E3: Square-Enix's newest Tech-Demo

[tezunegari]

This is Square-Enix's Luminous Engine and now I'm out of Kleenex.

[General Zod]

Who knows, maybe they'll actually take this somewhere. Vs. 13 is pretty much vaporware at this point.

[Tolya]

I will be impressed if they tell me that a high spec PC can do this image quality. Because real time might also mean "we have linked 30 high performance workstations to render that shit".

[Mr Bean]

You the picture perfect grime and squaller of the old man at the beginning is contrasted very well with the picture perfect uncanny valley of the girl who runs away with the rock with her classic post 3D Final Fantasy styling.

It makes the super pretty boy inhuman looking characters of most Final Fantasy's when you contrast them with the much more realistic looking humans elsewhere in that tech demo.

[Losonti Tokash]

...those were definitely words, but I'll be damned if there was anything coherent in that post.

[CaptHawkeye]

If Square Enix wants my attention they should make a game for Spirits Within, they'll never do it though. They're too busy making the Final Fantasy interactive movie games.

[General Zod]

If Square Enix wants my attention they should make a game for Spirits Within, they'll never do it though. They're too busy making the Final Fantasy interactive movie games.

Considering how much it flopped I wouldn't get your hopes up. Then again they made FF-XIII/2 so . . . *shrug*

[CaptHawkeye]

That's too bad because the SPACE MAHREEEN overtones in Spirits Within would have fit perfectly in western gaming after Halo struck. The Phantoms even had serious potential for variety with interesting boss fights because they were many different species. Leave it to Square to make a movie out of what should have been a game, and a game out of what should have been a movie.

I guess the main Final Fantasy games sell better. When I was younger FFX and FF7 at least made sense in the context of technical limitations and were particularly well written. So I think back then the "story with an RPG mini game" seemed less egregious to me. Now there's no excuse for that anymore. The rest of the games have been, well, the same. With incremental changes to gameplay design, in many cases like FF13 going backwards.

[General Zod]

That's too bad because the SPACE MAHREEEN overtones in Spirits Within would have fit perfectly in western gaming after Halo struck. The Phantoms even had serious potential for variety with interesting boss fights because they were many different species. Leave it to Square to make a movie out of what should have been a game, and a game out of what should have been a movie.

I guess the main Final Fantasy games sell better. When I was younger FFX and FF7 at least made sense in the context of technical limitations and were particularly well written. So I think back then the "story with an RPG mini game" seemed less egregious to me. Now there's no excuse for that anymore. The rest of the games have been, well, the same. With incremental changes to gameplay design, in many cases like FF13 going backwards.

The few trailers they've put out for FF Vs 13 look fantastic, but after six years they've got diddly to show for it, and frankly it really seems like it's what we should have gotten instead of FF13.

[JLTucker]

You the picture perfect grime and squaller of the old man at the beginning is contrasted very well with the picture perfect uncanny valley of the girl who runs away with the rock with her classic post 3D Final Fantasy styling.

It makes the super pretty boy inhuman looking characters of most Final Fantasy's when you contrast them with the much more realistic looking humans elsewhere in that tech demo.

What does this mean?

[General Zod]

You the picture perfect grime and squaller of the old man at the beginning is contrasted very well with the picture perfect uncanny valley of the girl who runs away with the rock with her classic post 3D Final Fantasy styling.

It makes the super pretty boy inhuman looking characters of most Final Fantasy's when you contrast them with the much more realistic looking humans elsewhere in that tech demo.

What does this mean?

He likes realistic characters over animu characters.

[Ryan Thunder]

I suppose he complains every time he sees Jessica Biel in a film as well.

[Mr Bean]

Okay since it was a little unclear and when I wrote this I was on my phone let me try again.

The old man in his dirt and the lines on his face from .20-.23 looks like next generation visuals and all the other graphics tricks that take a bunch of shapes, slap a texture on it and convince us we are looking at a person. To me it's starting to climb the uncanny valley as most faces you see in games today all look in some ways plastic, wrong they look off.

By contrast the summoner from .29-.33 with the rock in the fancy robes again looks good and the scraggly beard looks worlds better than beards from most games which even in Skyrim looks like your wearing a beard shaped chin-warmer rather than have hair growing from your face.

If you stop the film and look at gunmen you also notice those little imperfections, dirt on the hands, scars on arms, one was missing two fingers little bits that say details.

Compare that to the Summoner woman. She's a doll, her lines are perfect her facial structure is very symmetrical, her skin is flawless. That makes sense when you can't do detail which we've not been able to do up until this point but compared to everyone else in the trailers were we see all the little imperfections that are vital to make a bunch of shapes on a computer screen look human to our eyes she's an aberration, she stands out glaringly so.

[TheFeniX]

I suppose he complains every time he sees Jessica Biel in a film as well.

The same Jessica Biel who looks human without 8 lbs of makeup on? It's not like people haven't been posting complaints about magazines like Playboy and fasion rags making their models look like dolls rather than actual people. Squeenix has been making cute dolls even on PS2 hardware so I'm not exactly impressed with that. I am however in agreement with Bean, the rest looked pretty damn good and I still can't understand why so many graphics design teams can't figure out how to apply facial (and even head) hair.

[Losonti Tokash]

Probably because it would take a massively disproportionate amount of resources for something most people won't pay any attention to when they're playing.

[Ryan Thunder]

I suppose he complains every time he sees Jessica Biel in a film as well.

The same Jessica Biel who looks human without 8 lbs of makeup on?

The point being that yes, he's hyperventilating over nothing.