‘City of the Shroud’ is an RPG with a truly player-driven story
Adventure and role-playing games have always focused on telling stories, and that tradition has permeated into almost every other genre. Whether with linear plots or with branching, adaptive tales, developers are putting story everywhere. And just as the technology powering games is evolving, so too are the narratives within them. One game, however, is pushing forward into entirely new territory: City of the Shroud.
Partially funded by a small-scale Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, City of the Shroud is being developed by Abyssal Arts, a small team strewn across the US and UK, with some assistance from Japan. It’s a hard game to categorize. It’s an RPG, yes, but it blends tactical elements from X-Com, The Banner Saga and Final Fantasy Tactics with a real-time combat system that borrows from classic fighting games.
There are no “turns” in City of the Shroud; instead, combatants all generate action points in real time that can be used whenever you like to either move or strike an opponent. Attacks themselves are performed using an upgradable combo wheel, which is a little like Street Fighter. As in Capcom’s famous series, you use the wheel’s “d-pad” to input commands (down, left, up, etc. …) for special attacks, and you can put them together (if you have enough action points) to pull off combos. There are multiple classes of character, each with their own moves, strengths and weaknesses, to combine however you please. Controlling them at the same time makes for challenging battles.
Between the frantic bouts of combat, the game presents itself much like a visual novel — you’ll converse with the residents of Iskendrun, the titular shrouded city. It’s isolated, and on the brink of civil war, with potential leaders squabbling for control. Something bad is coming, though, and someone in the city knows about it. As the archetypal hero, you’ll have to work out whom you can trust, choose whom to ally yourself with and whom to fight. But you are just one hero, in a city of thousands.
While City of the Shroud‘s world, its inhabitants and the broad plot line have all been devised already, where the story goes will depend on players. Throughout the game, they’ll be making decisions in the visual novel side of the game, aligning with different factions, supporting and betraying whomever they please. After the first chapter, though, those decisions begin to affect the world as a whole. Abyssal Arts is collecting gameplay data from each player, pooling it together and then reshaping the political landscape of Iskendrun around it.
“We wanted to give your decisions consequence, [and] we wanted the choices of the players and what was going on in your game to have consequence for everyone else,” Keaton White, the game’s director, explained. White has AAA experience in the industry, having spent four years in Japan at Capcom as a production manager, working on the Dead Rising series and the upcoming action RPG Deep Down. He’s now based in Brighton, England, where he founded Abyssal Arts. Together with author Moira Katson, whose self-published works have hit the top of Amazon’s Sci-Fi/Fantasy charts three times in three years, and programmer Ryan Becker, White created City of the Shroud.
“We wanted to give your decisions consequence, we wanted the choices of the players and what was going on in your game to have consequence for everyone else.”
Iskendrun can be divided into five factions, and the leaders of each are the main characters driving the story forward. At the start of the first chapter, each player aligns with one of those groups, and begins to uncover the story from that perspective. The decisions they make throughout the game — including, at one point, whether to defect to another faction — will directly influence their experience, as you’d expect, but after the chapter is done is when things will get really interesting.
After an undetermined amount of time — likely around two months — Abyssal Arts will close what’s referred to internally as “the influence period.” The chapter will still be playable, but decisions won’t influence the plot, and the team will begin to pore over the data. They’re playing their cards close to their chest with regard to which decisions will influence the story. “It’s not always going to be obvious that you’re at a feedback point,” explained Katson. “Little choices and comments you make may weaken your leader’s standing with allies or in the city as a whole.” There will be huge decisions to make, and those might be more conspicuous, “but then there will also be smaller decisions that shade the tone of how I write certain events.”
It’s not always going to be obvious that you’re at a feedback point. Little choices and comments you make may weaken your leader’s standing with allies or in the city as a whole.
