Final Fantasy VII Remake

What makes you think it was pre-rendered? I think it was PC-development footage.

 

The devs confirmed it. The entire Leviathan set-piece battle and warping across a large and dense destructible Altissia city was a prototype pre-rendered CG as a pitch to the higher ups at Square Enix to show what they wanted to do and their visual target. They ended up reusing that footage for the 2013 reveal since they barely had a game created at that point. The game wasn't even running on the Luminous Engine at this time which was still being worked on. They created this after Versus XIII development was canceled and this pitch was to get a greenlight on taking Versus ideas and remaking it into FFXV. it doesn't make any sense this was PC dev footage when they showed real PC dev footage in the trailer that looked notably worse with massive stutters. This was 2013, even real UE4 released game ran like dog **** at this time. There was no way this footage was real-time even if it was on PC.

I mean just look at it. No contemporary game even comes close to that footage in sheer scale of battling over a massive open world city that eventually transitioned to a full on giant boss battle that crumbled the city in this visual quality.

 

This is supposedly real time gameplay footage revealed in 2013 the same year of the FF15 trailer announcement.

It still looks better


Also a lot has been changed from the story and characters

 

What looks better in that footage besides the destructible environment props though? Weak textures and the skin shaders looked horrible, completely lacks sub surface scattering found in the final game, with some very last-gen looking specular highlights and material work. Hair modeling and shaders were much more simplistic too.

2013


final


2013


final


Also has jagged low-res shadows that broke apart and lacked the volumetric lighting and soft shadows of the final game.

2013


final game


In the final PC debug you can change the lighting of Lucis to daytime, and the daytime lighting looks better too.

 

In-engine pre-rendered makes sense. They were using their PC experimental engine called Ebony. The bad footage was probably actual real time performance (didn't even have post processing on).

Still, I don't think it was beyond what current gen hardware is capable of. Sadly the downgrade was pretty big.

 

I am not sure if the images you posted are bull shots or from the PC version on ultra but it doesnt look as good on my PS4. from my personal experience of the game, lighting looks harsh with noticeable aliasing, shadows look rougher, there are missing effects like many of the reflections, and the magical sword effects look less refined. The shaders on the behemoth and the self shadowing are much more pleasing on the 2013 trailer than it does on the final game

 

Last comparison image are from PS4 with the volume lighting and soft shadows. The others are from PC in-game since you can move your own camera angles. Doesn't matter the resolution boost, the lighting and shaders on PC is still the same as the console version, both look substantially better than that 2013 footage.

Even if the things you mentioned as a knock on the final build were true (they aren't), look at the lighting, reflections, aliasing, shadows in that 2013 footage and you can't honestly say 2013 looks better. They didn't even have proper and consistent physically based materials in that 2013 footage. Nor TAA so sub-pixel and specular aliasing was horrendous, and piss-yellow lighting that carried over from the PS3 footage of Versus. Besides the hair dithering when in movement, the final build even on base PS4 was a clean looking game thanks to the TAA.

2013


final PS4, leather actually looks like leather, on top of much higher res textures.


The same magical sword effect was brought back in an update in the Royal Edition, which improved the main character's Armiger abilities.

ps4 final


If you compare the other particles in the final build they look much better than that sword effect anyway, there was no reason to think the lack of the 2013 sword effect was due to a tech hurdle. The particles, lighting, and effects in the final game are brilliant.

ps4

 

Ebony Engine was their PS3 engine to make Versus XIII before it got canceled. Its renderer was outdated and is evident with that real-time 2013 footage and why it ran like crap even on a PC, with outdated tools and workflow not made for current-gen production which is why Luminous was created. The character models in the real-time footage and the pre-rendered footage aren't even the same, you'll notice Noctis looks completely different if you compare them.



That pre-rendered footage isn't running on Ebony. It wasn't running on any engine, a bunch of it was faked that's typical of a movie production. That's why Gladio looks like a miniature version of himself on the stairs with completely mismatched scaling before he magically became proper sized as he jumped towards the camera.



You can't list a single game out right now that even matches the scale of the pre-rendered battle while maintaining that graphical quality though. Since it had a visual target to make it look do-able graphically, obviously if you take away that scale and only look at small scenes, we already have graphics that surpass it, especially those games using high quality baked lightmaps. Those games still don't compare with the scale of that battle at all.

