“Real-time” is a term thrown around loosely in industry circles by developers looking to hype visual fidelity of their latest games. At E3, it’s unavoidable – and it becomes easy to dismiss.
But when Square Enix brought their Luminous Engine to the show, proclaiming to run a next-gen Final Fantasy tech demo… in real-time, they succeeded where similar marketing approaches frequently fail: They turned heads.
Shown to the media during an after-hours event at E3 2012, the near-four-minute tech demo was introduced by Yoshihisa Hashimoto, chief technology officer for Square Enix, under the name “Agni’s Philosophy.” Game Informer reported that Hashimoto was adamant about its real-time authenticity, announcing that the engine, Luminous Studio, is indeed Square’s next-gen property for creating games.
Though hitched with the Final Fantasy motif, the caveat was also revealed that the tech demo was strictly that; “Agni’s Philosophy” is not in production or associated with a specific game project (think of Quantic Dream and David Cage’s “Kara” demo).
Nonetheless, as the opening scene introduces a priest and his cloaked followers attempting conjure up a mysterious, mystic ancient being, it’s hard not to become spellbound in our own way. The precise muscular structure and fluid animation in the priest’s face quickly negates any notion an uncanny valley, while a red mist floats prominently in the background and each of its ten thousand particles beautifully begin percolating around the creature. It’s easily one of the best-looking pieces of game footage we’ve ever seen.
And that’s just before the bullets start flying. A raiding unit of masked mercenaries soon intrudes on the group, and flurries of AK-47 fire are met with streams of electricity at a pace as ferocious as today’s Call of Duty’s and Battlefield’s (and Skyrim’s).
Her mentor soon killed, one of the younger female priestesses is able to escape to the outdoors of a mountainside, flavela-like city, and we’re treated again to eye candy that, quite honestly, is better suited for watching than it is for reading about the curvaceousness of Coke bottles and..oh hey, turns out that creature is a riding-ready dragon.
If one thing is clear watching the tantalizing clip – even though Sony and Microsoft stopped short of unveiling the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720, despite eons of rumor to the contrary – it’s that the technology of the next generation is appearing right before our eyes at E3 2012. (For another example, look no further than our hands-on preview of Star Wars 1313, a game that’s highly suspected to be released beyond today’s consoles and yet looks stunning in its early-developed form.)
Luminous’ demo is likely not something next-gen games will be able to emulate right out of the gate – the sleek cinematography dilutes the picture of what gameplay would actually look like – but it is quite telling of how close to the mark Epic’s 2011 “Samaritan” demo might have been.
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Follow me on Twitter @Brian_Sipple.
Source: Game Informer
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Real time meaning not a cutscene? Because it looks like a cut scene.
Exactly.
@Dakota
When they say real-time, they’re not talking about someone actually is controlling the characters in real time. It is technically a “cut scene” in that everything is scripted and it’s merely playing out like a movie, the difference is that it’s being rendered in 3D in real-time. So it’s not just recorded and played back via a video decoder…
But this is where developers can play games. Even if this is being rendered in real-time, that doesn’t really prove anything about the actual gameplay. Having a robust 3D engine is awesome, but that’s only half of the story. The other half is the hardware. Everyone knows the saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link right? So you have to ask yourself, what is this being rendered on? Is it something that can be produced in mass quantity for a price people can afford in the size of a console? Or is it some extremely high-end PC running it? Technology gets faster and cheaper every year, although it slowed down due to the disasters in Asia in the past few years, but maybe soon something like this could be running on something that can be sold as a console. Of course, I know this will just cause a flame war, but I’m merely stating the obvious, but by that time, PC hardware would have already surpassed this, so in terms of console versus PC, it really doesn’t make any difference…
@ ken
exactly, half the time these high quality cinematics have been rendered via a render farm and they render in parts e.g some machines render only lighting whilst others shadows etc. people fail to understand that this is more then likely just an in game cutscene (that looks really nice) and nothing more.
some optimistic people say that it might well and truly be the next step in the visual department b/c of the drastic upgrade we took from gen1 to gen 2 (consoles) but as it stands no one can prove anything until we actually see gameplay with this sort of visuals.
on your last bit (console and pc comparison) i am led to believe that in the end consoles are the ones with more power and capabilities not pc’s, otherwise how would a 5 or so year old xbox 360 be able to run bf3 smoothly and be comparable (performance not visual wise) to a pc whilst only having around 512mb of RAM ?
dont get we wrong pc’s are great for mainstream gaming, but think about what your pc is doing vs what the console is doing – the pc has to run the OS, antivirus etc as well as the game you are playing whilst the console just runs the basic OS and the game (which if installed and not played via disc runs it alot smoother/faster). i suppose in the end it comes down to personal preference but atm i’ll stick to console partly due to the fact that they’re reasonably cheap, mostly hassle free and very user friendly (no need to re-install, trouble shoot etc when problems persist).
