Resistance y Untold Legends: Noticias.

Meltdown is an extension of another mode called "Node," in which two teams race to take over as many nodes as possible. Nodes are large chambers that contain several cylinders, you can re-configure the nodes for your team. Once you control a node, you can choose to re-spawn there after you die, adding strategy to the order in which your team goes after them. Meltdowns adds the twist that these nodes are actually coolants for each team's base, so by taking them over, you're overheating the enemy's headquaters. At certain heat levels a base's defenses will temporarily go down, allowing the opposing team to get inside and deal major damage.

There will also be the option to play unranked matches where the player will be able to configure the game however he wants by tweaking areas such as hit points, weapon sets, and much more. Popular player-created configurations may even be made into official new modes by Insomniac and offered as downloads. Conversely, ranked matches will have very limited configurations to keep the playing field level and fair for everone.

...

they did stress that a big focus is being put on smart matchmaking, so that a new player who buys Resistance a year after launch will be able to play without having to get torn apart by the guys who bought the game on day one.

Flat, circular fans are embedded in the ground in various places, and walking over one will launch you up to a higher area, one fun strategy we found was to balance ourselves at the top of the column of air, hovering there while firing down at enemies below; the up-and-down bobbing motion can make you a hard target.

Right now the final push for the look and feel of Untold Legends Dark Kingdom is upon us. Earlier this spring, we began with some prototype art to lay the ground work for the environments, as well as the three main characters. We have honed in on a style now based on feedback from internal sources, as well as from the public.

Most of the people on the Dark Kingdom art team are gamers who share the same desire to make the game look great. The trick so far has been reacting to the technology as it has become available. The power of the PS3 is starting to become apparent to us as artists. The raw graphics power of the machine is pretty amazing, but the one thing, or I should say things, that has quite a few of us excited is the exploitation of the SPU’s. It is pretty amazing what can be off loaded to the SPU’s. For example, we have the reactive water running off one of them right now and it looks great (and it isn’t even totally complete yet w00t!) In addition, we are planning on using the SPU’s for radial flora, particle FX, and real time physics simulation. There are more details about the system I would love to talk about, but I might be violating my NDA.

Ok, now to talk about what we are actually doing art wise. It has been challenging to move forward and evolve to the new system, but our experience using pixel shaders and per pixel lighting on EverQuest II has helped us to understand the demanding nature of the next generation game art. The first hurdle we had to overcome was the art style of the game. It doesn’t sound like it should be a hurdle but it is. Our overall approach initially was to avoid realism and try something stylistic. We eventually evolved into a style that leans towards realism, but I would not call it realistic. We chose this direction because of two primary reasons: It is easier to create environments using photo sampled textures, and focus testing character concepts in a nation wide survey. The environments are turning out to look pretty impressive, but I know they will look better as we progress. It’s easy to say this in a blog, but I guess you will have to take my word on it. The characters are at the beginning of something really good. We are using a high-res to low-res method to create the characters, which leads to the results being incredible. It really maximizes benefit of normal mapping.

With the increased memory of the new PS3 hardware, we are enabled to have a much higher texel density which in turn makes running in the hi-definition modes look fantastic. It sort of makes me laugh that games like Dark Kingdom, will be a big reason that people will buy hi-definition TVs.

Well, more to come as I can write it,

Bill Yeatts
Art Director