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So, here's some rather disappointing news regarding Titanfall.
It turns out we've got another resolution gate fiasco
going on, only this one is with an exclusive title on
the Xbox One. So, you might know that
Microsoft has been having a bit of a problem getting developers to
really crank the Xbox One up to those higher-resolutions and high frame rates
and it was always expected that first party titles or should I say
exclusive titles should get a little bit more love from Microsoft to be able to
optimise and really push their game
up to those 1080p resolutions. Now, here is where things get a little bit messy for
Microsoft.
Titanfall, which is obviously a game
produced by Electronic Arts, released by Electronic Arts but exclusive to Xbox One
is only running at
1408 x 792 for the resolution
so 792p if you want to be exact about this.
It's certainly higher than 720p which a lot of Xbox 360 games would run at
but it is a long way short frankly of
what I would expect from, you know, the Xbox One
for a title that should have been given a massive amount of love
by Microsoft and really, you know, pushed
to get this up to a 1080p resolution or at very least 900p.
Now, the guys at Respawn who are
producing the game, the developers, have said that they are
working at the moment to patch Titanfall to hopefully bring it up to
around 900p but there's going to be some compromises if they're going to achieve
that.
So effectively they could do 1080p without any anti-aliasing
so that means you're going to have jaggy lines around things. Now there's a slight offset there
because the higher the resolution
the less anti-aliasing is kind of necessary to kind of smooth things out on bigger
screens,
so not necessarily a massive problem
if they did decide to drop the anti-aliasing altogether. However
the other option they're working on is to go to 900p and use EFEXAA
a fast approximate anti-aliasing. This is a technique that we've been
using in the PC industry
and probably the games consoles as well for a heck of a long time, probably certainly three or four
years
and technology wise it's a really good approach to at least getting
some anti-aliasing in there. It's fast it's approximate
it's not perfect but it does the job. Obviously whenever you have
anti-aliasing
that is where you start taking a resolution hit because every frame has
to have all the lines and edges
smoothed out around the textures and the models and everything like that to really give it
that kind of sharp pop
otherwise what we get is a game that might look
graphically great, but you kind of have this ugly shimmery
speckliness really round artifacts and
what that really leads to is just a slightly mucky looking picture. It lacks that
clarity that kind of
pop that, you know, we really like. What we want from our games is something that comes
close to what, you know,
Pixar put out in their movies, beautiful clean lines and
you know, great colour and a lot of that really comes from having great
anti-aliasing working well.
But you pay a big performance hit for it and that seems to be where
the guys at Respawn are kind of coming unstuck a little bit.
In order to actually do anti-aliasing
you're having to use ESRAM in quite particular ways
and they're struggling to balance up resolution
anti-aliasing and doing that within ESRAM
all in one go and so there are some compromises like I say. They've
essentially released this game
at the same resolution as the beta, so if you weren't overly happy with the
resolution on the beta, if you thought the image particularly wasn't great then
it's not improved at launch, put it that way. But there is potentially a patch incoming
that should make things a little bit better. Now really
the question here is how did Microsoft
allow this to kind of happen and why are they happy to allow this to happen on their
biggest launch game? You know, this is the one they want to ship consoles,
you know. So far there hasn't really been a game that was a must buy
and I must get the Xbox One. So far there hasn't really been,
you know, a killer title for the Xbox One where you kind of had to rush out
and you must buy it. Titanfall's the first one and
unfortunately to find the game that is just not hitting
even what I would call close to a suitable resolution
792p? Sorry, well short, 900p needs to be the bare
minimum for a next-gen console to be hitting resolution wise, otherwise frankly it's
not really a next-gen console is it?
It's just a console with a slightly faster chip, slightly faster
APUs in there, but ultimately it's not really offering
next-gen, plain and simple.
It's not offering next-gen. It might have next-gen graphics, it might have next-gen
gameplay
but it's not hitting that resolution that sweet spot that honestly
I as a gamer actually expect from Microsoft and their partners.
Really, if this game needed longer in the oven to get those resolutions right
to then get the anti-aliasing working exactly perfectly
combined with the resolution they should have given it more time. They shouldn't have rushed this one out
just to ship units.
Unfortunately we will see, because the early reviews that I'm seeing
coming out from the States show that this game is not
the AAA title that everyone was expecting. Average scores at the moment are around
85 on Metacritic, that's not a big AAA title, that's kind of
AA kind of levels. A triple A title will really clock in
over 85 and into the nineties. What we're really getting here
is a game that well, there seems to be quite a bit missing. I think that the way
the single player seems to have been hung into this game
isn't really working and that's where we're getting some lower scores but
ultimately from a technical standpoint
Titanfall running at 792p? That doesn't impress me much.