NEW Lair Screens Plus Interview!

bleon I think they used the same camera for all the games they covered. blue dragon, lost odyseey, all where filmed with the same cam.

 

I'm very disappointed, to be completely honest.

Rebel Strike was an excellent example of where quantity can fail miserably compared to quality (in terms of variety of vs. solidity of gameplay, if that makes sense).

I totally understand wanting to break away from the basic gameplay that they'd already had, but the overall quality of that game was brought down, IMHO, due to that. It seems much the same way here. The dragon duelling makes me cringe. I'll wait for more though. I'm so very close to giving up and buying a PS3 sometime this holiday season or soon after (thanks to many of the interesting games, Resistance included, despite not being amazed at some of its facets either). It would be nice if Lair could be added to that list and make me buy.

 

Lighting is definitely less than ideal. They're HDR bloom is painful. My biggest concern was gameplay - or lack thereof. It seemed non-existent. A couple of dragon shoots and some omnipotent army bashing.

 

Eurogamer seems to agree with a lot of things (both positive and negative) said in this thread:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=67883

 

Now I saw another piece on Lair in the second Gamespot Live event (the replay, I didn't see it live), and just before your mission starts, you stand next to your dragon just before you climb onto it, and at this point, the dragon has all the detail we've seen in the best shots.

The Factor 5 guy also showed some more things you could do with the motion sensor, and when taking out a rival dragon, he showed some different moves and combos to take out the enemy dragon's rider ... this time he didn't actually mount the other dragon, but the dragon plucked the rider off the other dragon and threw him up to him, after which he slaid the other rider.

He also explained that the top-bar is the morale indicator, showing your troops morale vs the enemy troops morale, something which your actions influence.

 

I'm not really happy with what I have seen of Lair. But on the other hand its clearly still in a very very early state.

I think it was way too early and a mistake for them to start showing combat. The air to air combat is pretty un-fun currently. And the ground combat looks pretty bad most of the time. The main attack effect, which is the fireballs, looks really rough period. Quite simply, it does not look good yet.

There is some stuff that works and looks good though. The dragons themselves look and animate really nicely. The terrain renderer also excelent. The water is some of the best water I have ever seen. And hey, it runs at 1080p (Although I think they made a big mistake to switch from 780p for the TGS demo - it's not ready for it yet)

I sort of feel bad for F5. I'm sure they were pressured really hard into having something playable for TGS. I'm sure this is a far cry from their actual goal.

 

So basically like the cars looks amazing in the garage in PGR3, then take about 5 steps down in the actual game? That's not really a good thing.

 

is this confirmed at 1080p? maybe the slight gfx drop is due to that?

 

No, WTF. It's during the actual mission.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y83/radicalnsx/unmounted.jpg

 

It was confirmed by Eggbrecht himself in a recent IGN interview. They're rendering at 1080p.

 

Already looks good but a lil less than I expected (people who think this looks bad really need some new glasses..) I also can't figure out where the lighting comes from. Some very neat details like the flapping of the dragon wings. Looks promising for a build in progress.

 

No, it's their LOD system in effect. From the interview:

 

What concerns me the most in terms of gameplay is the lack of any range attacks aside from fireballs. Don't you think shooting the same fireballs all day is boring? Also the ground combat looks fun, but it can get boring quickly. It seem the soliders can't do anything against the dragon. They are basically getting run over like lemmings.

 

What we saw from this game was 'just' work in progress. When the final version launches (next year..) it would be more usefull to comment on the gameplay (which I agree looked somewhat boring righ now)

 

I did not know this game was ready to launch?

I thought it had a good 6-8 months left?

 

from what i seen so far from the gameplay demo, the dragon's wings become translucent when lit by light and fire all in realtime is the most impressive.
does anyone know is the realtime muscle deformation still present which was demonstrated in the rainy trailer?

 

The HDR bloom looks horrible, as it always does when HDR is viewed on a non-HDR monitor. Should look great on an HDR display.

One question - what about everyone with an ordinary display, is there going to be a non-HDR game setting for them?

 

...

I don't think anyone has an HDR display, and it wouldn't do anything anyway because the output is still 24 bit colour. The PS3 has the potential for HDR colour output through HDMI1.3 but nothing will support it yet.

 

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/6557

An interview with Julian Eggebrecht. Talks about the technology of the game mostly.

 

He even shows single-handed control like the Wii remote