Moira Katson
Of course, Katson already knows the meat of the story. “We know the antagonist, we know the events that are coming down the pipeline,” Katson affirmed. But at the core of the story is a complex political landscape, and the strength and aims of each faction within will dramatically change how the city responds to these events. The city, as it were, is a “living organism,” whose reflexes are attuned to the actions of the players within. “Characters will get pushed to extremes in various ways” depending on what decisions gamers make, Katson continued, and “will end up possibly siding with people that they would’ve gladly have pushed off a cliff before.”
The experience of scripting a game, especially one as unique as City of the Shroud, is a world away from writing a novel. Aside from requiring vast amounts of writing in a very short time, it also requires the writer to let go of the story and allow others to shape it.
Abyssal Arts ran a small beta pilot earlier this year, with a different main character and much shorter chapters than the final game will have. “It was incredible watching that,” Katson explained. “When you’re writing a novel, you have no idea what people are thinking in the middle of it.” Here, though, she was able to see whom people trusted, whom people sided with, just as the story was beginning.
Character art for the “Duelist” class.
The test run allowed the team to tweak the way they introduced characters. One early problem they found was that gamers, perhaps conditioned from a lifetime of simpler, objective-based stories, were all making the same, dull decisions. “Our players are too practical, and sensible,” Katson explained. “We have all of these fun characters, and sure, they’re charming sociopaths, but they are charming, y’know? Players just did not trust them and did not want to ally with them.”
This isn’t a novel, though. If the team feels that people aren’t understanding a character fully, they can change that. Got an inherently untrustworthy character that people blindly trust? Throw some more clues their way. “I would say it’s different writing this, not just because of the medium, but because I have that feedback,” Katson said.
“Feedback” seems to be key here. Or maybe “feedback loop” is more apt. Based on what players do, Katson will continue developing the city, pushing the story forward, only for players to react again and send things in another direction. Throughout it all, one recurring character in the game will talk about the city as a whole whenever you meet him. Every time, he’ll relay the current state of play based on real-time data — which factions are strongest, which are growing in influence and which are shrinking. Small touches like this, it’s hoped, will give a sense of Iskendrun as a living entity.
In addition to creating a real-time experience for gamers, Abyssal Arts needs to make sure the game stays interesting. Each chapter is going to be “alive,” as it were, for only a couple of months or so. The team needs to factor in players coming late to the party, or those who want to replay the game from another faction after the fact. “We don’t want this to just be a compelling story because you’re influencing it,” White said. “We want to make sure the story itself is compelling enough — that you can watch choices ripple through this world. It needs to remain this very multifaceted world.”
City of the Shroud is very, very ambitious — especially as it’s the first game from a small studio. It’ll be released in four chapters (you only pay once; the other chapters will come free) over the course of a year. “We wanted to strike a balance between keeping updates at a regular pace and what we can handle as a team,” said Keaton. That means managing a game release, bugs, balancing and community management all while writing what needs to be a captivating, dynamic story. And that’s without factoring in server management: aside from the story mode, players can face off against each other in online battles, something that’ll require upkeep and tweaking of its own. It’s a gargantuan task.
This project could completely fail. Any title with such lofty aspirations runs that risk. But from a couple of hours playing through an early beta provided by the developers, it’s clear there’s a solid game here already. Battles are exciting, and unlike anything I’ve played through before. The characters are interesting, and the dialog is (unsurprisingly, given the author involved) well written and engaging. It’s not exactly beautiful right now — animation is a little choppy, and the UI is full of placeholders — but that’s to be expected at this point in development.
The first chapter of City of the Shroud should come at some point before the middle of next year. And after that, the real work begins.
With the Switch, Nintendo could make controllers great again
There was a no more exciting time to be a peripheral fan than 1999. For me, someone who loved the custom controls of the arcades, the Dreamcast was a fantasy. Its Visual Memory Unit (VMU) was a memory card with a screen that slotted into the controller — and a micro console in its own right. Games like Power Stone and Seaman let you load mini games onto the VMU to play on the go, but more interesting was its dual-screen potential.
