Dark Souls: Remastered On PS4 Pro Will Not Feature HDR Lighting

To the excitement of many around the world, Bandai Namco announced yesterday that Dark Souls would be getting remastered for all current-gen platforms. However, that excitement may now be diminished for the PS4 crowd, as it has just revealed there was one fairly significant mistake made in the post: contrary to what was initially stated, the PS4 Pro version of Dark Souls: Remastered won’t feature HDR Lighting.

For those unfamiliar with the term, HDR Lighting, otherwise known as High-dynamic-range rendering, basically allows for more realistic and vivid environments by using lighting calculations done in high dynamic range, rather than using lamps. To learn about this in more detail, read this write-up.

The long and short of it is that it just looks better.

At any rate, considering that the original Dark Souls on the PS3 is outdated in just about every sense of the word, fans on the PS4 Pro were pretty excited to learn that they would be able to play it with Upscaled 4K resolution with HDR Lighting at 60 FPS, making the experience closer to what one would expect on a PC.

However, it turns out that this won’t entirely be the case and the community head was quick to go to Twitter to rectify the mistake, saying:

“So to correct a few things that I posted about yesterday – Dark Souls Remastered will not include new assets based on the Dark Souls 3 engine or any combat differences. There is no HDR lighting for the PS4 Pro version.”

So, there you have it: Dark Souls: Remastered on the PS4 Pro will no longer feature HDR Lighting. And while that will certainly be disappoint for some, the game will still have Upscaled 4K resolution and run at 60 FPS which are arguably far more important. More than anything else, though, it’s great that Bandai Namco finally listened to what fans have asking about for years and decided to remaster Dark Souls 1 at all.