Welcome to the new Digital Foundry Direct Weekly – our regular news show where DF team members take a time-out from their current projects to talk about the latest gaming and tech news… and for once, I’m not it! There is a decent excuse, however. The truth is that examining six different console versions of Forza Horizon 5 all of which can see comparisons alter on a biome-by-biome basis resulted in a truly colossal amount of work. In terms of embargo coverage, thankfully John Linneman had us covered with his in-depth tech analysis concentrating on the Xbox Series X version, but even on the same day, I was still wondering how to contain and present the vast amount of data I’d gleaned from all systems. Hopefully it paid off! There’s still more Forza to come – with more from our studio visit, a deep dive into the PC version and something a little extra on the PC side made possible by the amazing Digital Foundry Discord community.
In the meantime, Audi Sorlie, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia sat down for the weekly virtual get-together, with a diverse range of news topics, including PS1 ‘demake’ efforts with Bloodborne, Netflix’s initial foray into gaming, plus the release of the original Little Big Planet source code. Headlining the show, it’s all about Battlefield and it’s all about ray tracing – Alex shares his thoughts on the Battlefield 2042 RTX trailer. Meanwhile, it looks as though Sony has once again listened to legitimate critiques of PlayStation issues, resolving the PS5 CMOS battery timebomb. It’s all a bit of a non-issue in the here and now, but very much a problem for the future. Replacing a dead CMOS battery within the console with a fresh one requires Sony’s servers to re-authenticate the system clock to run any games at all (even physical games) but in a hypothetical scenario, what would happen if there were no Sony servers, or if the user had no internet access? The issue was fixed on PS4 a while back and now future preservation of PS5 titles looks assured too. Good!
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