FF13 trailer rant
The Final fantasy 13 trailer was shown during last E3 this year. This was months ago so this is very old news, I know. I had the trailer on my computer and after recently watching it again I thought of a thing or two that I would like to share.
Ever since the first PS3 trailers were shown, people have been doubting their authenticity. Killzone is an already proven “fake”. By fake I mean that it only shows a prerendered cut-scene and not actual game footage.
The FF13 trailer however is only semi-fake, though. It begins[1] and ends[5] with pre-rendered CG clips, but the chunk in between[2,3,4] is ingame footage, but not actual game footage. It is a pre-scripted action sequence, rendered using the game engine.
The thing that sets it apart from other trailers is how smoothly it manage to transition between the CG and the ingame graphics. Sure, the GUI pops up and it looks more like a game, but it never feels like the main character changes in any way, when in fact she does.
During the ingame footage the character models are surpricingly low-res. Actually something not far from a PS2 model. But they’ve kept a lot of detail in her face, so you never really notice. The facial expressions[2] look really, really good. I’m gonna go on a limb here and state that the amount of polygons in her face and hair is more than in both her arms and legs combined.
Because if you look closely at her arms and legs[3], they don’t look all that good. At least not geometry-wise. The textures are great. Compare her boot with the one in last image[5]
At first I thought the forest segment[4] was fake, because I couldn’t imagine any game developer company to consistantly create that much content for any part of the game. But looking closely I noticed that the crystal structures also had a low polycount. This scene makes good use of the depth-of-field effect. It’s a post process shader. Same with the High dynamic range lighting with the bloom effect to simulate the bright sky and the eyes ajusting to the light. These are all high performance effects that you can see in modern games, but rarely together.
Looking at the battle it seems strangely familiar to what Peter Molyneux talked about at Leipzig. He ranted about context sensitive fighting, meaning you only need one button to do all kinds of moves and that the battle should involve the environment too. (The female hero freezes time and uses one of the enemies as a stepping stone to lurge herself into the air).
All in all I think this trailer only shows a concept of how FF13 might look and play. It showcases some of the engine’s (and the PS3′s) rendering capabilities. The GUI is most definetly fake (“Blizzrad” wtf), but hints that the game will at least have realtime battles.
That is all!
