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I think every player old enough to have owned PlayStation 1 wishes to experience those old games now, but in high quality and without emulators. Great news! Faithful recreations of classics can be possible with rendering techniques used in The Last Night, an upcoming cinematic platformer "with the heart of a sci-fi thriller" by Odd Tales.
According to its Creative Director Tim Soret, the studio's approach can bring PS1 games back in 4K HDR, working at 60 FPS. He suggests developers should "hook an old game to a modern engine" and then "downgrade" the visuals. To prove his view, Soret shared his tests on Metal Gear Solid.
"To clarify, in the comparisons above, the PSX graphics are not "emulated". We're not "upgrading" the original renderer, we're downgrading our modern renderer. This makes it much easier to offer improvements," he explained. "So what you see is our rendering pipeline using custom shaders recreating the iconic PSX look: vertex snapping, texture warping, dithering, etc."
This should give the user control over these features and the ability to swap to modern shaders, post-processing, volumetric lighting, and other features "on the fly."
Soret is not happy with the remasters players are offered now, he calls the MGS remakes "lazy" and Tomb Raider's – "disrespectful." He believes it's time to invest in game preservation and make old titles accessible to modern players.
Soret says he has "very promising" tests of Silent Hill and Tomb Raider as well, so follow him on X/Twitter if you don't want to miss them. Also, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.