More notably, though, what was once a tunnel shooter has been tweaked once again, with more open environments to explore now – which make the most of the graphical fidelity on offer, as well as the processing power – and a handy array of new abilities for your travels.Īlongside the usual futuristic firearms, Shadow Marshalls now have the power to see through walls (another nod to The Last of Us, though at least this time it makes sort of technical sense) and slow down time for brief periods, as well as harness a personal drone called The Owl like a bird of prey. Gamers wrapped up in the franchise's mythology may well get a kick off the in-universe referencing and political allegories, but we have to admit we've become lost and bogged down in a murky back story that never seems to transmit its intergalactic Second World War into much emotional heft it's at least balanced. Players take on the role of Lucas Kellen, a Shadow Marshall (that's an elite black ops agent of the future, y'all) who is tasked with keeping the familiarly fire-eyed Nazi-tinged forces of Helghast in check as the ongoing war between them and the Vektans (that's your lot) intensifies.ĭavid Estes of Homeland fame voices the surrogate father and military superior Sinclair, giving you authoritative updates in what equate to a series of rather elongated, po-faced search and destroy missions around intergalactic substitutes for real-world wars. Killzone Shadow Fall: PlotĪfter what we'll politely call a homage to The Last of Us's opening, in which our immediate story expectations may be subverted but it feels so familiar it's lost its punch, the latest Killzone thrusts us quickly into the future and a familiar role of skilled gunman (skilled, at least, in the cut scenes) waiting for despatch. If Knack is the family crowd-pleaser, Resogun manna for the retro-arcade crowd and Contrast the quirky art-house effort for the indie fraternity, Killzone: Shadow Fall is for those who live and breathe head shots. Known for being dark, dingy and hard as hell, it makes for a stridently uncompromising introduction into Sony's next-gen console. If Halo comparisons may have hobbled it slightly, it's certainly carved out its own niche among the PlayStation die-hards. This is a new technique, and can't be described using terms applied to previous methods.Guerrilla Games' Killzone franchise of first-person shooters have become the hardcore flagpole for Sony-friendly gun fans, spanning six entries in a carnage-heavy series sometimes subtitled 'Nazis in space'. Shadow Fall is not using any kind of interlacing, vertical or horizontal. It's best that we call it something else.Īll that is incorrect. It's a very different method than interlacing, with much better results. On progressive displays interlacing can only be a render-saving method if it's either upscaled or half framerate HSTRAA saves render time without either of those effects.Īnd probably more that don't occur to me. Interlacing produces comb artifacts on any object in motion HSTRAA on only some. Interlacing can be applied to any video stream, including those already recorded HSTRAA can only be used by a 3D rendering engine at runtime. But this is a very superficial similarity to interlacing, and calling it that is both inaccurate and far more confusing than helpful. Guerrilla's "half-sample temporal reprojection analytic AA" (let's call it HSTRAA for short) does different work on alternating columns of pixels. Despite this, the final image still has much higher IQ than an equivalent upscale or interlace.Ĭlick to expand.The old terminology of "odd and even fields" (not frames) and "interlacing" were established to describe a very specific method of generating a video stream. (In other cases it can.) The drawback is artifacts-manifested as blurred textures or motion ghosts-when the approximation fails. It requires data only used within 3D rendering engines, and therefore couldn't (for example) make existing Youtube videos look better at higher resolutions.īecause it uses this extra data, it gives much better results than interlacing or upscaling-so much better, that in certain cases pixel counting can't detect the native rendering resolution. In distinction, the Shadow Fall method cannot be used on a video stream. Interlacing and upscaling have particular meanings, and refer to methods of using pixels of an undersized video stream to fill in display pixels on the same or subsequent frames. This is a new technique, and can't be described using terms applied to previous methods.
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