The VMU could display information, like your health in Resident Evil or plays in NFL 2K, right on your controller. These features were ahead of their time — it wasn’t until the Wii U GamePad came along that we saw a company go all-in on dual-screen gaming (the DS and its successors don’t really perform the same task). But the VMU was only the beginning of Sega’s plan to expand the Dreamcast.
There was the Dreamcast Gun, a wired light gun that let you slide in a VMU or Jump Pack (for rumble support) into the top. There was the microphone attachment that slotted in underneath the VMU in your controller to let you talk to the weird fish-with-a-face virtual pet in Seaman.
Then there were the standalone peripherals. Who can forget the Sega Fishing Controller, which as well as making Sega Bass Fishing incredible, also acted as a Wii-like motion controller in Virtua Tennis and Soul Calibur? Not to mention Typing of the Dead‘s keyboard, Samba De Amigo’s maracas and Virtual On’s twin sticks.
For context, the Dreamcast was on sale for less than two and a half years worldwide, and just a year and a half in the West. The number of accessories, the number of innovative ideas realized in that time, is just ridiculous.
With Sega’s hardware days long behind it, Nintendo took up some of the slack. The Wii had add-ons for the Wiimote, including an analog nunchuck, a MotionPlus sensor pack and a “Classic Controller.” There were also peripherals that integrated a Wiimote slot into their design — namely a steering wheel and a gun — as well the standalone Balance Board for Wii Fit. Oh, and somewhat serendipitously, there was a maracas shell for the Wiimote to play Samba De Amigo.
That innovation in peripherals all-but died with the Wii U, though. The GamePad was certainly innovative in itself, but its all-in-one nature killed any chance for peripherals that weren’t Amiibos. But there’s a chance peripherals could return in a big way with Nintendo’s latest console, the Switch. A portable tablet with slide-on “Joy-Con” controllers, it takes the modular spirit of the VMU and applies it to the system as a whole. And a Switch concept by one artist, posted on Twitter and highlighted by Polygon, truly impresses me.
Ryan Salamanda imagines a world of add-ons that slide onto the right side of the main tablet to “augment” the controls. There’s a Yokai Watch attachment complete with a spinning disc and light-up button. There’s a Pokemon Snap add-on with zoom dial and shutter key. There’s even one with a fishing reel, as well as an attachment that mimics a GameCube controller. Salamanda’s vision of what was then known as the “NX” was that, for certain games, you’d be able to buy the game packaged with a custom controller.
It’s a great idea. The Dreamcast brought the magic of arcades into a 15-year-old me’s bedroom. The Switch detailed by Salamanda would let me bring that excitement with me wherever I went. Would I feel stupid frantically spinning a wheel on a bus? Sure. But I want it so bad, nonetheless.
I’ve been arguing on and off with my colleague Nick Summers all morning about whether this is a good idea. His point is that peripherals are great because they look and feel like a complete object. “Even the craziest of Joy-Cons can’t hide the fact you’re holding a 7-inch screen,” he says. That’s valid, but I feel like the need to make that complete object has stopped many companies from doing so. By producing small, focused add-ons, perhaps based around a reference design, Nintendo and its partners could make these peripherals happen for a much lower cost than producing one-off, standalone accessories. And if that’s what it takes for me to return, after 15 bass-less years, to that feeling of reeling in a giant fish, it’ll all be worth it.
Images of Sega peripherals from Sega Retro.
Via: Polygon
Source: Ryan Salamanda (Twitter)
The Engadget Podcast Ep 11: Everybody Hurts
Managing editor Dana Wollman and senior editor Mona Lalwani join host Terrence O’Brien to talk Macbook rumors, Amazon ISP ambitions and Julian Assange. Then they’ll talk about all the work that went into Engadget’s five part series covering the world’s first cyborg games, Superhumans and look at VR’s ability generate empathy.
