Heavenly Sword Gameplay In NBCs Heroes

[AssMan]

 

[Avalanche]

Fraudsters! They're never playing that. Jessica is a cruel, trickster of an alter-ego.

 

[JM0087]

That is sick, the gameplay looks similar to God of War.

When is it coming out?

 

[Avalanche]

I have to say, that gif makes the game look absolutely stunning.

 

[THE LIZARD#1]

Is it just me or does this game look F**king amazing?

 

[El Santo]

Gametrailers video.

Quicktime: http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?type=mov&id=17487

W Media Player: http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?type=wmv&id=17487

It looks so great.
I wish they could have shown more, though.

 

[Zenien]

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=941089&postcount=52

Draw Distance is 10Km to be slightly more precise tho in that level there is nothing beyond about 5Kms

We have a custom skin shader, it simulates the effect of SSS but isn't doing anything clever or complex like actually properly modeling it... Its an art tuned shader rather than a technically correct one. The initial work was done by our old Art Director Hughes Giborie (I don't know how to spell his second name he's french!! ) who now works for Digital Eclipse over in Canada.
Since then its been tuned by a number of artists and programmer and lets our awesome character artists achieve some wonderful results (and I'm not saying that cos I worked on it, cos i didn't).

From a November/October Build

Yeah, November(ish) maybe the month before, not sure exactly...

Separate from XNua there is of course my day (and often night…) job… Heavenly Sword and Ninja Theory have been in a pretty tight media silence for a while which we are finally coming out of. I really don’t get the whole media silence thing but meh Sony pay the bills so… Its also been a fairly odd time for me which hasn’t helped me post very much either, I’ve been a bit ill and have been almost obsessional over the army section of the game which has eaten massive amount of my time.

Basically two of us (Lilly and I), pretty much designed and implemented most of it from a game play perspective over the space of the last 6 months or so. Its been pretty intense to say the least…

Essentially we have built a separate game that runs along side the normal game… The armies can swap into the main game when required… its totally seamless to the player but internally there are two distinct game play systems.

So basically you have the army game which has up to 2180 AI’s (I checked the other day cos somebody on Beyond3D asked and I didn’t actually know, its can probably go a little higher but thats the current number embedded in the code) running on SPUs with the normal main game logic mainly running on PPU. For fighting the SPU code selects the 20-30 closest army guys and hands them over to the normal game so you get the full fight engine and AI for them. For ranged weapons (like the Bazooka) its all handled internally to the armies, and they try and run or dive and also get blown up quite spectacularly(its very satisfying ). The army AI is hierarchical, each guy has his own brain and avoids and tracks important things but there is also a battalion level intelligence that guides each unit around the field following a specialised virtual machine with commands and orders. Its quite hard to control an army and not make it look silly, so we use a few tricks to make it look visually interesting as well.

From a design point of view, the difficulty is giving the player a challenge without making it completely unfair. Obviously 2000 people + catapults vs 1 women is a little unfair in the real world but we have a number of techniques to keep it fun. From long range weaponry to her spinny attacks and some cool special moves she can wipe them out if you know how. I had a screen shot (used to be my laptop backdrop) when I was tested the army death code where I went and slaughtered every person I could find (at that time about 950). With Alpha basically done (which means we are basically feature complete) its now just a matter or polish and balancing, that’s something Lil and I are quite looking forward to, we have had to do a fair amount of rushed drudge work to get here and just having some time to polish is something we’ve been wishing for, for quite some time.

I think some stuff is being shown at GDC but don’t quote me, I know ATG have produced a presentation using the army code as a SPU case study and a video has been made but its possible its for internal WWS stuff and not GDC… but hopefully its for the public as its very frustrating not to have it ‘out there’

 

[hey yo its sean]

Great. Two of the ****tiest characters on the show are playing the PS3. Good times gonna come.

 

[Zenien]

http://www.playsyde.com/news_4070_en.html

"THIS IS LIVING"

New Footage interview with Golum. (Unfortunately the footage is butchered by the encoding) a little bit.

Heavenly Sword has just passed ALPHA (meaning all the features are now in the game), meaning the real gameplay polish and extra polish are next.

Example:

everything (that is opaque) cast shadows over everything (that is opaque), hair included, there are not precomputed shadows in the game.
If you don't see shadows is cause in that particular shot shadow maps params were sitll not tweaked or cause shadows are casting in another direction..

 

[Zenien]

 

[JM0087]

^ that's gotta hurt.

Man this game looks amazing. When is it coming out?

 

[BatMatt]

as of now, June