got forsaken. Its really bad in rings. The high res texture popping is obscene.
All other games work fine so I know its not my console at fault. I hope this gets addressed and fixed on both platforms.