The Flame Wars Leaderboard
Wins
Loses
Winning %
Mona Lalwani
3
1
.750
Christopher Trout
2
1
.666
Dana Wollman
8
5
.615
Devindra Hardawar
9
7
.563
Chris Velazco
3
3
.500
Cherlynn Low
6
7
.461
Nathan Ingraham
4
6
.400
Michael Gorman
1
2
.333
Relevant links:
- Apple could bring E Ink keyboards to MacBooks in 2018
- Amazon wants to sell internet service in Europe
- Ecuador confirms it cut Assange’s internet for US election interference
- Superhumans: Inside the world’s first cyborg games – Episode 1
- Superhumans: Inside the world’s first cyborg games – Episode 2
- Superhumans: Inside the world’s first cyborg games – Episode 3
- Superhumans: Inside the world’s first cyborg games – Episode 4
- Superhumans: Inside the world’s first cyborg games – Episode 5
- VR helped me grasp the life of a transgender wheelchair user
- The New York Times VR app launches with portraits of refugee children
- The United Nations is turning VR into a tool for social change
- The Godmother of Virtual Reality: Nonny de la Peña
- ‘That Dragon, Cancer’ forced me to confront my past
You can check out every episode on The Engadget Podcast page in audio, video and text form for the hearing impaired.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on Facebook
Subscribe on Google Play Music
Subscribe on iTunes
Subscribe on Stitcher
Subscribe on Pocket Casts
‘The Orange Box’ comes to Xbox One
It’s been more than nine years since Half-Life 2: Episode Two came out and, yeah, that cliffhanger still stings. Thankfully, Microsoft’s Larry Hryb has announced that The Orange Box is now available on the Xbox One via backwards compatibility. That gives everyone the chance to soften the blow of Valve’s contempt for its audience by once again replaying five of the company’s best games. The legendary bundle combines Half-Life 2, its two episodic sequels, Team Fortress Two and some rando game about physics puzzles that’ll probably never take off. It’s not just The Orange Box that’s now available for your nostalgia, since Galaga Legions and Joe Danger 2: The Movie are also now available.
The Orange Box, Joe Danger 2: The Movie & Galaga Legions are coming to Xbox One Backward Compatibility today https://t.co/qPMRNrLoTQ pic.twitter.com/8nTaqGE9NG
— / Larry Hryb / + 1m (@majornelson) October 20, 2016
Blizzard launches its own cross-game voice chat service
About a year ago, Blizzard revealed a chat service for all of its Battle.net multiplayer games, starting with Overwatch. Last month it killed the Battle.net name altogether, saying multiplayer support is a “normal expectation” that no longer requires its own service. Now, the World of Warcraft maker has rolled out Blizzard Voice, a chat service that works across all its multiplayer titles.
The system works much like Steam’s Voice Chat, letting you talk to friends or friends of friends inside or outside of games, as long as you have the Blizzard Launcher open. The company promises “high quality voice audio and superior stability,” full customization, and the ability to “individually mute and change player volume.”
Blizzard Voice has arrived! Be sure to update your Blizzard Launcher before trying to give it a go 🗣 pic.twitter.com/P3T2lEMVWM
— Blizzard Ent (@Blizzard_Ent) October 20, 2016
To the dismay of some, it’s not an in-game chat system, however. That means you can’t talk to players not in your friends list during random pick-up games, for example, unless you use a third-party app like TeamSpeak. However, some Reddit users are hopeful that, with the technology now in place, team play will be launched soon. As one user says, “it’s such an obvious thing … if people are having a problem with toxic kids, just mute them or turn voice chat off completely.” To get Blizzard Voice, you just need to upgrade your Launcher.
Source: Blizzard (Twitter)
‘Doom’ unleashes hell with a new arcade mode
If you’ve shotgunned and boot-stomped your way through the new Doom campaign (and if you haven’t yet, you should) fear not: Bethesda has plenty more demon hunting ready to go. The developer released “Free Update 4” this week, which comes with a nifty arcade mode. Every gun, suit and “Rune” upgrade is unlocked from the start, giving you the best possible edge in the battlefield. The aim is to blitz through the “streamlined” game in the shortest time possible, avoiding enemy attacks and racking up multipliers. Points are rewarded for butt-kicking your opponents, leading to a final score that you can compare with friends.
