Prince of Persia Prodigy is gorgeous!
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 - 6:32pm
The first screens of the new PoP game are starting to trickle out by way of a Czech website and from the limited screens I can say that the game looks pretty damn good. The 6th, 7th, and 8th screens really show how they're tryng to shape the graphics into something that looks like a real-time water-color painting, I dig it. I haven't heard any words on gameplay, but my faith was restored after the last PoP title, The Two Thrones, so here's to hoping this turns out to be another winner! 
Thrones. Two Thrones. Two Towers is LotR.
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It's gorgeous.
The new Game Informer has a pretty lengthy preview of it. Really looking forward to it, but I hope the environments are bright and beautiful like the first (PS2/Xbox) game.
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It's cel-shading. I love cel-shading in games, but it's really hard on both art direction and technical front to pull that kind of graphics off.
We'll see how it develops, but given the quality they have on team (I think PoP always had one of best concept artists in there) it will surely be a killer. If not, it will at least encourage more devs to try incorporate cel-shading into their games.
Anime fans who dig this style should also look at Afro Samurai sharing similiar art style and gameplay. Personally I almost hate anime, but this one was really good (plus it had Samuel L. Jackson doing voiceovers).
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It looks incredible!
It's more a stylised cel-shading than I was expecting...
the OP was right, it does look like a real-time water-colour!
I really need to play 2 Thrones... but the Starforce, it haunts me...
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Wow...pretty.
Quintin_Stone wrote:
lunabean wrote:I just started Rival Swords on the Wii. Not sure yet what I think of the controls, but man does it want to be in HD.
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Wow that art style is amazing. The villain is especially nasty. Will it be for both 360 and PS3?
I lovvved PoP1. PoP2 was such an abomination that I've refused to even think about the series again. Was 3 up to 1's standard?
The original (well, the original from this dev team, anyway) had a sort of wistful sweetness to it that I really enjoyed, and some really fun level design. 2 was just... ick. How was 3?
I enjoyed 3. It still wasn't as good as the 1st one, but definitely much better than 2.
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I've actually not played any of this series, but all it'll take to get me interested in this one is a video of it in motion.
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That might be the only game I've seen to rival Okami in terms of cell shading glory, though that's a bit unfair since it's on consoles a generation more powerful than Okami. I just hope the level of animation is up to PoP/AC levels, combined with that cell shading.
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Well, some great textures out there. On the other hand, they'll have some hard time trying to balance it to not look too bleak/pixelated/angular. [/b]But hey, they're the same team that did PoPs and AC (afaik the internal team that does this is a team that made Sands of Time; and [i]I wouldn't be surprised if they'd team up with Jade, because there was a word that she left for new big project)
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I think PoP 1 and 3 were equally good in somewhat different ways. Gameplay-wise, 3 was the best if only because it allowed you to sneak around using your wall-running and climbing abilities in order to get an instant kill on many of the enemies.
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Excellent art style. I enjoyed PoP1 on the PC and haven't gotten around to the others.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
I'd agree that 3 was much better than 2 but not as good as one. They took out a lot of the stupid angsty Prince stuff and those pointless chases against that thing whose name I can't remember. If you haven't played 3, I'd recommend picking it up for cheap, it's definitely worth it.
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Indeed, but there are some pretty cool filters being applied to the scenery to give it more of a "painted" feel than the average cel-shaded game.
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Color me impressed. I like how they've figured out a way to add texture to the cartoony planes. It looks way better than the flat color fields that are present in DBZ/Nartuo style games.
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I'm not sure I like the design of the Prince, though. I mean, it would look cool if he were an original character, but I don't know. The Prince, to me, was never a dude with a metal claw-hand and a bad-assed animalistic attack style. This is like The Prince meets a Werewolf meets a ninja. Cool, but seems to be more in keeping with the emo prince than the loveable original.
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Given that they're focusing on "challenging 1 v 1 battles", I'm very unsure about this one.
Those sound an awful lot like deliberately tough boss fights, and a reappearance of the incredibly irritating quicktime/single-shot-deaths-aplenty fights (sans save points beforehand, even) that ruined PoP:WW is deeply unwelcome.
On a more positive note, the new art style looks fantastic and the idea of an open-world PoP is intriguing.
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I just hope the fights revolve around the wall-running and jumping stuff. It could be especially cool if you and an enemy were both doing the same acrobatic moves through a collapsing environment, trading blows in mid-air as you try to outrun whatever it was that was causing everything behind you to crumble. I play these games to climb things, not to fight.
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Well, let's wait until they show us new control scheme. After all they're the same company that pulled off AC.
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You're right that it looks like a painting but this article says it's not cel-shaded at all.
Either way, it looks impressive.
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Done well, that sounds awesome to me. One of the big issues in designing combat is that it starts to get fugly when you add enemies. Either you're fighting fodder, or you should lose, so there can't be any tension. Stripping away the ninja extras seems like a smart solution to me.
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I'm going for cautious optimism, they are really going for innovation and the only thing I'm concerned about is the open world. If it isn't implemented really well it will kill the game for me.
1 v 1 combat could be very cool, as long as it isn't as technical as a fighting game, without being too simplistic. And it is sooooo purdy!
kuddles wrote:
MechaSlinky wrote:Or it could end up being like that battle near the end of PoP:Two Thrones where you had to fight those two guys - one with a sword and one with an axe. The difficulty spike for that fight was enormous and i actually quit the game for several months before retrying, failing and then looking at an FAQ to understand how to beat them. Also, the final boss of that game was also incredibly unforgiving but nowhere near the stumbling block i found those two guys to be - i at least knew what i had to do to beat that final boss.
Hopefully the platforming will be cool as it has been and i'm looking forward to the pseudo-open world that can be completed in 'any order' (i guess there will be a relatively final boss that has to be unlocked first) but the subsequent areas are increased in difficulty.
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Yeah, this screen is a good example. Now, I'd love to see whole thing in motion, because you can't really say much more how they're doing this upon seeing still shots. They will really have to do helluva work with their shading/lighting to fit this painting-style, but so far it looks spectacular (observe HDR, how blur's applied in background, and how great and sharp shadow of the monster looks)
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For the most part I like it, but I really wish games would stop adding Depth of Field blur outside of cutscenes. It makes assumptions about where the player is looking on the screen, and when it assumes wrong then it looks like ass.
And just to nitpick, but can HDR be seen in a screenshot? I thought that was used in gaming to handle transitions from high and low light areas, and wasn't quite the same thing as HDR in photography. The range of colors in screenshots is more indicative of a broad color palette for the game, also good.
The art direction looks good to me, but then everything looks like it has a weird Photoshop filter applied to it after. Emboss? Was that the one?
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Meh, I'm surprised you say this. I completely agree, and thought about it when posting, but it was probably the first time I've found DoF blur in game not annoying.
Yeah, sure, but I just assumed that bloom lighting in the background comes from HDR cause, well... they don't make games without it anymore ;]
A little bit - yes (look how shadow cuts out). But once more I think that it should serve new PoP well. When we see it in action we'll know whether they overdone it or not. At least they're paving the way for others.
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