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Uncharted 4 preview thread. New footage/info

D

Des

Member
Its been said but fluidity in the combat is something else. This could be a truly great shooter if this and the PSX encounter are any indication.
 
K

kpaadet

Member
gamerMan said:
Where Uncharted 4 really shines is it's animation. I have never seen anything like this in a videogame.

X5Lzh3U.gif


The way animation are blended are seamless. It doesn't even look like the animations were captured separately. Apparently, there is a physics model running over the animation according to Jeremy Yates.
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Very impressive indeed, makes a lot of other 3rd person games look very dated.
 
X

xenorevlis

Member
gamerMan said:
Madagascar does have an implementation in GI but it is faked on the models and sometimes you can see the glow of the rocks applied wrongly to the models. You can sometimes see the GI solution leaking through objects that should be occluded and in darkness. With the way GI and volumetric lighting is implemented here there is no way you could adjust the time of day in realtime as most of the lighting is done through lightmaps and light probes.

I know a lot of people have said the reason the models don't appear as detailed as the cutscene models is because the camera is not close enough. You wouldn't want to get too close to the gameplay models as they lose detail as the effects are not rendered at a high enough resolution. If you get too close you will see dithering appearing on the models. Unlike the cutscenes, the shadows during gameplay do tend to shimmer a lot when the the camera gets close. This is the sign of low res shadow maps.

All of the effects seem to be rendered at higher resolution in the cutscenes. During gameplay, they appear to have a dithered look. As the game transitions from gameplay to the cutscenes, you can see the transition in lighting sometimes as the lighting, shaders and shadows appear to be dithered on the models before resulting in a cleaner image in the cut scenes.
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Oh absolutely agree about the GI solution. I didn't think it was realtime / dynamic such as Driveclub time-of-day. However the PBR tech is there to support the increased development speed and allow for variety of weather and time-of-day setups.

As for the character model, it's definitely going to utilize advanced shadows, more complex facial rigging, and other stuff like shader detail for cutscenes. Base model stays the same, with silhouette tessellation and other LOD stuff changing directly on it. Hence why I suggested cutscenes using more static lightas and such to free up resources for additional presentation performance.
 
L

lukeskymac

Member
Different enemy setup, improved enemy reaction times and zero info assists on Crushing. Steel fisting/kicking still alive and well. The few fears I had about this game have just disappeared.
 
F

Fancy Clown

Member
lukeskymac said:
Different enemy setup, improved enemy reaction times and zero info assists on Crushing. Steel fisting/kicking still alive and well. The few fears I had about this game have just disappeared.
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Remixed encounters on crushing? Hell yeah that's amazing. Hopefully it derives most of its challenge from the new enemy placements and reaction times than just making Drake way more fragile.
 
L

lukeskymac

Member
Fancy Clown said:
Remixed encounters on crushing? Hell yeah that's amazing. Hopefully it derives most of its challenge from the new enemy placements and reaction times than just making Drake way more fragile.
Click to expand...

Surely it's not gonna happen to all encounters, but the demo one is an example. On Hard and Crushing, there is at least one RPG dude in addition to the standard ones and the Snipers.
 
Z

zsynqx

Member
Since Dualshockers is banned, here is some info they posted from the stream

Since early playtests, the developers wanted a very accessible handling for the jeep, but the initial feedback wasn’t very good, so a lot of iteration was done for it.

Driving on rocks, grass, water and mud feels different.

The developers created a sort of “interrupt system” for conversations on the jeep. It stops conversations when you leave the vehicle, and then they restart naturally when you come back. Conversations can start and stop over and over, and it feels very natural.

A lot of iteration was done with this, tuning priorities on what could interrupt a conversation, and what needed to be said “now,” and take priority over the ongoing conversation. For instance reacting to a sudden situation.

Around the time in which Uncharted 3 was shipped, Naughty Dog had a very scripted prototype of a vehicle. It didn’t really look like what Uncharted 4 has, but it allowed the developers to start determining what they wanted from adventuring with a vehicle in an Uncharted game.

Lots of layers of animation go into things like the bridge that almost collapses in the Madagascar level.

There was a lot of testing on how big the open spaces where, in order set objectives for those spaces.

If you want to go around on foot you can go really far, and leave the vehicle behind by quite a lot. It depends on where you are in the level, but the developers want to encourage player choice on whether to move on foot or drive.

If you leave your companions behind, they’ll comment about it. They won’t just sit on the jeep, but they will walk around it, kick the tires, inspect it and more. They will be active.

The game has a “pretty significant lenght,” in most cases you’ll be playing longer than in the first three games. It’s a “pretty meaty game” and since when it went gold it’s been taking Meyer a long time to play through it, longer than he expected.

It’s very hard to pin down the lenght of a typical playthrough because there is no typical

A “lot more” about the multiplater is gonna be revealed before the release of the game.

Meyer teased that if you like taking screenshots of the game and of the beautiful environments you will like what the team set up for it. They “definitely” tried to support taking really nice screenshots.

Photo mode can be accessed with R3+L3, and can be turned off. You can see the full pause menu below.

The team thought a lot on how to help players think about stealth from the beginning, because they knew many would just drive the jeep into the enemy and get shot up. So they started by adding some approach paths for the jeep that are a bit more hidden so you don’t need to walk all the way down.

The towers in Madagascar are an ideal environment for enemy snipers.