The don’t really have more power or capabilities, but console games are optimized for the console. It’s hard to do that on a PC where there is suck a large array of cards and whatnot. Also, a lot of the higher end parts that would blow a console out of the water are a little pricier than people would prefer to spend. $600 though, and you could make a PC better than a console, how much more I couldn’t say.
such*
exactly and that’s why games on the iphone and on consoles look better compared to even a pc 4 years old (from now), just look at nova 3, that game is made for the iphone yet looks like a console game why, b/c it is being built for a specific unit – specific parts and not a wide array meaning they now what the device can and cant run smoothly (hence why all iphone games load and run fast and smoothly, same with console games (even ports).
like i said pc’s have more visual power – they can support higher resolution textures and can process alot more but as is stands the consoles have the upper hand b/c that is what developers make games on first (then they port to pc then ps3).
a decent gaming pc costs on average 1k, excluding monitor and peripherals, that is over three times the price of my 360 slim. not only that but i would have top spend a day or so building it, installing the os, installing everything else i need THEN installing the games, which would take another day. then you have the aforementioned issues with installation etc… see how long and hard it is to build a decent pc (that will be a pile of trash in 6months time) ? Pc’s aren’t meant for gaming, but they can be used for gaming simple as that which is why consoles surpass PC – they are tailored to running games.
I see what you’re saying but those troubles are over-exaggerated. Once I have all my parts a computer from building to playing a game takes only a few hours. Plus, the minimum specifications for most PC games are at least an 8800 which is a 5 year old card in the first place. No PC is a pile of trash in 6 months even tough people like to toss that a lot. Not trying to argue just stating some of my opinions. It’s really just comes down to personal preference.
Meant to say GTX 8800.
@jwalka
You realize that developers developing on consoles first is NOT how it’s SUPPOSED to be done right? It’s 100% due to them taking advantage of the fact that consumers are willing to accept inferior products and still pay top dollar for them. What is the developer’s incentive to try harder if they know they can go the lazy route and still make the profit? Back when all of the advancement in gaming were made, developers developed for PC, then scaled them down to run on consoles. Which makes more sense since you can always scale down graphics without investing any more resources, but you can’t “scale up” a resource without spending time and money on adding detail and information. So this whole trend of developing on consoles then porting to PC is so extremely lazy and it makes people with high standards like myself pretty frustrated at most of these crap games coming out that people are calling “revolutionary.” I was just explaining to my coworker that even playing games in 3D is nothing new, we’ve been doing that on PC since 2000… I know, I had one of these video cards that supported it and I played many games in 3D. I had the Asus V6600 video card which came out 12 years ago, and it was capable of making any game into 3D on any monitor as long as the monitor’s frame rate can support it. Then games like Gears of War were showing off their “revolutionary” graphics. You know what their great secret was? Bump-mapping and normal-mapping… Seriously? That’s been out on PC games for many years before they started using it on console games. But all of the console gamers started foaming at the mouth like it’s something new. Seriously, we haven’t had any big improvements in gaming for quite some time, and it’s sad because most gamers don’t seem to mind…
I was about to say the same thing…that makes no sense. Seems like they don’t even know what the hell their talking about on a gaming website cmon.
Even if its real time im sure its not on this gen console
Well… even if the graphics arent what gameplay will be, it looks great. Makes me want to go out and get a couple final fantasy games. Although I only got a 360 and PC.
@asdf
Probably not too far off from games looking like that either…
its real time as in the sense of that its being rendered realtime while its not being player controled and there pre-defined movements and camera angles the engine is processing realtime vs this being a video of a cgi animation or the sorts.
Saky-cam has infected gaming. Now we’re done for.
But in all seriousness, the tech demo looks great. It must have been running on $10,000 hardware to get visuals that great. Everything on that rig must have been top-of-the-line, no-one-can-even-buy-it-yet level of technology.
Look out for $1,000 next-gen consoles, everybody.
tech demo on ps3 for ff7 and thay put no game out that look that good so the new tech demo is ther just for looks i say
I wish they didn’t make it so cinematic, its impressive but its like watching a movie. I’d prefer to see gameplay as a demonstration.
For some reason…..this trailer creeps me out.
BUBBLES!!!
I’m a bit disappointed. I was expecting next-gen ingame footage to resemble the quality of the CGI trailer of Arkham City….. I hope that concept clip was on the lower end of the graphics spectrum for the PS4/X720.
Are you kidding? That was really good. Plus, the Luminous engine is much different than Unreal Engine 3, artistically. And the Unreal 4 Semaritan demo is high end, the recent photos for UE4 found in Game Informer were made on a GTX680. Don’t expect the consoles to be higher than a GTX680 or 690, I’d be surprised and it’ll be really expensive.
With that said, the Luminous engine is a huge leap forward for real-time demo.
You’re really shooting for the stars with this next-gen aren’t ya? Lol
That didn’t impress me at all still unreal enginr 3 and frostbit is better!
@GAMER
Uhhhhh, not by a long shot… Nothing against those two, Unreal Engine 3 is the backbone of probably a good majority of 3D games out now and was a technological marvel when it came out, but time has passed and technology has advanced. Frostbite 2 is a pretty impressive engine, but again, FOR NOW. It wouldn’t be in a year or so, and the level of detail in this demo is well beyond either of those two. Make sure you watch the video in HD, or it’ll be pretty pointless…