If you miss the original Doom experience, you’ll want to dive back into SnapMap. The level editor has been updated with some classic Doom assets — walls, floor panels, computer banks and more — which you can stitch together into devious, ramshackle stages. They won’t change the core gameplay, but if you liked the retro Easter eggs baked into the main campaign, this is a way to feed those retro cravings once again. And if you’re not particularly creative, that’s okay, because you can download other people’s maps, or a selection put together by the Doom team.
Source: Bethesda
The Oatmeal’s latest Kickstarter hit is a monster card game
The Oatmeal’s Exploding Kittens project took Kickstarter by storm and raised an impressive $8.8 million. Now, the online sensation is back on the crowdfunding platform with another card game, and it’s all about building monsters that can eat horribly hairy, axe-wielding, laser-toting infants. Matthew Ingram (that’s The Oatmeal’s artist’s name) has teamed up with his Exploding Kittens collaborator Elan Lee yet again to create Bears vs Babies. The project is already a hit after having raised $1.3 million, but that amount’s bound to grow with 27 days left to the campaign.
In Bears vs Babies, you have to collect cards with different body parts to build the most ferocious monsters you can in order to defeat an army of horrible mini-humans. The campaign only has two tiers to choose from: you can get the kid-friendly core deck if you pledge $25. If you want to get the NSFW booster pack on top of the core deck, you’ll have to pledge $10 more. At this point in time, the duo only has plans to release a physical card game. But if it ends up as successful as their first one, we wouldn’t be surprised if they also release a mobile version.
Source: Bears vs Babies, Kickstarter
The ‘Star Trek: Bridge Crew’ VR game is delayed to March 2017
Ubisoft’s upcoming VR game Star Trek: Bridge Crew seems to instil an excitement in certain people that just can’t be matched. And so it is with a heavy heart that I bring you news of the game’s delay. Originally scheduled for November 29th, it’s now been pushed back to March 14th, 2017.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is a collaborative game in the vein of Artemis or Space Team. In it, you’ll assume one of four positions — captain, engineer, weapons or pilot — and then work with your team mates to complete objectives. It’s a VR-only experience, and so is only coming to PC and PlayStation 4 for now.
Early responses to the experience have been pretty positive, but Ubisoft says the delay is necessary to “deliver the best game experience possible at launch.” We take that to mean that there are more bugs than even Ubisoft is comfortable with right now. To be fair, I played it around two weeks ago and there were indeed a lot of issues with matchmaking and setup. Hopefully the delay gives developer Red Storm Entertainment time to fix it. In the meantime, you’ve always got footage of LeVar Burton and co. playing to tide you over:
Source: Ubisoft
Video game voice actors will strike after rejecting pay raise
The video game industry has made an offer to the SAG-AFTRA-represented video game voice actors, but the union won’t put it to a vote in front of its members. Interactive Video Game Companies (VGC; the group representing the game industry) offered a nine percent raise that “accelerates the 3 percent annual increase sought by SAG-AFTRA negotiators over a three-year period” according to a statement. The publishers also have offered up to $950 more per game depending on how many voice sessions an actor does. The VGC’s offer would raise day-rate for a four hour recording or on-camera session to $900.
While these pay jumps sound fine on paper, they ignore the union’s biggest concerns: stunt pay for intense voice sessions and compensation that comes on the back-end, like bonuses based on the amount of copies a game sells or subscribers it has. The snarky folks in the comments will probably call this greed and say the work isn’t that hard to do, but Hollywood studios don’t bat an eye to offer certain actors as much as 40 percent bonuses for home video royalties — that’s in addition to the huge wages made for appearing in a film.
The voice actors union was right to reject this. The talent it represents, like John DiMaggio and Nolan North pictured above, work with movie and TV studios regularly and just want the same compensation for the same type of work — not to be treated as second class citizens by the $23.5 billion video game industry. The members will strike starting tomorrow, October 21st.
