Daylight preview GameGPU
| BASIC GAME INFORMATION |
Release date: 8 April 2014 of the year
Genre: Survival horror
developer: Zombie Studios
Publisher: Zombie Studios (PC), Atlus (PS4)
Daylight is a video game in the survival horror genre, developed and published by a private company from Seattle, Zombie Studios. The gameplay of the game was first shown at PAX 2013. On June 6, a trailer for the PS4 version of the game was released, the release is scheduled for April 8, 2014. The game engine Unreal Engine 4 is used for development; this is the first game created on this graphics engine.
The developers stated that in the game the levels will be generated randomly and everyone will receive a unique passage of the game, which by the way will take only 20-30 minutes, but this is the “trick” of this horror game, time after time while passing the game you will collect bits and pieces of the story and find new facts.
| GRAPHIC COMPONENT |
So what do you have to deal with? An abandoned, randomly generated clinic for the mentally ill, the only living person is the main character, who, inexplicably, ended up in this terrible place filled with ghosts with an eerie atmosphere. The nameless girl has a fairly wide arsenal, amnesia, a smartphone and everything... sometimes on the way to the exit you will come across flash grenades and luminescent sticks with which you can read the clues and messages that are written on the walls.
On the walls you can read different stories of the mental hospital and find a way to get out of the building. Armed with this very smartphone, we set off to look for a way out and figure out along the way who the main character is.
Do not underestimate a smartphone in this difficult situation; it is a very useful “device”. Firstly, the flash of the smartphone, the only light source, is used as a flashlight. Secondly, the compass will allow you to navigate the gloomy rooms and corridors of the clinic. Thirdly, it has a rather interesting function “otherworldly activity detector”: ghosts appear in the phone and it begins to play sound and video files about the heroine’s life, and when ghosts approach, it begins to turn off and on.
You can't kill ghosts, you can only run away or scare them away with flares or fluorescent sticks.
| Gambling process |
The phone battery does not last forever and it will need to be recharged and the girl will have to be left in pitch darkness alone with sounds, groans, creaks and whispers. The transfer of emotions and fear to the player will occur through the main character, who will comment on everything she sees. But despite the abundance of ghosts, meeting even one face to face is rare.
What will scare you is not a monster jumping out of nowhere, but something around the corner or in the next room, constant tension and a feeling of complete helplessness. Therefore, danger awaits anywhere along the entire path. You just relaxed and a ghost actually appears, you are discouraged, the heroine is in a panic, and you also have to push buttons, you didn’t have time to get ready and you died.
Another feature that was mentioned earlier is random generation of levels. This, and the absence of any prehistory, emphasizes the uniqueness of the game, distinguishing Daylight from the usual horror games. The understatement of the story will not let you go just like that; after completing the game in half an hour once, you will want to play it again. And each subsequent playthrough will be absolutely unique, different environment, notes, showing stories on the walls.
The developers promise maximum variety, each replay will be different from the previous ones. To understand the entire story and more or less understand the plot, you will need more than a dozen restarts.
The gameplay changes depending on the level. The levels will be varied, not only the most complex labyrinths of corridors, but also quite spacious locations. In general, Daylight, as the developers themselves believe, will be replayable and the player will not have the feeling that what is happening around is scripted.
Summing up all, we get an endless horror that scares you differently every time and looks different every time. This is truly interesting and should be addictive like MOBA games in which there are never the same, absolutely identical battles.
| Supported OS and graphics API |
Daylight uses the latest version of the cross-platform Unreal Engine 4, the Unreal Engine hardware platform is quite wide and includes all currently existing operating systems and consoles. Support for PC and Playstation 4 has been announced so far. The game will be compatible with all major systems of the Microsoft family Windows the bit depth of the systems is 32-bit or 64-bit, and support for OS X and Linux is also possible. The priority and main graphics API for Daylight will be DirectX 11. The game will work through the digital game sales service Steam.
| Game engine |
Daylight is based on the Unreal Engine 4 game engine, developed and supported by Epic Games. This is the first game created on this engine and should simply amaze everyone with its stunning graphics. Judging by the screenshots, the developers would quite praise the previous versions of the engine, because... In the horror genre, the picture is not in the foreground. It is important to establish artificial intelligence, called the Director, which influences the gameplay by adapting to the level of players and changing game parameters. Thanks to his work, each playthrough of the game is unique and inimitable, which increases the replay value of the game.
The first game created on the engine, Unreal, appeared in 1998. Since then, various versions of this game engine have been used in more than a hundred games, including Deus Ex, Dishonored, Lineage II, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Postal 2, the Brothers in Arms series, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, as well as in the famous game series Unreal and Unreal Tournament from Epic Games themselves. Being primarily adapted for first-person shooters, the engine was also used to create games of other genres.
Written in the high-level C++ language, Unreal Engine 4 enables the creation of games for most operating systems and platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Mac OS X, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Wii, Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube consoles. In December, Mark Rein demonstrated the Unreal Engine 3 engine running on the iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS. In March 2010, the engine was demonstrated running on the Palm Pre communicator, which is based on the webOS mobile platform.
To simplify porting, the engine uses a modular system of dependent components: it supports various rendering systems (Direct3D, OpenGL, Pixomatic; previously supported were Glide API, S3 Metal, PowerVR SGL), sound playback (EAX, OpenAL, DirectSound3D; previously supported were A3D), text-to-speech playback tools, speech recognition (only for Xbox360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Windows, also planned for Linux and Mac), modules for working with the network and support for various input devices.
The following technologies are supported for online play: Windows Live, Xbox Live, and GameSpy, including up to 64 players (clients) simultaneously. Although the development tools do not officially include support for a large number of clients on a single server, the engine has been used to create MMORPG games. One of the most famous representatives of the genre, Lineage II, uses the Unreal Engine.
| Gameplay video |
Below we publish the gameplay video itself from the official Daylight website.
Judging by the gameplay videos provided by the developer, what awaits us is a very atmospheric and rather unconventional horror game, which, if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you, will certainly tickle your nerves and keep you on edge throughout the entire game, all 30 minutes))). We hope that this project will give each player what he came for: some bricks, some to play with their imagination, and some just immersion in the creepy and bone-deep “cold” atmosphere of insecurity and the constant presence of something unknown.
| Estimated system requirements |
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SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS ASSUMED BY THE GAMEGPU "Daylight"
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Based on the above material, we will draw some conclusions. Since the game is based on the Unreal Engine 4 (and the given materials on the game), we can conclude that it will not be very resource-consuming and, by modern standards, not very demanding. Apparently, for a comfortable game you will need at least four computing threads. Also, for the game to run smoothly, it will require about 2 or 3 gigabytes of RAM in the system.
Well, if we think about the graphics subsystem that will be necessary for Daylight, then in our opinion, sufficient performance will be provided by video cards starting from the level of NVidia GeForce GTX 580 or AMD Radeon РВ 6970. Optimal performance, taking into account all activated maximum settings, can be expected from NVidia GeForce GTX 770 or AMD Radeon R9 280X.
