Hands-on with Revolution in the next GameInformer - Ubisoft's Red Steel, aka "Katana"

[pc999]

Got my answer

Developers making Revolution software that will show up at E3 2006 in playable form - high profile companies like EA and Ubisoft, to name a few - will soon be sent the official fourth SDK prototype, which promises to deliver between 90% and 95% of the final system's performance.

Althought this isnt set in stone yet (at least at the time), Li Mu Bai said they are still consideringt 128Mgs of 1T-Sram not long ago.

BTW Ubi nerver used the Souce engine, nor even Souce engine existed on the GC.

Althought they had the license of UE2 (2,5/X ?) that they used on SC1-3, RS, XIII (more?), thought this does not look like any UE game till today, I wonder if Epic will do any specyal work in any of their engines for the Rev?

 

[Bohdy]

I can't say I recognize the engine, but the lighting is exceptional! I'm guessing that it is a modified in-house engine like the PoP one.

 

[-NakedZ-]

For some reason those screens reminded me of Stranglehold. I just hope the sword fight is better than those samurai arcade in movie theatres.

.Z

 

[Qroach]

I've seen the pictures and it looks pretty good. The lighting style reminds me of Def jam vendetta when I played that on the xbox. The geometry seems pretty low on the character models, and the pics are far too small to determine texture quality. Almost all textures in a game can look great with a small photo or scan.

It still looks good, but I'd want to see direct screen grabs or higher res scans before saying it looked amazing or on par with the better next gen titles.

 

[Teasy]

I've seen the pictures and it looks pretty good. The lighting style reminds me of Def jam vendetta when I played that on the xbox. The geometry seems pretty low on the character models, and the pics are far too small to determine texture quality. Almost all textures in a game can look great with a small photo or scan.

It still looks good, but I'd want to see direct screen grabs or higher res scans before saying it looked amazing or on par with the better next gen titles.

Out of interest which FPS are you comparing it too?

 

[blakjedi]

First glance puts PDZ to shame....

 

[Ragemare]

Looks much better than what I was expecting from the revolution. It seems like the Rev is able to match the first wave of Xbox360 games in graphical splendor (whether good art is responsible or not) which is more than acceptable for what the system needs.

I was worried it might have really awful graphics, not that if that were the case it would stop me buying it.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Agreed.There are some games that just look...very nice.Theymight not be technical powerhouses but they just do things right.Condemend is a title that comes to mind and fits that category and so does Red Steel although the shots are ,apparently,a bit touched up so we'll have to wait to see if it will as clean as these shots indicate.I wouldn't expect games like Oblivion to be released on the rev. anyway.

This looks way better than condemned to me.

 

[fearsomepirate]

It looks nice, but the lighting looks similar to Marvel Nemesis (http://media.cube.ign.com/media/681/681939/img_2999914.html, which didn't exactly require monster pixel shading power. From the scans I've seen, I've not seen any soft or self shadows. Texture res is nice, and I hope the AA looks that good, but I also didn't see any normal or parallax mapping, either. Nothing immediately jumps out and says it's using anything much beyond Flipper's feature set.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

Looking at the images, I see whats obviously an outside area. The explosion looks nice, you can buildings on the left and right. I haven't purchased a gaming magazine in years. When this hit shelves I will.

I've been wondering there had been any comments in the article about the Revolution CPU/GPU and memory.

I have a question for the tech-heads, if Nintendo decides to give devs 128MB of main memory, with a clock rate of say 700Mhz, what amount of bandwidth should we expext?

And where the hell is Li Mu Bai at?

 

[Ooh-videogames]

It looks nice, but the lighting looks similar to Marvel Nemesis (http://media.cube.ign.com/media/681/681939/img_2999914.html, which didn't exactly require monster pixel shading power. From the scans I've seen, I've not seen any soft or self shadows. Texture res is nice, and I hope the AA looks that good, but I also didn't see any normal or parallax mapping, either. Nothing immediately jumps out and says it's using anything much beyond Flipper's feature set.

Well with six months left to work on and polish the title we just may see those features added, also the pics doesn't seem to show any environments that would benefit from them.

 

[StefanS]

From the same issue:

George Harrison interview:
There're going to be around 20 launch titles. About a third of them will be from Nintendo.

Source: gamefront.de

 

[Hardknock]

From the same issue:

George Harrison interview:
There're going to be around 20 launch titles. About a third of them will be from Nintendo.

Source: gamefront.de

Insanity. 13 third party titles + 7 first party?

Hopefully we get some mario love around launch.

 

[Corwin_B]

Insanity. 13 third party titles + 7 first party?

Hopefully we get some mario love around launch.

Super Smash Bros Revolution was rumored to be a launch title, IIRC... I suppose we can count Zelda TP as a Rev launch title too...

 

[pc999]

It looks nice, but the lighting looks similar to Marvel Nemesis (http://media.cube.ign.com/media/681/681939/img_2999914.html, which didn't exactly require monster pixel shading power. From the scans I've seen, I've not seen any soft or self shadows. Texture res is nice, and I hope the AA looks that good, but I also didn't see any normal or parallax mapping, either. Nothing immediately jumps out and says it's using anything much beyond Flipper's feature set.