Control schemes are “highly customizable.” The team has done a lot of work so that players can customize controls in accordance with their gameplay style and preferences.

Naughty Dog worked with someone that helped them making sure that people with certain disabilities had no problems.

You can drive off a cliff, and that respawns you at the latest checpoint.

Naughty Dog isn’t showing the menus because there are spoilers there.
There’s a lot yet to be revealed.

Some of the trophies will be revealed before the game comes out, since that normally leaks anyway.

Sam and Sully will shoot while you’re driving. The team experimented with allowing the player to shoot while driving, but there were all sorts of control problems, and it also encouraged players to never leave the vehicle, so it was removed.

Difficulty settings can actually add different types of enemies. For instance at the tower in the Madagascar demo there are only snipers on normal difficulty, but Hard and Crushing add enemies with RPGs, which are particularly lethal in combination with snipers. In harder difficulty settings enemies are also more accurate, they’re quicker to see you, and stealth is harder.

On Crushing you get less information on who is seeing you and where they are (you don’t see the threat indicators showing who is about to notice you. They will still give audio clues though). One of the developers took over an hour to beat the tower encounter on Crushing difficulty.

Enemies on Crushing difficulty are also much more aggressive in following you and finding you if you try to get back into stealth.

Enemies have different behaviors depending on whether you’re in the jeep or on foot.
There is more than one situation in which you can sneak through an encounter and not kill anyone. There’s even a trophy bound to this. There are also times in which combat is unavoidable. It depends on what makes sense for the pacing and the story.

Sam and Sully are really helpful in combat scenarios. They don’t shoot blindly. They’ll spot enemies for you. If an enemy grabs you they’ll come and take them off you. There are team takedowns where you can take down an enemy together with them. When you’re in stealth, they will take down enemy stealthily as well.

Co-op would take away from the crafted experience of following Nathan Drake adventure. There will be no campaign co-op.

There will be a soundtrack released for the game, in both digital format and CD.
Both markings and threat indicators can be turned off in the menus.

If you don’t do certain actions or explore certain locations you can miss some conversations and banter between the characters. A lot of dialog is dependent on how you play and where you go.

Markings carry through even if you die. When you come back enemies that you marked are still marked.

A lot of iteration has been done on friendly AI to make sure that they don’t get spotted by the enemies, but they’re still near you, active and helpful. The team also worked on balancing how much they’ll take down enemies without being too invasive (making you feel they’re taking down enemies that you wanted to take down yourself).

The reticles give you information. There’s a dot in the reticle that bounces around showing you where your bullets are actually hitting. All guns have peculiar patterns that you can get used to.

You can skip cinematics if you so choose.

There was a lot of iteration for melee looking at previous games of the series. The developers tried to incorporate melee into everything, allowing you to attack enemies while vaulting over obstacles, swinging with the grapple hook and more. Every action you can do during exploration can actually be changed into melee.

There’s no sprint button, but in combat you move a little bit faster than you normally do.

The Jeep can’t be destroyed, but it can take damage.

In the next few weeks there will be more videos. Naughty Dog will talk about a few details like control options and more.
Click to expand...
 
S

SomTervo

Member
lukeskymac said:
Different enemy setup, improved enemy reaction times and zero info assists on Crushing. Steel fisting/kicking still alive and well. The few fears I had about this game have just disappeared.
Click to expand...

Wait... Like different encounter designs on crushing? Enemies in different places/quantities?

Holy fuck it's gonna be GOAT
 
C

Chris Metal

Member
SomTervo said:
Wait... Like different encounter designs on crushing? Enemies in different places/quantities?

Holy fuck it's gonna be GOAT
Click to expand...

Yeah they said that encounter on hard/crushing should introduce enemies with rocket launchers for example. They took them out of normal cause it wasn't balanced for that difficulty. If this happens in most situations, it'll be worth playing on harder just to see differences.
 
J

Javin98

Banned
tapantaola said:
I remember NDC having dithered shadows, but they fixed it with a patch... perhaps they could do the same here?
Click to expand...
I doubt it, ND seems to be doing some sort of temporal reconstruction on the shadows in Uncharted 4. Basically, the shadows progressively improve in quality and become less dithered after several frames. This is not something you patch out, but I guess they could bump the shadow resolution slightly.
 
L

lukeskymac

Member
SomTervo said:
Wait... Like different encounter designs on crushing? Enemies in different places/quantities?

Holy fuck it's gonna be GOAT
Click to expand...

Chris Metal said:
Yeah they said that encounter on hard/crushing should introduce enemies with rocket launchers for example. They took them out of normal cause it wasn't balanced for that difficulty. If this happens in most situations, it'll be worth playing on harder just to see differences.
Click to expand...

Yup, I hope Crushing's enabled from the start, because I'm jumping in right from there. Somewhow I feel UC4's Crushing is going to be the real deal like TLoU's Survivor instead of past Uncharted's "You are annoyingly fragile now and nothing else".
 
N

Negotiator

Member
lukeskymac said:
Yup, I hope Crushing's enabled from the start, because I'm jumping in right from there. Somewhow I feel UC4's Crushing is going to be the real deal like TLoU's Survivor instead of past Uncharted's "You are annoyingly fragile now and nothing else".
Click to expand...
Agreed. I also hope it won't have Brutal after that. :p
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
This will be my first special edition in like 10+ years, that steelbook is stunning, hopefully you get a nice bit of currency as well for a quick leg up in MP.
 
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