Since the Uncharted 4 trailer stunned gamers around the world with its absolutely stunning visuals at the end of Sony’s E3 2014 press conference, many shadows of doubt have been cast, particularly from non-PS4 gamers, about the origin of the footage shown in the trailer. The biggest declaration amongst these gamers is that the footage in the trailer is a pre-rendered cutscene, and actual in-game visuals will not match the quality of those in the trailer.
Corinne Yu, an animation and graphics programmer for Naughty Dog, officially put those claims to bed in reply to a query from a gamer named Paolo, claiming that the trailer “doesn’t look good enough” to be pre-rendered footage.
@ZirpPop Our U4 trailer is an in engine real game level running on a real PS4,Paolo.Our trailer doesn’t look good enough to be prerender CGI
— Corrinne Yu (@Corrinne) June 12, 2014
A senior animator at Ubisoft stated that a friend of his from Naughty Dog had similar news.
@shinobi602 yeap – my buddy from ND confirmed that too 😉 he said they have some crazy rendering pipeline there…
— Nakimushi (@ArtKusanagi) June 11, 2014
As a matter of fact, Naughty Dog games will no longer contain pre-rendered footage at all going forward, beginning with Uncharted 4. This news comes via a user of Beyond3D.com, a forum for video game developers. The user stated that a Naughty Dog developer "explicitly confirmed to [him/her]" that the Uncharted 4 footage was in-game and running on "a single PS4," and continued to deliver the news about Naughty Dog ditching pre-rendered footage.
The user also quoted Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbetter, who offered convincing evidence supporting the tweets above:
We’ve studied the video in a little more depth and have concluded that it’s definitely running at native 1080p resolution (as opposed to being rendered at a very high resolution, then scaled down – a process known as super-sampling). Small clipping anomalies, a touch of specular aliasing on Nate’s shirt as he sits up, along with some shadow aliasing on his forehead also suggest a real-time render. On the face of it, we’re still looking at some pretty incredible anti-aliasing here for a real-time technique on a game running at 60fps, particularly when it comes to the perfect, artefact-free rendering of Nate’s hair – but the combination of the low contrast setting, slow camera movement, motion blur and depth of field would work well generally in making aliasing much less of an issue.
What does this mean? It means that what the world saw at the end of Sony’s press conference is going to happen–and as long as there are no unexpected surprises, it will be every pixel as glorious as it seemed.
If you’re half as excited for Uncharted 4 as we are, hit the comments section below and tell us if there’s anything that could possibly tide you over until that mystery release date in 2015.
Via Gearnuke