John Linneman wrote:Coming from humble handheld origins, Ready at Dawn's first foray onto more powerful console hardware is a curious mixture of extremes. What can't be ignored are the fundamental flaws in the pacing, the over-reliance on cut-scenes and a basic lack of content. And yet, at the same time, from a technical perspective what we're looking at here is a game with an extreme level of care, attention - and accomplishment. The narrow approach to game design has at least allowed the team to unleash perhaps the most impressive example of real-time graphics on a console to date. The quality of the lighting and materials really helps build a beautifully realistic, almost tangible world for the player to experience.
The presentation also calls to mind our thoughts on Ryse when it was released in late 2013 - with a different approach to rendering that is more film-like in nature. The Order: 1886 moves away from the sharp edges one typically associates with real-time visuals by focusing more on a soft, temporally stabile display. It's clear that pushing visuals of this quality on a console with super-sampling would be impossible leading us to believe that this is the best possible choice given the situation. In
our first look at Ryse, we quoted a Hollywood CG professional on image quality and, reading it again in 2015, it feels completely relevant to the approach Ready at Dawn has taken:
"We do what is essentially MSAA. Then we do a lens distortion that makes the image incredibly soft (amongst other blooms/blurs/etc). Softness/noise/grain is part of film and something we often embrace. Jaggies we avoid like the plague and thus we anti-alias the crap out of our images," said Pixar's Chris Horne. "In the end it's still the same conclusion: games oversample vs film. I've always thought that film res was more than enough res. I don't know how you will get gamers to embrace a film aesthetic, but it shouldn't be impossible."
It seems pretty clear that Ready at Dawn has emulated this filmic approach and in that sense, we feel they've really nailed it. The upscaling artefacts in Ryse, minimal as they were, are eliminated here and the selected anti-aliasing and post-processing techniques really succeed in delivering the type of image one might find when examining a still frame on a Blu-ray film.
We're extremely eager to see where this approach goes and hope to discover new examples in the future. It's interesting to note Tim Moss and Christer Ericson are credited as directors of technology on this project - while Mr Ericson has moved on to work for Activision, Tim Moss remains with Sony Santa Monica Studio. Perhaps this connection will filter back into future Santa Monica projects or even other Sony internal titles in development? Either way, what's clear is that current-gen hardware is opening the door to new rendering paradigms that have the scope to revolutionise the way that games are presented - and in future, hopefully we'll see the same kind of innovative spirit applied to the gameplay too.