 

That GIF is enhanced with motion blur in After Effects. This is what the actual game looks like:



Particles are still are very inferior compared to the 2013 trailer.

Character lighting is much better in the final game but the environment lighting is inferior. The environments in the 2013 version are almost photorealistic. No so in the final game.

The reason why they look different is due to the lack of HDR post processing in the real-time footage.

A game like Horizon does a lot more than anything in FFXV trailer. The battle in the trailer is just a few ships hanging in the sky and a few small particle explosion effects.

That scene (the whole area really) was heavily downgraded in the final game. Looks a generation behind. All due to changes in lighting and shading.

 

I doubt that last image is real time. It was from the first 15 announcement which appears was not made of real time graphics and that looked better than anything we got. The image compression from videos is not doing much justice of the first trailers.

 

E3 trailers:
https://www.gamersyde.com/news_e3_final_fantasy_xv_trailers-14194_en.html

TGS trailer (combines both E3 trailers and adds a couple of extra seconds of "gameplay" footage):
https://www.gamersyde.com/video_final_fantasy_xv_tgs_trailer-30879_en.html

 

Pretty apparent you haven't even played the game. That video trailer you posted doesn't prove anything, they didn't even fully utilize the sword summon as the gif did. A video trailer that lacks something doesn't disprove stuff I already showed you from the actual game.

Also, motion blur doesn't magically add in a bunch more particles, so I'm not sure what your line of thinking here is. The particles in that gif are there because they actually exist. In fact, that gif doesn't even showcase the game at a full-on all out particle party that it's capable of. The final game completely trounces any scene with particles in that 2013 trailer.

If you think piss yellow lighting and overdone bloom are photo realistic then sure. Real-time lighting is universal, if the dynamic moving objects like characters have horrible lighting but yet the static environment looks decent, then they pre-baked the lighting for that city at that time in development on worse engine. There's nothing impressive about that or anything to brag about, especially when the final game has completely dynamic GI and 24h time of day transitions, yet actually manages to look more photorealistic while at it.

2013


final

'





Some last-gen looking baked light textures on the building in that 2013 footage.


Dynamically lit in the final version looks considerably better.

Check again, even the hair model isn't the same. Post shaders aren't going to change the mesh and weird body proportions the pre-rendered trailer has.

I don't think you understand what the word scale is. Horizon doesn't come anywhere close. Funny you try to downplay that e3 trailer though, because Horizon's destruction and set pieces are highly simplified compared it, none of which even has the draw distance or visual density of that city battle. And the biggest city in Horizon is miniature sized compared to the Venice city in the trailer.

Every game out now looks downgraded form that pre-rendered trailer.

 

1) Most of the particles in that gif aren't from the teleportation effect. Still inferior to the reveal.
2) The dynamic GI is an improvement indeed. Too bad they ruin it with cinematic filters compared to the natural look in the reveal.
3) Lush, organic, dynamic open world environments are indeed more taxing that rigid low poly buildings. Even then, they cut the Insomnia battle from the game. The Altissia battle looks like a PS3 game compared to the reveal.

 

Wow, this game looks really good! Here's the entire Square E3 presentation on it:


March 3 2020, only on PlayStation 4

 

It looks amazing, that Midgar pan out showing a ridiculous amount of geometry and light sources is truly remarkable, hope that's all real time and not CG. The gameplay looks top notch too, plenty of particles splashing around and high quality models with very dense environment gives you a 90s CGI feel at times. Tifa alone stole the show for me , she's perfect and on point. This whole presentation is my personal best of E3 this year.

 

This Gamespot stream footage is also quite poor, the latest [Tifa] directfeed trailers are better.


edit - Gamersyde has added 400MB+ trailer for download.
https://www.gamersyde.com/news_e3_final_fantasy_vii_remake_images_and_trailer-20949_en.html

 

I'm also hearing rumors that the first "episode" or release will feature only Midgard. Next release will have the game leaving Midgard.

First release being on 2 BluRay disks means that Midgard should be really detailed.

Regards,
SB

 

there are two versions heard:
-the first part is only midgard
-the first disc of the 2-disc Part one is only midgard

hope it's the second one true.

 

It's only Midgar and it's not 2 discs.
It's "2 discs worth of game content" but not 2 discs.

 

If the first game is Midgard only they do seem to have changed order of some parts.
I'm quite sure the flashback Sephiroth and fire scene happened originally when party was at Kalm Inn.