Completely agree, the lightning is also very comparable to RE4 (during lightnings, which is made from the TnL IIRC) I wonder if this isnt just a updated flipper too (I hink this specialy because there is a few games with very simalar lightning on GC, as already pointed), as it doenst seems to be there much more things than we see in next gen, just done better (which may not be bad) and there is no shadows/dinamic fxs veside lightning so the gfx seems a bit static too.

The question is why, it is just a updated GC indeed (?), or it is the dev kits that still GC based (?), or their kits have a better feature set but they had not time to push the SW to use it (?), the worst is that this made fear from the CPU.

I mean gfx per se is nice (althought if it is the first option it may be limited dependent of the cases/type of games/engines), but will this be enought for new uses for the HW?

 

[Qroach]

Out of interest which FPS are you comparing it too?

I don't recall comparing to any first person shooter. I only compared it to def jam vendetta.

Still, imo judging by the scans, the character model resoloution seems to be on par with the current generation FPS. Not on par with medal of honor or brothers in arms scans for next gen we've seen...

 

[fearsomepirate]

Completely agree, the lightning is also very comparable to RE4 (during lightnings, which is made from the TnL IIRC) I wonder if this isnt just a updated flipper too (I hink this specialy because there is a few games with very simalar lightning on GC, as already pointed), as it doenst seems to be there much more things than we see in next gen, just done better (which may not be bad) and there is no shadows/dinamic fxs veside lightning so the gfx seems a bit static too.

I think some people forgot that current-gen games didn't exactly look like crap. There's definitely lots of room to improve, but it's not like we didn't have our share of games with fairly convincing-looking 3D worlds and flashy special effects. The way some people were going on, you'd think they were expecting Revolution FPS's to look like the first PS2 installment of Medal of Honor. Personally, I always felt that the vast, vast majority of cross-platform games were running way below what the Gamecube was capable of, even some of the better ones (example: compare Fight Night Round 2 with WWE: DOR2). There was a lot of unrealized potential in the dying generation of consoles that went unrealized in the rush to shovel more B-rated cross-platform titles to the market.

BTW, the upcoming WWE game is one place I'm really just not feeling the "next gen." I'm sure it looks more impressive in motion, and I realize those shiny pants weren't doable on Cube, and there are doubtlessly more polygons, higher-res textures, more colors, and per-pixel lighting, but comparing
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/820/820799/img_3496270.html
to
http://media.cube.ign.com/media/734/734926/img_3030789.html
still isn't getting me psyched.

 

[pc999]

Personally in most cases (not in WWE ones) I think that the core diference between next gen and current gen is art.

They are just meant to look diferent, I dont think that a top looking current gen game will ever look worst than a top looking next gen game, just like 2D games dont look worst than 3D.

Personally I think that for current gen all we need for they become really good looking is higher rez/better textures, more polys for more complex games, AA and AF and really good shadows in the rest I think it is good enought, then just give us a lot of CPU power. When companys start to try to make something that it is in between we get things like PDZ (IMO PDZ looks very bad).

And this game really dont seems next gen, it actually to me it seems like if it as (at least some) the best things of current gen, ie like if they some the best models from current gen, one of best lighning, some of th best fxs (in the RS3 picture) etc... This is very good for this kind of art IMO, but I dont think this is comparable in any way to next gen and it does not try to be, but it really does look good, and if this will be the standard it is very nice.

Thought I still very interested to know what kind of games it can do (ie gameplay that requires faster HW) and I will sorry if it will be limited.

Edit:BTW I consider current gen tech those that run in current gen games (SC3, Source, D3, RE4...)

 

[Ooh-videogames]

Personally in most cases (not in WWE ones) I think that the core diference between next gen and current gen is art.

They are just meant to look diferent, I dont think that a top looking current gen game will ever look worst than a top looking next gen game, just like 2D games dont look worst than 3D.

Personally I think that for current gen all we need for they become really good looking is higher rez/better textures, more polys for more complex games, AA and AF and really good shadows in the rest I think it is good enought, then just give us a lot of CPU power. When companys start to try to make something that it is in between we get things like PDZ (IMO PDZ looks very bad).

And this game really dont seems next gen, it actually to me it seems like if it as (at least some) the best things of current gen, ie like if they some the best models from current gen, one of best lighning, some of th best fxs (in the RS3 picture) etc... This is very good for this kind of art IMO, but I dont think this is comparable in any way to next gen and it does not try to be, but it really does look good, and if this will be the standard it is very nice.

Thought I still very interested to know what kind of games it can do (ie gameplay that requires faster HW) and I will sorry if it will be limited.

Edit:BTW I consider current gen tech those that run in current gen games (SC3, Source, D3, RE4...)

Maybe its because your fixated on normal mapping and parallax mapping, also remember this game has 6 months of dev time left before launch. Alot of FX could be added during this time. There still isn't any confirmed info on whether or not Hollywood has any shader capabilities.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

I don't recall comparing to any first person shooter. I only compared it to def jam vendetta.

Still, imo judging by the scans, the character model resoloution seems to be on par with the current generation FPS. Not on par with medal of honor or brothers in arms scans for next gen we've seen...

GRAW didn't look like GRAW awhile back. We're talking about a game with 6 months of development time left here people.

You guys are killing me with the selective "benefit of the doubt".