First In-Game Shot of Lair?
Well it IS a launch title, after all. It makes sense that we'd see something about now.
Published: March 28, 2006
One of the biggest question marks -- aside from the obvious one of price -- that the PS3 still has swirling around it is what will the games look like. If Sony's PowerPoint-a-licious E3 slideshow is any indication, the PS3 should offer games out of the gate that are more impressive than the 360 (the PS3 is supposedly twice as powerful, you see). Given how many of the trailers and "games" shown off at the press conference last year were obviously pre-rendered approximations, it's going to take an awfully impressive showing this year to convince the public of the PS3's graphical prowess.
The flipside of the coin, of course, is that the PS3 is a completely different architecture from anything that has been seen up until now. CELL's multiple SPEs, nVidia's programmable shaders, the relaxed bottlenecks and increased bandwidth, and the interesting balancing act that the half a gig of combined RAM (256 megs of which are dedicated purely to the graphics side of things) mean the PS3 is a very different beast.
Still, the question on every gamers' mind is still a simple one: what will the games look like? If an apparent screenshot taken from a PowerPoint presentation is to be taken as an indication of what the boys and girls at Factor 5 have been working on, it's damned fancy indeed. What appears to be an in-game shot from Lair, the hot, hot dragon-on-dragon action title from the folks that brought us the Rogue Squadron games.
Rogue Squadron is known for being very, very pretty, and that trend certainly seems to be holding true on the PS3, and the gameplay... well, they were very, very pretty games. Plenty of things about the screenshot would lead one to believe it's either a mockup, an early work-in-progress build of the game, or an outright face. The apparent d-pad-based system for issuing orders in the upper left and the stamina meter on the right side of the screen are way, way too small to be read legibly on a standard definition TV.
Still, it is very, very impressive, if a bit reminiscent of what the Unreal Engine has been pumping out in terms of detail. That the dragons aren't coated in Vaseline here as in some of the previous pre-rendered shots is a good thing indeed, and riders on the dragons should make for some interesting dogfights.
This is, of course, all speculation, but it's fun speculation, and it's the kind of stuff that we can all geek out on up until the moment when we actually see the games running on PS3 hardware at E3. Man, May can't get here soon enough...
The flipside of the coin, of course, is that the PS3 is a completely different architecture from anything that has been seen up until now. CELL's multiple SPEs, nVidia's programmable shaders, the relaxed bottlenecks and increased bandwidth, and the interesting balancing act that the half a gig of combined RAM (256 megs of which are dedicated purely to the graphics side of things) mean the PS3 is a very different beast.
Still, the question on every gamers' mind is still a simple one: what will the games look like? If an apparent screenshot taken from a PowerPoint presentation is to be taken as an indication of what the boys and girls at Factor 5 have been working on, it's damned fancy indeed. What appears to be an in-game shot from Lair, the hot, hot dragon-on-dragon action title from the folks that brought us the Rogue Squadron games.
Rogue Squadron is known for being very, very pretty, and that trend certainly seems to be holding true on the PS3, and the gameplay... well, they were very, very pretty games. Plenty of things about the screenshot would lead one to believe it's either a mockup, an early work-in-progress build of the game, or an outright face. The apparent d-pad-based system for issuing orders in the upper left and the stamina meter on the right side of the screen are way, way too small to be read legibly on a standard definition TV.
Still, it is very, very impressive, if a bit reminiscent of what the Unreal Engine has been pumping out in terms of detail. That the dragons aren't coated in Vaseline here as in some of the previous pre-rendered shots is a good thing indeed, and riders on the dragons should make for some interesting dogfights.
This is, of course, all speculation, but it's fun speculation, and it's the kind of stuff that we can all geek out on up until the moment when we actually see the games running on PS3 hardware at E3. Man, May can't get here soon enough...