UNCHARTED 4: A Thief’s End [The Await Is Over: King Drake sliding into our hearts]

Fatboi1

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The extended Uncharted 4 E3 demo will change games forever

For reasons best known to Sony, the best thing at E3 was the longer version of its E3Uncharted 4 demo that it didn't show at the conference. Behind closed doors, an extended version of the truck chase continued the sequence and raised the bar so high it might well break all other games.

What happens is impossible to describe without falling into hyperbole because holy Christ I nearly lost my shyt, with gameplay that almost seemed to be mocking your ability to deal with it - piling sequence onto sequence, and building the pace and action up to to a level that's almost impossible to comprehend without seeing it. Nothing else out there can compete with what I saw: there's honestly a world before that demo and world after.

Trying to describe that with words can only give you hint of what to expect, but I'll do my best.

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In the original Sony press conference demo, Nate and Sully shot their way through a market, escaping bad guys and a gun-carrying APC truck in a smashy downhill drive. In the short version, Drake lassos an overhanging crane arm and swings alongside a bridge as it smashes him into obstacles. Fade to black, crowd goes wild.

The extended demo continues this sequence, only with the swinging changing to dragging as Nate's pulled up onto a muddy road. There's what I can only describe as the best mud physics I've ever seen here, as Nate slops and slides along the ground behind the truck. Nathan's forced to take chaotic pot shots at gunmen in pursuing jeeps while he desperately tries to climb the rope and claim the truck.

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From there, via a shootout on the back of the truck, Drake manages to jump to another jeep as he tries to catch up with his brother Sam's motorbike - the reason for the chase in the first place. Throughout all this, the speed and scale is huge. There's no sense of being on a single straight road with prop trees whizzing past; this is all taking place in a huge open environment. Vehicles careen and rattle between routes and obstacles, or go pinwheeling through the air in sheets of flame once the tires have been shot out. It's fast, loud and cinematically overwhelming.

And it's not even the best part. After fighting some goons who're trying Nate's jeep-hopping tricks to get from their ride to his, Drake catches up with his brother and jumps on the bike. From here, it just goes crazy. The camera switches to a front view as the pursuing APCs give chase, smashing through obstacles and skidding back and forth on their heels.

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What's impossible to understand until you see it is just how kinetic and animated it all is. It's not a static rolling road creating a background for a shooting gallery. It's a twisting, turning, full-on car chase. Sam throws the bike around, leaning into skids or throwing a leg out for sharp turns. The view swings around the action and the bouncing bike as Nate peppers the pursuing vehicle's grill with bullets. Beautiful depth-of-field effects and camera angles create an incredible sense of velocity as the carnage unfolds.

It ends with the pair sliding the bike under a container as the APC explodes behind them. It's ridiculous and joyously over-the-top in a way that even the game seems to acknowledge, with Drake and Sam bursting into grins at the end like school kids that have just had the best fun ever.

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It's definitely a return to Uncharted 2's sense of scale and action, recreating the thrill of that game's helicopter chase. But on a level so far above that, and what other games have achieved, that it's a literal game changer (I said there'd be hyperbole). The scale, speed, and sheer ambition of the sequence genuinely has the potential to redefine what's possible, drawing a line in this generation's games and not so much raising the bar as firing it into orbit.


:wow: This shyt gonna be crack cocaine on wonder bread.
 

Fatboi1

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Man wtf they ain't show that shyt for. Spoiler be damned!

:mad:
The streets is loving that extra part.





Honestly I don't want to see it as much as I do want to see it. With Uncharted 3, they showed WAAAY too much of the game. I feel like so far with UC4, they've been great as the PSX demo wasn't even a set piece moment or anything, just some regular ole gameplay that looked set piece like.
 

KushSkywalker

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im watching tis right now and i had no clue all this was going on :wow:

dude calls out so much lil stuff and im like :ohhh: shyt he right :damn:
You see those sandbag physics when bullets were going threw em and they were spillin there contents and deflating and shaking as bullets riddled them, they coulda been bags of grain or something but god dam. Every little detail.

Edit: They were grain, but each bullet drained different amount of grain and each time the bags deflated slightly more, and shook with cloth physics and weight. It was pretty cool 2:27 seconds.
 

KushSkywalker

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The attention to detail with civilians, physics, lighting, physical interaction with environment.

Naughty Dog is ridiculous with all the little stuff they do. Like RIDICULOUS. They do things that add to realism that you wouldn't even know that's why it looked real unless you analyzed it like this guy. But shyt that was an amazing breakdown. Lots of stuff I didn't notice.
 

BamdaDon

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Aye nikkas in here saying the game looks OK and not better than uc3 :mjlol: get that 30 inch 420p Vizio the fukk outta get a new phone or something. I'm destroying you nikkas on mp everytime I play this shyt to teach you a lesson. My son was just playing uc3 that shyt look like ps2 to tlou remastered.
 

Kamikaze Revy

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Uncharted 4 Videos Show Awesome Foliage and Water Puddles Technology and More
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End uses some quite innovative techniques to achieve its effects, and two of them were showcased during an event hosted by the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood.
In the videos at the bottom of the post you can check out the shader foliage animation and the tech used for ripples in water puddles in action. Technical Artist Christophe Desse, Artist Andrew Maximov and Dynamics Artist Neilan Naicker also provided a few more interesting details.
  • The team was initially tempted to rig the foliage in the whole game (basically setting up the foliage with actual animations), but that would have been too expensive performance-wise. That’s why Maximov created a “shader foliage animation” (which you can see in the first video below) that is much more affordable and still very interactive.
  • Leaves have particle emitters on them, so if there’s a gust of wind, they actually drip droplets of water.
  • At Naughty Dog developers are very happy to share their knowledge and share ownership of a project. Desse, Maximov and Naicker do it all the time.
  • The fly on Drake’s forehead in the first cinematic trailer was made in the span of a day at the very last moment.
  • The grain sacks used as cover in the E3 demo are physics-based as they react to bullets, but also simulation-based as they deflate when they get hit. Those are two different animation layers on top of each other.
  • They didn’t really need to have the clothesline that gets ran over with the jeep in the E3 demo, but they still wanted to put it in. It was initially started by Desse, and then Naicker completed it.
On top of this, Character Technical Designer Hans Godard showcased some of the tools used by Naughty Dog, which you can see in the last video.



 

Kamikaze Revy

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Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End Models Showcased: Jeep, Bike, AK-47 and More from the E3 Demo

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If you loved the Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End demo showcased at E3, here’s your chance to see some of the assets used to create it. Technical Artist Christophe Desse showcased some of them during a livestreamed event hosted by the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood.
You can check out the AK-47, the jeep, a bike and more in the gallery at the bottom of the post.
Desse also mentioned a few more details about how they were made:
  • Normally you wouldn’t be able to do changes at the very last moment, but at Naughty Dog you can go to the game director and plead your case, taking it upon yourself to the the last minute job and get a better result. The AK-47 displayed below was one of those cases.
  • Texturing the AK would have taken a day before, with the new tools it takes much less, but this doesn’t mean that they work less. They have time to do more iterations and get a better result.
  • At Naughty Dog artists often aren’t told what tools to use. The important thing is the results.
  • Desse used Havok for the physics of the Jeep. he also rigged the antenna so that it sways with the wind.






 
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