Prince of Persia: Rival Swords

[Natoma]

Holy mama. I figured the graphics for Wii would be pretty good, but not this good, this early.

Gorgeous. Anyone still want to say Wii graphics suck? It isn't Gears of War or Assassin's Creed, but it's not Pong either, that's for sure.

http://wii.ign.com/objects/846/846384.html

 

[Ike Turner]

ERmmm those are 1200x900 screens (withloads of FSAA..)...last I head the Wii's res is 480p..soooo you know...

 

[Natoma]

Watch the videos.

The last pic is normal sized btw, if you take out the black borders.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Ummm...the publicity shots for this game back when it was called "Two Thrones" and on the PS2 looked just as good:

Sure, the game looks incredible in screens. But once you add in aliasing, banding, pixellated particle effects, reduce the resolution, and set it in motion so that you realize the lighting is entirely prebaked and hardly affects the characters at all, it just loses a little bit of lustre.

 

[Natoma]

That's why I said to check out the video.

 

[jonnyp]

I like it but doesn't look much better than say God of War 2 on PS2 though

 

[Nesh]

Atlast a good effort from a third party dev to show great graphics on Wii

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Atlast a good effort from a third party dev to show great graphics on Wii

If you look at all the other complete rubbish games ubi released on Wii for the last few months they'd better spend some time on actually making a game wich doesnt look worse than ps2. Im still not very convinced about the controlls. If I look at the video it seems kinda weird and unnatural to me. There doesnt seem to be a really good concept behind it.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Looks identical to the Cube version to me, which I've beat several times. The cutscenes they showed are FMV. One thing I am getting tired of with current-gen graphics, which I've mentioned many times, is characters that stand in a dark area, yet are fully illuminated. PoP is one of the worst offenders in this regard. I simply don't see why Duke Nukem 3D could do it on my old p100, but true 3D games using GPUs can't. At the very least, you'd think they could just mimic the technique in those old 2.5 D games, which just assigned global light values to sectors. Seriously, there have got to be a thousand cheap hacks you could do to not have bad guys lit up like Christmas.

 

[cloudscapes]

Seriously, there have got to be a thousand cheap hacks you could do to not have bad guys lit up like Christmas.

Cheap hacks are what get the game out the door in time and actually make it feasable without too much developpement cost. I would like to have extra time for nicer features as much as the next guy, but we don't want to do more overtime than necissary when we already have a hack that sort of works if properly applied. The best we can do soemtimes if just use an already proven hack to the best of our abilities and hope there won't be any bugs related to that later-on. It's also hard to convince programmers to spare some time and resources to develop an alternative, when to most gamers, there wouldn't be much of a difference. Plus "new feature to repalce old one" = "risky developpement and potential to produce bugs" = "baaaad"

I remember Duke3D, the ambient lighting worked pretty well! Quake 3 also had something of a 3D light "grid" that took the whole space of the level. Each point in the grid represented a precalculated lighting value and the engine would interpolate between this point and the next and apply it to the character's ambient lighting. This stored no direction of light however, at least as far as I could tell with my couple of home-built Q3A maps.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I was thinking of something much more crude, and I've seen this done in other games (or so it seemed). Basically, when a character enters a dark area, you have a bounding box around that area and some predetermined constant value associated with the box by which the lighting will be reduced. It's cheap, but it prevents the whole "glow in the dark enemy" thing.

 

[Blade]

Y'ever think that perhaps characters glow in the dark for a reason? So they're not tough to spot?

Games make a lot of concessions to the realism quotient to make them more accessible...