A new preview of Killzone:
Shadow Fall is out in the wild today. Don’t go looking for it on YouTube or any
other service, though. Developer Guerilla Games says that streaming just isn’t good enough for their shiny next-gen baby. It needs special treatment to be appreciated
in all its glory.
You can find multiplayer footage
for Shadow Fall here on the Guerilla Games site, along with the advice the devs
are recommending for viewing the minute-plus clip the way it should be seen:
Unfortunately, there are limitations to streamed video, and
many of the clips and trailers we’ve released thus far aren’t being viewed in
the best possible fidelity and framerate.
In order to properly demonstrate the framerate and
resolution we achieve in Shadow Fall’s multiplayer, we’ve captured and lightly
compressed new footage that we’re not offering through a video sharing service.
Instead, we ask that you download and locally view the high-resolution,
uncompressed footage directly from us.
Please use a video player with hardware acceleration when
viewing the footage. We recommend Windows Media Player for Windows users and
QuickTime Player for Mac users. Do not use a non-accelerated player (such as
VLC Media Player) because the framerate and resolution of this movie are simply
too high and will very likely cause choppy playback.
Click
here to download the video. (ZIP archive, 541 MB)
The video you just saw has been captured from a multiplayer
match on “The Park” (MP08). The map is based on one of the environments you’ll
encounter in the single player campaign, situated firmly behind enemy lines
near the Visari tribute statue.
As you can probably tell from the footage, Killzone Shadow
Fall multiplayer outputs at a native 1080p, rendering uncapped but always
targeting 60fps. We’re very pleased with how well the game runs, and we can’t
wait for you to play it come November 15.
Now, someone will probably upload this somewhere. But, it’s 541 MB for 1:14 of console footage, which is the kind of thing that makes you wonder if some kind of shift will have to happen to accommodate all the ramped-up visuals of next-gen games. Having
taken a look at it myself, the skirmish does look visually impressive. The image above is a screencap from the video run in Quicktime Player on a Mac.
Mind
you, there’s nothing from a gameplay design standpoint that makes it look like
a big evolutionary leap. But the detail and smoothness on display aren’t things
that you can deny. Guerilla has traditionally been a studio that’s pushed
PlayStation hardware to peak performance and it looks like they’re well on
their way to doing the same here.
