Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

by gSathe

The Gears of War 2 trailer released just a few days back had people in a mixed mood since the scale and style of the cinematic effects failed to provide the visual high that people had been expecting from one of the more hyped games in recent times. Of course, that’s a strange statement to make in an industry run on hype, but even so, expectations had been high for the visuals of Gears 2. But there might be hope yet.

There’s a lot of argument in place right now about which game is the best looking, and the videos of each successive game demo are judged more mercilessly than the finalists at any skin-show… erm… beauty pageant. Killzone 2 was under siege when it turned out that the gameplay trailer shown back at E3 2005 was pre-rendered, an artist’s conception of the entire game. At the time everyone was laughing and taking potshots at Sony and how smoothly it could handle cutscenes! E3 ‘07 proved that the visual quality did indeed match up and silenced the critics a lot though.

Something similar happened with Gears of War 2, the game got people excited when they saw Unreal 3.5 being shown off at GDC in February and the teaser trailer made fanatics drool over the endless possibilities over the sequel of one of the best action titles in the 360’s lineup.

So when the gameplay trailer released on May 9th, people felt, well, a little cheated.

But here’s the thing. Looking at scans from Gameinformer’s latest issue, and comparing them with the visuals in the footage released, it looks like the build used in the gameplay trailer is an older build of the Unreal Engine. It looks like the demo was shown on an early build, and here’s the reason why:

The gameplay shown doesn’t make use of features shown off in Unreal 3.5, be it ambient occlusions, or meat cubes, the realistic water effects. The level of detail was sort of bland, so I decided to check in a few really high resolution scans from GI (which had been confirmed as in game screenshots) as evidence, and I found an essential component of Marcus Fenix missing all throughout the video – his vicious scar, which has been quite evident in almost all versions of Gears of war, is somehow… missing.

These scans are real-time images since they have certain peculiar moments which make them a little off the track as pre-rendered images.

1) Blood splatter in the screens.
2) Half a leg of an enemy locust which has been laid to rest.

The level of details on the enemies in the trailer was also significantly lower than what was shown off in the scans.

The direct feed screen of one of the character models, released a few days after the magazine scans released on the Internet also has a great amount of detail when it comes to facial expressions, wrinkles and shadows have been painstakingly recreated, to give a very high poly count model. These were however absent from the gameplay trailer. Both the scans and the screenshot make explicit the tattoos, which actually seem to be done with striking realism.

Fenix even looks punier in the screens from the trailer than in the scans, and his character model seems significantly less detailed, the bandana for instance has more wrinkles in the scans than in the direct video screenshots taken at 720p.

The moral of the story is that we wait and watch till E3 2008 when CliffyB will showcase a brand new gameplay trailer with a much updated engine, but until then, we can wonder…

Thanks to Neelesh Mukherjee for the tip off about the magazine scans. All the images are taken from either the gameplay trailer released or the scans from GameInformer. All copyrights for the images belong to GameInformer, and you should seriously pick up a copy of the magazine.

More images from Microsoft Gamers Day >>