NEXON has partnered with Samsung to make its F2P third-person looter shooter game The First Descendant the first to support HDR10+ GAMING.
The First Descendant Interview - Nexon Games talks about their upcoming looter shooter, what inspired them, boosters and more.
Nexon Games is still unsure whether The First Descendant boosters will be part of the game. UX farming improvements planned.
Warframe has boosters. They work well. If FD does this I won't complain. I just don't want to see "insert weapon" for $29.99 on sale but there is no way to achieve it in the game
In The First Descendant, each character not only has unique abilities, but they'll each have their own unique story and endings?
HDR10+ Technology will be very interesting to see in action in game
This is just an add for Smansung monitors. HDR has been around in gaming since at least as early as the PS4 (although HDR on PS4 wasn’t implemented until a later software update.) The problem is that games do a bad job of implementing HDR. Calling it “HDR+ Gaming” won’t change that.
HDR in PC gaming is still in shambles, Windows 11 didn't change anything. PS5 and Xbox are not that much better either, albeit PS4 started out well with Horizon Zero Dawn.
Every single game takes a lot of tuning to get it right because there is no standard on how to do it well, and each and every panel has very different presets to begin with. Plus, the HDR implementation itself can vary a lot. In some cases, the image quality becomes worse than SDR. For example, a game which was 6+ years in development, Baldur's Gate 3 has lifted black levels until you tune the in-game contrast to 1.25 or 1.3 value. Go a bit further and you crush blacks and saturate colors. Stay under 1.2 value and you won't even display all the colors correctly. A normal gamer with HDR display won't watch a niche Youtube guide on how to tune this just right, and will probably just play it with HDR on using a 600 nit panel and lifted blacks, something that could be a worse experience than a standard SDR image.
Just like with HDMI certifications and specs, there needs to be one standard in HDR and companies have some sort of an association (there's one for HDMI, and it somewhat works), meaning basically a bunch of companies' engineers who agree on how HDR should be implemented and what the baseline values are for both tuning and brightness and colors etc, and share knowledge and agree on these matters firmly.
There needs to be a "Filmmaker" mode for HDR in each and every implementation or some sort of "if you have a 1500 Nit TV, click here" or have much more simple but effective tuning options for crushed blacks, and a real guide on if you should have your display's HDR Tone mapping on or off in the display's menu when selecting the in-game or in-system (PC or Xbox or PS5) brightness and contrast values. For example, normal users do not watch videophile channels and know that they need to turn off the display's tone mapping when setting up HDR on consoles. Not doing so results into washed out image. Hence the endless "why my PS5 colors look washed out in HDR" posts on reddit.
Now it's all just arbitrary and who knows what kind of "filmmaker" mode and "reference" monitors game companies are using to tune HDR values, or better yet, how many displays they use to test it out from how many panel manufacturing brands to make sure it is implemented well.
One cure to bad HDR image is using Nvidia Ansel and tuning the values to your liking, but you need to have a very sharp videophile eye to be able to make sure you don't crush blacks or oversaturate the colors and highlights. A pleasing image to a user is not "reference" or "accurate", and therefore does not represent necessarily display the artistic intention of the game developer correctly.
When in doubt, just turn HDR off and enjoy a reference SDR picture with a better contrast and less blooming on LCD displays. Yes it is dimmer, but at least everything else is correct. Sony displays are great in SDR game mode as well because they are very close to "reference".