Source: PR Newswire
The PS4 Pro, as explained by the man who designed it
Sony really wants to clarify a few things about the PlayStation 4 Pro:
First, the Pro doesn’t signal the end of video game console generations, even though its specs and launch window fit a pattern that resembles PC or smartphone upgrade cycles more than traditional console releases. Second, the Pro is valuable even if you don’t have a 4K TV. Third, though most games on the Pro won’t actually be rendered in true 4K, they’re still much improved over the standard PS4.
Sony probably feels the need to clarify these points because after it revealed the PS4 Pro in September, there was some confusion over the capabilities and identity of the new console. It was pitched as a mid-generation upgrade that would usher in an era of 4K gaming, but after the scripted presentation, it became obvious that 4K was still out of reach for most developers. At the launch event, we found just one game on the demo floor that actually ran in 4K (that would be Elder Scrolls Online) while others took advantage of the Pro’s upgraded guts in other ways. Impressive ways, but not 4K.
After the reveal, it was unclear who the PS4 Pro was built for and what it signaled for the future of gaming consoles. It joined Microsoft’s Project Scorpio in blurring the generational divide, and with all of this talk about 4K, its benefits for HDTV owners were uncertain.
That’s when Mark Cerny stepped in.
Cerny is the architect of the PS4 and a highly respected veteran of the gaming industry. He introduced the Pro at Sony’s September event, and he followed that presentation with a behind-closed-doors meeting this week, diving deep into the console’s technical aspects. In other words, Cerny is Sony’s cleanup crew.
“PS4 Pro is not the start of a new generation and that is a very good thing,” he said. “We don’t believe that generations are going away. They are truly healthy for the industry and for the gaming community. It’s just that the objectives for PS4 Pro are going to be different.”
Cerny is adamant that console generations are a useful, necessary aspect of the video game industry. He repeated the line “generations are a good thing” throughout the meeting, reciting it like a mantra.
However, the definition of a console generation is changing, and right now the PS4 Pro is leading the charge. It isn’t a traditional, expected slim model with slightly upgraded specs and a fresh look — in fact, Sony just released one of those consoles as well. The Pro is bulkier and significantly more powerful than the standard PS4 or the new and improved slim version. Plus, the Pro costs $400 compared with the slim’s launch price of $300.
The Pro is a dividing line. The PS4 is not Sony’s latest and greatest piece of gaming hardware anymore: That distinction belongs to the PS4 Pro. When the console hits store shelves on Nov. 10th, there will be haves and have-nots, just as there are people who got the iPhone 6S Plus the day it came out, if only to show off to anyone who owned the suddenly outdated iPhone 6 Plus.
Cerny doesn’t see the PS4 Pro as a new generation for two reasons: It doesn’t have significantly more memory or a new CPU.
“For me, one of the hallmarks of a new console generation is the use of significantly more memory,” he said. “By contrast, the PS4 Pro is definitely part of the PS4 generation, so we took a different direction with the console. We felt games needed a little more memory, about 10 percent more, so we added about a gigabyte of slow, conventional DRAM to the console.”
The PS4 Pro uses this memory differently than the standard PS4. On the PS4, if you open Netflix and then swap to a game, Netflix remains resident in system memory, allowing for fast swapping between the two apps: Nothing needs to be loaded. The Pro, however, allocates background tasks to the 1GB of slow, conventional DRAM, freeing up more memory for the active apps (and allowing the home screen to resolve in 4K rather than the standard model’s 1080p).
Additionally, the PS4 Pro features an 8-core AMD Jaguar CPU, just like the standard model. This means it doesn’t use a brand-new CPU — another aspect that would herald an entirely new console generation, in Cerny’s eyes.
“With PS4 Pro, one of the primary targets is flawless interoperability between two consoles,” Cerny said. “We chose a different path [than a new CPU], keeping Jaguar as the CPU and boosting the frequency as much as possible.”
