Digital Foundry aka one guy named Richard Leadbetter...meh.
I'm no longer SolidTy, I'm starting my own website to make my posts more "official-like" (Under Pixel Factory or other nonsense) so I can be quoted in SW, lol. I already see users creating websites here and linking their own sites, lol. ;)
As far as judging the game early, it doesn't impress from those screens but it's not out yet so we'll see how Naughty Dog does at release next year. It's ND, so there really isn't anything to fear.
From the article which is about the game and AI :
"As the major console platform holders prepare to replace their current-gen hardware with the new cutting edge, PlayStation 3 in particular looks set to bow out at the height of its powers, with some phenomenal offerings incoming from Sony's first-party developers. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us is one of the most promising, representing the culmination of the developer's astonishing growth over the last six years - offering us the firm's trademark technical genius combined with a gameplay formula that hints at a new level of openness and opportunity we should expect from next-gen AAA titles.
The advantage with this "lighter touch" approach to the post-process is that pixel-crawl is all but eliminated, and there is doubtless a large resource saving in comparison with Sony's established MLAA technology. In truth, the Uncharted tech remains state-of-the-art to the point where further enhancements in terms of model detail or texture quality are not really required to achieve the firm's artistic vision.
From what we've seen so far in terms of the rendering, it's the implementation of light and shadow that has seen the lion's share of the improvements. Naughty Dog points out that in its post-pandemic landscape, essential utilities like electricity are a thing of the past: nature is gradually reclaiming the world, necessitating a more organic look to the environments. The developer has already done some great work in this area, specifically with the global illumination technology that we first saw in Uncharted 2. In The Last of Us, indirect lighting - the way that light bounces from surface to surface - has received new emphasis.
Most of this will be pre-calculated offline and baked into the environments (real-time global illumination to any great degree will require next-gen graphics tech - it's the centrepiece of Unreal Engine 4) but where The Last of Us has attracted interest from Naughty Dog's rivals is in the quality of its real-time shadows. Objects and characters are beautifully lit and shaded, perfectly sitting within the environments. The jagged low-resolution dynamic shadows from Uncharted have been replaced with a far smoother effect that seems to be using multiple penumbra. Ambient occlusion, serving to add depth to the environments in the nooks and crannies, is a touch heavy in places (especially when characters move close to surfaces) but it generally looks a class apart - reminding us a little of the excellent work done by Sucker Punch for inFamous 2..."
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