Simply put, Velocity 2X looks amazing, and I’m not just talking from a gameplay perspective. The original PSP game had an understated pixel art vibe to it, which was excellently overhauled for the Velocity Ultra, which made good use of the added power and the higher pixel count.
Velocity 2X, though, takes a 2D engine and applies one graphical effect after another, to create something rather special.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Ovc4Jwge0
Writing on the EU PlayStation Blog, James Marsden, Futurlab’s Managing Director, said:
One of the major influences for Velocity 2X was the art style of Flashback on the Amiga. For those of you too young to have played Flashback (poor you, play the original!), it was a stunning visual achievement, using rotoscoped animation and a simple yet stylish art style to create a highly atmospheric experience. 12-year-old me fell in love with it.
Artistically speaking, we wanted Velocity 2X to be the spiritual successor to Flashback (and indeed Another World), and also to create a level of atmosphere and production value that is rarely seen in 2D games.
Despite being a small team of 10 (only three of which are artists), we set ourselves the ambitious challenge of reaching the kind of visual fidelity that makes people say “oooh” and “ahhh” and “take my money!”.
Throughout the post, he showed of a handful of mockups and benchmark images which they aimed to reach.
While the PS Vita version wasn’t expected to match the PS4, it managed to surprise everyone but Technical Director, Hussain Sheikh, quickly catching up with what they planned for the PS4 version so that both now boast a host of clever visual techniques, including:
- Particle explosions
- Dynamic environment lighting
- Vignetting
- Environment effects such as leaves in the wind, twinkling stars etc
- Bloom
- Light refraction
- Anamorphic lens flare
- Colour correction
- Smooth 3D camera zoom
- Screen shake & camera turbulence
Sadly, it doesn’t sound like they’ll have fish AI, but I guess you can’t have everything. It’s also still quite a long way from being finished, but now that the engine is nearing a finished feature set, the artists are busy making the existing levels look gorgeous while the design team are crafting more devilishly compelling levels for us all to whizz through.
Of course, the graphics engine is just one part of the experience, but if the original game and the brief snippet I played at Eurogamer Expo are anything to go by, this is going to be one hell of a follow up.
Source: EU PlayStation Blog
Lieutenant Fatman
The lack of fish AI is indeed rather vexing, I honestly do not understand why so few developers make that a priority these days.
Having said that, I will still be looking forward to playing this.
Also, I feel I should mention the the soundtracks they have used so far, loving them, so catchy!
MikLSP
OK, you win… I’m off to look up what fish AI is :-/
MikLSP
Ah, I see; a jibe at CoD Ghosts. I’ve honestly never heard anything of that before, shows how much interest I pay to CoD related things I guess ;-)
Gaztee
Now I know why it reminded me of flashback!
Which also reminds me I need to have a play of Another World on my Atari Jaguar!!!