We're running on all cylinders now in developing our recently announced launch title for the PS3, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom. We're gearing up for showing a fully playable game at E3. It's pretty cool seeing a lot of aspects come together. We have physics running on a separate SPU, and a full-on water simulation running on another one. It's awesome watching a dungeon level fill up with water as the player races against time trying to stop the water before it gets too high.
We're also now seeing the game running at 1080p and I have to say the quality level of the imagery is pretty darn good. The first screenshots released were actually of an older version of the game with a character (The Brute) that's no longer even in the game, but that's the double-edged sword of offering players an early look at a Next-Gen title. Getting the graphical quality level to a point where we are happy with it has taken some time and a lot of very hard work by the team, but when I see the result, man is it impressive! For me though, the physics is really the major aspect of the game that will put ULDK a cut above any other "dungeon crawl" game ever made. Just about everything in the game now has a full physics simulation running on it, and it makes all the difference in the world. Watching a skeleton get thrown around like a child's toy and pieces of it flying all over the place never gets old. It's funny how much time people spend just playing around with the different things you can do with the physics system.
What's cool to me is that the different SPU's really give us the ability to add a depth to the gameplay that just wasn't possible on previous console systems. Fully simulating water, including the character making real waves and happening at the same time you're doing a physics simulation on nearly everything in a scene is a very processor intensive thing to do. But the PS3 handles it like it's nothing.
We’ve realized we need to be careful about what we show to players, because we’re developing so quickly that the screens we pull are dated as soon as we put them up, and outputting at a 1080p resolution takes a moment (not to mention the fact that the screens are shown in a lower, unimpressive resolution by the media). Once the new characters are in, though, we’ll show players a lot more.
On the network side, SCEA announced that we are collaborating with them on the Playstation Network. We've been working on it for quite a long time, and it's coming along extremely well. We've made sure that ULDK is very much an online game from the start. All of us like playing multi-player co-op online and that's been a major focus from day one. Online games are what we like making here at SOE so this isn't something we're adding in as an afterthought. It's what I think people will remember and like most about the game — playing with friends.
The team is working a ton of hours to get ULDK ready for E3 and for launch day, and it's really coming together well. Personally, I can't wait to let everyone take it for a spin at E3.
Smed
