During Sony’s HUGE PlayStation 4 announcement event today, Square Enix CTO Yoshihisha Hashimoto discussed the awesome architecture of the Playstation 4 system and it’s raw power to drive their own next-gen game engine, Luminous Studio. The engine coupled with the Playstation 4 hardware was presented as a game-changing advancement for graphics and live action that further blurs the already fuzzy line between reality and video games. A demo was shown of the LS engine in action showcasing a brief yet fairly odd story of veiled priests conjuring magic lightning squaring off against some sort of turban-clad gun thugs. Strange but awesome to look at and exciting to watch. However….
Even odder than the story is the fact that this demo, showcased at (arguably) the most important game console announcement event of the year and streamed live onto millions of PC’s, was released to the public 9 months ago on youtube. This was billed as an enhanced demo for the PS4 - sort of – he really didn’t SAY it was but hinted it was showcasing the capabilities of the next-gen hardware. I’m not seeing a difference between the two after several comparisons. I’m not knocking Square Enix by any means, they’re an amazing developer, but I have to wonder that with the gravity of the event, could they have or perhaps SHOULD they have come up with a brand new, never seen demo of their Luminous Studio engine running on the PS4 hardware?
Checkout the Square Enix Tech Demo from Jun 2012
This is the Square Enix Tech Demo Taken Right From the Event, Feb 20 2013
Related articles
Related Articles :
About Craig Bickford
I’m a 39 Year old lifetime gamer starting with a Commodore Vic-20 and working my way up through the Atari 2600, the NES, Sega Genesis, Sony Playstation, several Xbox 360′s, and about a bazillion computers and gaming rigs I cobbled together from parts and good intentions.Oh yeah, I’m also a freelance writer, computer programmer, graphic designer, loving husband, and father of four!
This was easily the point in the confrence where I was least impressed. Not that it looked bad, it just didn’t wow me. “Deep Down” by Capcom had a similar feel (well had a dragon anyway) and was visually more impressive.
I FULLY agree! It wasn’t exciting at all and it just felt lazy to me, like…”Oh! We’re presenting tonight at the Sony event and we need to show some next-gen tech? Crap! Throw that tech demo we released back in June up. Maybe they won’t remember it now”. To me, if you’re going to be up on stage in front of the….entire gaming universe…for a huge hardware launch like the PS4, you better have something visually epic and totally unseen prior to THAT moment.
The original video was rendered running live on PS4 hardware; the development kits have been available to developers for some time.
You seem to have missed that fact.
When the initial video was released; the PS4 was not officially announced and could not be mentioned due to the terms of NDA. SquareEnix revealed yesterday that the video that was previously posted; was rendered on PS4 hardware.
There is absolutely no reason for you to notice a difference in video; as they are both from PS4 hardware.
It’s fairly simple.
OK, I’ll give you that I didn’t know that dev kits were available 8 months ago BUT you seem to have missed the entire point of the article as per your chosen username…the demo was, in fact, 8 months old. OLD is my point. I don’t care if it was rendered on PS4 hardware 8 months ago – it’s 8 months old. That’s OLD. We’ve SEEN it and, as you so thoughtfully pointed out, we’ve seen it rendered on PS4 hardware so it was really, REALLY OLD news and boring – nothing new, no whizzbang. In 8 months they couldn’t have come up with something new?