The word “downgrade” is on everyone’s lips these days, it seems. With Watch Dog's release date trailer sending the digital world in a frenzy (not in the way that was intended), and Dark Souls 2's lighting differences being scrutinized, there has been another game caught in the crossfire of downgrade accusations: Sucker Punch's inFAMOUS: Second Son.
Via DualShockers, we've found that Sucker Punch is standing firm against downgrade accusations. In a Q&A period on the inFAMOUS: Second Son Facebook page, Tech Art Lead Jason Connell answered multiple questions regarding the game's alleged lighting and detail differences from the E3 version of the game.
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“Definitely no visual downgrade of graphics since then! We put that particular area in sunset instead of sunny time of day so that it matches the mood of narrative better,” Connell said through the Facebook account for the game.
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Connell also takes the time to detail the game's lighting engine and how it was a focus for the team.
"The lighting team spent a lot of time researching how bright it is outside during different times of day. We call this physical based lighting. This was done heavily in the pre production part of the project.
The most challenging part of moving to physical based lighting was establishing all of the rules of which an artist has to go by... and THEN figuring out how to break them artistically to get the exact look you want," Connell wrote.
Initially there were some concerns over Second Son's static time of day system, but Connell expressed that great attention to detail was created to make the game's eight TOD variations stand out visually.
“I really enjoyed working on the time of days. Each one has a specific sky and they are a lot of fun to make. I could talk for days about this. For story reasons we lately keep TODs static. There are a few exceptions [...]but I spend a lot of time trying to make TODs feel dynamic and have movement in clouds.. But largely are tied with narrative.”
Concerns over inFAMOUS: Second Son's graphical differences come from an alleged gameplay leak from a retail copy of the game. The full game will be available to everyone with a PlayStation 4 on March 21.
