Heavenly Sword screenshot/girlfriend

by Nick Doerr { Mar 11th 2007 at 3:00PM }

Cutscenes in games are photo-realistic on the PS3. Seriously. Even though Nariko from Heavenly Sword is built based on an actress (kind of like the main characters in the Onimusha games), this screenshot/wallpaper placed on the Ninja Theory forums really shows how gorgeous games can be, cutscene or not.

This picture of Nariko spurned on a lot of debate on the forums, many nay-sayers claiming that there's no way this sort of graphic can be in-game. It is in-game, but a cutscene. Just read the original post from the Web Admin: "Had a chat with Tameem, and we've managed to get approval from Sony to release a screenshot to say a big 'Thank You' for your participation on the forums. So, without further a-do, here's an in-game screen grab of Nariko from one of our cutscenes." Yeah, we added the bold. So, what did this "Tameem" guy say? Let's look backwards.

"I'm assuming most of you have seen the "Cinematic Production" teaser. The facial model and texturing you see is based on the actress and the expression is comprised of a series of blend-shapes driven by the mocap data. Each expression is tweaked by us so that we remain true to the original performance. Lighting and depth of field is then applied to the scene and the results, I hope you'll agree, look pretty nice. This particular example doesn't have the floor in place and we've made it into a 1280x1024 size image so that it can be used as a desktop wallpaper."

I've needed a new wallpaper and this will do nicely. What do you guys think? If actual in-game... gameplay graphics are anywhere near this, will that not be very, very impressive?

Tags: Heavenly Sword, HeavenlySword, Ninja Theory, NinjaTheory, PlayStation 3, Playstation3, PS3, Sony

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

TheGuy @ Mar 11th 2007 3:32PM

Wow...even from a cutscene that's really good quality. It looks even better than the cutscene pictures from FF XIII. I hope this game can live-up to the hype as the female God of War, and show what the PS3 is truly capable of.

Tom Clarke @ Mar 12th 2007 6:15AM

That's 'spurred', not 'spurned'. Forgive the pedant.

Stef Geiger @ Mar 12th 2007 12:08PM

..Yeah, by "in game" they mean that the cutscene is... in the game. No way that's being rendered in real time. It's a cinematic that's part of the game. Not to say the PS3 can't do some really impressive stuff, but I don't expect we'll see THIS level of detail coming out of the PS3 for a few years, when developers get really good at squeezing the cell for it's power.

Another reason why this pretty much can't be in-engine - that much detail during gameplay is just a waste of GPU because unless the camera is REALLY close, and the player is perfectly still, you'd never be able to appreciate the quality. I mean, is anyone going to be able to say "wow! she has bump mapped lips and individual eyelashes!" while hacking and slashing at a dozen enemies?