PS3 Untold Legends Dark Kingdom art style changes & interview
Andy Sites is the Producer of Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom. As part of the Sony Online Entertainment developer team, he explains the art change:
“Now to talk about what we are actually doing art wise. It has been challenging to move forward and evolve to the new system, but our experience using pixel shaders and per pixel lighting on EverQuest II has helped us to understand the demanding nature of the next generation game art…
…the first hurdle we had to overcome was the art style of the game. It doesn’t sound like it should be a hurdle but it is. Our overall approach initially was to avoid realism and try something stylistic. We eventually evolved into a style that leans towards realism, but I would not call it realistic. We chose this direction because of two primary reasons: It is easier to create environments using photo sampled textures, and focus testing character concepts in a nation wide survey.
The environments are turning out to look pretty impressive, but I know they will look better as we progress. It’s easy to say this in a blog, but I guess you will have to take my word on it. The characters are at the beginning of something really good. We are using a high-res to low-res method to create the characters, which leads to the results being incredible. It really maximizes benefit of normal mapping.
With the increased memory of the new PS3 hardware, we are enabled to have a much higher texel density which in turn makes running in the hi-definition modes look fantastic.”
At E3 Andy Sites got interviewed for gaming TV channel G4, here’s the video featuring gameplay footage:
The PS3-exclusive action RPG will be out at system launch, November 17th 2006.
Categories: Interviews, News, Videos
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