Just over a week ago, after devoting half my Sunday to delivering packages across the continent of Australia in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, I went to bed with a dull ache behind my temples. I wrote it off as a likely symptom of the usual suspects: maybe I hadn’t drunk enough water, or by snacking my way through the afternoon instead of having a proper meal, by the time I had dinner the headache was already settling in as a side effect of hunger. Maybe lack of caffeine? It’s not like I’d spent all day glued to the TV, which can sometimes leave my brain buzzing and desperate for a break.
But by Tuesday I had a new suspect: Death Stranding 2.
I didn’t start to blame the new PlayStation 5 game, which I’ve been playing for the past week and a half, until last Tuesday, when I went to bed with a pounding headache. It was the kind you wake up from in the middle of the night and immediately notice the absence of, relieved of a tiny subconscious irrational fear that your brain could just be like that now. Tuesday had otherwise been normal: I’d worked most of the day and felt fine, then played about two hours of Death Stranding in the evening. That was all it took for the ache to start burrowing in.
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Nothing in the game seemed like an obvious trigger. Wearing a VR headset for long enough is guaranteed to give me a light headache or nausea, but Death Stranding 2’s standard third-person camera is basically videogame comfort food, easily digested. And the game doesn’t suffer from dramatic framerate drops or the kind of zoomed-in first-person FOV that can often cause nausea.
The only thing it suffers from, as a console game, is running at 30 frames per second. But after years of primarily gaming on PC, apparently that’s all it takes to mess my brain up good.
Like most big budget, high fidelity games on the PS5, Death Stranding defaults to a “quality mode” when you launch it, prioritizing resolution, but it doesn’t advertise that fact. You wouldn’t know there’s a performance mode unless you go into the options menu’s graphics settings tab, which has only two entries: screen brightness and graphics mode, which can be flicked over to “prioritize performance” to lock the framerate at 60 fps instead of 30.
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach – PS5/PS5 Pro – Digital Foundry Tech Review – 4K HDR – YouTube
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In a PC game that tab would be my first port of call, but for the first few days I was playing Death Stranding 2 I didn’t even bother checking it, because I knew I wouldn’t find the granular settings for things like texture quality and draw distance and anti-aliasing I’m used to on PC.
Besides, the game looked great! So I just started playing it. And also started getting headaches.
I grew up playing loads of console games at 30 fps or worse (ahh, Nintendo 64) without issue, but over the last decade or so it’s become more and more of a rarity for me. I’m used to locking games to at least 60 fps on my 144Hz monitor. On my Steam Deck, the types of games I tend to play at 30 fps don’t involve much rapid action: Dorfromantik is as chill as they come.
So either my brain’s somehow grown more vulnerable to strain from lower framerate games altogether, or there’s something about Death Stranding 2 that I found especially nauseating. (Screen size could also be a factor, since the Steam Deck doesn’t dominate my view the way my 60″ TV does).
When I sat down to play the game on Wednesday, I opened the meager graphics menu for the first time and switched it to performance mode. It immediately felt like breaking free from the tar pits that pockmark Death Stranding’s world. Everything was moving so fast. The animations and protagonist Sam’s responsiveness to my button presses were suddenly so snappy I couldn’t believe what I’d been tolerating for the last few days.
Flipping back and forth between the two graphics modes now, I think the most likely culprit for my headaches is the camera—spinning it around at 30 fps makes me a little queasy. Perhaps stronger motion blur would help cover up the choppiness of the refresh rate, but I’m not sure that would be an outright cure.
(Image credit: Kojima Productions)
I think the bigger issue is responsiveness. I’ve gotten so used to a game leaping to enact my inputs within every 16.67 millisecond window—the time it takes to generate a frame at 60Hz—that waiting double that time for each button press or analog stick flick, plus 20 milliseconds of input lag from my TV and a few more from the wireless controller, is now just too jarring. Like when I’m playing a VR game and the refresh rate of the screen is a smidge too low to perfectly match every little motion of my head, there’s a disconnect between what my brain’s seeing and what it thinks it should be seeing.
I’m thankful Death Stranding 2 has a performance mode on consoles, and for players who are happy with 30 fps, the game runs extremely steadily in that mode. I’m now happily headache free despite playing 20-something hours of the game in the last few days. But it also renewed my appreciation for the fact that even the most barebones PC port today will likely still offer enough graphical options to hit 60 fps on years-old hardware.
Yeah, we’re still struggling with unoptimized games like Monster Hunter Wilds and the stutter epidemic. But between standard graphics settings, upscaling tech like DLSS and FSR, frame generation, and community-made tools like Special K that help smooth out performance, these days 60 fps is a lot closer to the floor for PC gaming frame rates than it is the ceiling. And judging by the quality of the first game’s excellent PC port, when Death Stranding 2 does finally arrive on PC it’ll be an even better version of an already stunning game.
