The remake of Silent Hill 2 launched yesterday and judging from the current review scores on Steam, it’s going down a mighty treat. Bloober Team seems to have done the original a great service with its reimagining of the iconic 2001 survival horror game. However, it’s not perfect.
For example, the developer has ensured that the cutscenes in Silent Hill 2 are locked to 30 frames per second. In this modern era of gaming, this can be something of a bugbear. Fortunately, as noted by DSO Gaming, someone has already fixed that. At least on the PC version.
Nexusmods user RoseTheFlower has created “Cutscene Improvements,” a modification for the remake that unlocks the FPS during the cutscenes on PC. This means they can now be viewed in higher framerates. The mod also removes the “black bars from the cutscenes in anything other than 16:9.”
Unlocking Silent Hill‘s full potential
According to the report from DSO, it does work pretty well, though they’ve only tried it on a few of the earlier cutscenes, with the writer adding that they “did not spot any framepacing or speed issues.” This potentially raises the question of why the developer and/or publisher made the decision to lock the scenes to just 30fps.
Such a small detail may not be a huge issue for some gamers. However, those who want more bang for their buck are willing to play something that makes the most of their hardware. Bethesda raised similar concerns when it turned out that Starfield would be locked to 30fps on a console. At least the PC version still has it unlocked.
It seems there may not be any one reason why a modern studio would limit frame rates in this day and age, but it is far from me to speculate Bloober or Konami’s rationale. In any case, if you are playing Silent Hill 2 on PC and you have a system with decent specs, “Cutscene Improvements” seems to be one mod that’s worth trying out.