So there’s the technical definition of a new generation and then there’s the social distinction. Regardless of whether players view the Pro as a more powerful, generation-skipping console, Cerny is adamant that the hardware itself is not upgraded enough to be a new generation.
But that’s just hardware. Games on the PS4 Pro will also use new software tricks to beef up their graphics and gameplay across SD, HD and 4K TVs. The newest, most game-changing technique is called checkerboard rendering, a process that was first used in Rainbow Six Siege.
Checkerboard rendering changes the shape of pixels; they’re no longer square. Instead, this process relies on delineated horizontal rectangles that each include one color, one Z value and one ID buffer (the building blocks of game graphics). Using data from previous frames to fill in information gaps, checkerboard rendering enables developers to build a more complete, crisp image that, according to Cerny, is nearly identical to native 4K.
He’s not exaggerating here either. In a demo this week, he pulled up a scene in Days Gone on two separate Pros and 4K televisions, one of them natively rendered and the other checkerboard upscaled. The images were nearly indistinguishable: The native game was slightly more saturated and the textures in the grass were clearly resolved while the checkerboard grass shimmered slightly in the breeze. However, from three or four feet away, it was nigh impossible to see a difference.
Of course, not all games on the PS4 Pro will use checkerboard rendering or even attempt to hit 2160p. Even games that do support 4K won’t always reach their full potential, considering not all players own a 4K TV. For those without a 4K set, Pro games will automatically scale down to the TV’s maximum display settings.
“Requiring all titles to run at 2160p on PS4 Pro makes no more sense than requiring all titles to run at 1080p on the standard PS4,” Cerny said. “The titles are going to use the increased graphical power in a number of ways. Some developers will favor quality over resolution, some will favor resolution over quality. We don’t want to have any sort of rules that have to be followed.”
Cerny listed a handful of AAA games that prepared for the Pro via various techniques, though nine of the 13 titles on display used some form of checkerboard rendering. Days Gone, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn all use 2160p checkerboard upscaling, and most of these titles rely on 1080p super-sampling for HDTVs. Meanwhile Watch Dogs 2, Killing Floor 2, Infamous First Light and Mass Effect: Andromeda use 1800p checkerboard rendering. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes advantage of checkerboard rendering to hit variable 1800p and 2160p resolutions while Spider-Man hits 2160p via a post-checkerboard process called temporal injection and For Honor gets there via a similar version of temporal anti-aliasing.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Paragon are special cases too. Shadow of Mordor uses native rendering at dynamic resolution, meaning the resolution “can vary broadly,” Cerny said, “but typically it’s at 80 percent to 90 percent of 4K.” Paragon features a mode for HDTVs with 1080p native rendering and enhanced visuals, and there’s no direct 4K version of the game: On 4K TVs, the upgraded graphics will simply be enhanced even further.
“We know that when game creators are making the decisions on how to best use the technology we provide, the result is almost invariably better for the gaming community,” Cerny said.
Near the end of the meeting, Cerny pulled up Knack, his PS4 launch title, side by side on two HDTVs. One game was running on a PS4 Pro and the other on a standard PS4. The differences were obvious: The PS4 Pro resolved cleaner lines and animations while the standard PS4 scene had more noise, particularly in detailed areas and backgrounds.
Cerny started with the Pro, picking up the controller and saying, “So if we look at the scene, again, it’s very clean, smooth. But if I were to do this on — ” he switched to the PS4 TV and sighed. “Look at all the moiré, or all of the shimmery noise in the distance. And this is what we see when we play games on an HDTV and we’ve learned to ignore it.”
Noticeably improved graphics and new standards for developing games certainly sound like hallmarks of a new generation — at least from the player’s perspective. Technically, Cerny might be right that the Pro is a mid-generational upgrade, but it is clearly a significant improvement over the standard console (even for people without 4K TVs). Significant enough to cost $100 more than the new and improved slim PS4, at least.
AIVAnet 