• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

PS4: The Dark Sorcerer - Quantic Dream's full tech demo released

70 people worked on just this tech demo, 70! What a waste of money.

You are assuming they learned nothing about getting this much fidelity out of the PS4. They would have learned a lot, and they have a history of doing these things probably for that very reason.
 
I have to give credit to the hilarity of the video. It reminded me of a Top Gear episode where Clarke, May and Hammond had to make a racing movie.

Anyway, in a few years time, perhaps that'll become standard in linear games. Heck I was incredibly pleased at what BF3 at 60fps on Xboned achieved. And on PS4, inFamous SS showed a substantial leap over one of the best looking games this gen, TLoU (which is a linear game).

In the long run, things will get even better. All we can ask for now are games that are innately great where visuals like these will only aim to enhance the entire experience.
 
Nice. Will we finally be playing playable pixar type graphics? This looks almost to good to be true, kinda doubt gameplay will look like that.
 
incLsosRuoFGn.gif
 
Damn. That is utterly amazing for realtime. Even though it's not gameplay and is a fully scripted sequence, just the thought that that is running in real time on a PS4 is incredible.
 
The level of detail in this is just insane... Almost movie like. This is clearly not possible with a big environment and all but with the kind of game QD makes, that should be ok i guess..
 
70 people worked on just this tech demo, 70! What a waste of money.

It's not like the programmers made an engine just for the tech demo. They were making their PS4 engine and use the demo to prototype the features. Similarly with the artists (as someone else pointed out) they figure out the skin shaders and particle effects and take those through to polish. Some of those may be used for a future game but even if they're not, the content creators now have the process down and can work more quickly on future content.

So just because you don't understand how/why something was done, doesn't mean it was a waste.
 
It's not like the programmers made an engine just for the tech demo. They were making their PS4 engine and use the demo to prototype the features. Similarly with the artists (as someone else pointed out) they figure out the skin shaders and particle effects and take those through to polish. Some of those may be used for a future game but even if they're not, the content creators now have the process down and can work more quickly on future content.

So just because you don't understand how/why something was done, doesn't mean it was a waste.

I completely understand, but You should understand what 70 people can do. This was probably done in about a year, maybe 9 months and thats ton of man hours for a demo and assets that wont be probably never used in any game.

For example Crysis 3 was done by 100 people in 23 months, whole game from scratch [pre-production, experiments etc everything included] with big engine update, new capture technology and on 3 platforms.
 
Am I the only one who's completely turned off by this type of facial capture?

L.A. Noire and QD's PS3 games look good, but the method they use to reproduce human faces makes them look especially creepy to me. This has the exact same problem, except it's amplified greatly by the fact that everything else looks so good.

To my brain this is like the epitome of the uncanny valley and I don't really get how it doesn't bother others.
 
Cage commented on the tech

In the current demo, there are about a million polygons in the set, and a little less than a million per character on the screen (i.e. a total of 4 million when the three characters are on the screen). Each character has about 350 MB of textures and about forty different shaders. It’s all managed with Physically Based Shaders, volumetric lights, full HDR, Color Grading, Physical Lenses (particularly useful for chromatic aberrations and 3D depth of field), and translucence for more realistic rendering of the skin. The change of set and all the lighting (and the behavior of the shaders) between the dramatic version of the set and the “studio” version is done in real time. The same holds true for all pyrotechnical particle effects.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/06/11/the-dark-sorcerer-a-next-gen-comedy/

There's quite a bit more info in there as well about the demo.
 
I completely understand, but You should understand what 70 people can do. This was probably done in about a year, maybe 9 months and thats ton of man hours for a demo and assets that wont be probably never used in any game.

For example Crysis 3 was done by 100 people in 23 months, whole game from scratch [pre-production, experiments etc everything included] with big engine update, new capture technology and on 3 platforms.

It's the engine that takes up most of the work, I think.
Creating the assets it's fast in comparison.
And the scene was very small, so it's not like they spent months working on it.
 
Looks great, kinda wish they put the whole video seriously at the end though
would be interesting to see what it would be like
 
Its funny when I saw this on twitch yesterday that I recognized the goblin's voice, its Cole from Martin haha

I think they used his face as well...you can see Cole in there somewhere.

man I love Maurice and the Demon guy.... "Someone Call a Doctor!" hahaha
 
Someone pinch me, I am dreaming. These are the kind of graphics I could have never imagined... who knows what gaming will look like on the PlayStation 5.
 
70 people worked on just this tech demo, 70! What a waste of money.

Waste... for creating engine, tools, recording pipeline, accustoming key people for working on new hw and extracting A LOT OF POWER from the PS4. They will use all of this for other PS4 titles.

Kara demo was a catalyst for creating Beyond engine and recording pipeline.
 
I would love a game based on a bumbling, comedic dark sorcerer and a cast of characters like this...I would pay top dollar.


Waste... for creating engine, tools, recording pipeline, accustoming key people for working on new hw and extracting A LOT OF POWER from the PS4. They will use all of this for other PS4 titles.

Kara demo was a catalyst for creating Beyond engine and recording pipeline.

...and probably more importantly, they used demos like this in the past a catalyst for securing the kind of funding they needed from Sony to make games like Heavy Rain and Beyond.
 
Nice tech demo.

But the comedy was something I wasn't expecting from QD. I love it. One of the titles which would make me buy a PS4 day one, I think.
 
Waste... for creating engine, tools, recording pipeline, accustoming key people for working on new hw and extracting A LOT OF POWER from the PS4. They will use all of this for other PS4 titles.

Kara demo was a catalyst for creating Beyond engine and recording pipeline.

Thats what pre-production is for in game dev cycle.

===
For the record, this is Quantic Dream first PS3 demo:

And their latest game:

Imagine what the PS4 will do in 5 years oO

And this is how their environments look in their latest game:

ibg7F1dt2G5Cc7.jpg

ibm4N7JdGFTpsO.jpg


Pumping all GPU budget into characters isnt really good optimization solution.
 
The really annoying thing about Quantic Dream tech demos is that as soon as I see one, I instantly want a full-fledged game based on it. It happened with Kara, which still has a distinct possibility of happening given all those Singularity rumours some months ago, but now I want dat Dark Sorcerer game too. God knows how that would work - even in the interactive movie genre that would not be easy to pull off - but I want it.

Anyway, the whole video was hilarious. And I think the goblin looking a bit shitty is an intentional thing.

Oh yeah, and one more thing - the vid is infinitely giffable. So much material there.
 
Thats what pre-production is for in game dev cycle.

===


And this how their environments look in their latest game:

[]http://i1.minus.com/ibg7F1dt2G5Cc7.jpg[/img]
[]http://i4.minus.com/ibm4N7JdGFTpsO.jpg[/img]

Pumping all GPU budget into characters isnt really good optimization solution.

Way to miss the point entirely. But hey, wouldn't expect any more of you.


Also good job capturing a frame on what's like a 1 second scene to prove a silly point. We've seen gameplay already, environments are fine.
 
That's crazy, we're never going to see that in a real game.
But considering that today's charcters are made with even less than a 10th of that texture budget, we can expect great things.

I think we can expect Sony's first party studios to spend big bucks to make an actual game look like that. Look at The Order 1886.
 
Top Bottom