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After Friday's trailer for Gen Atlas, the new game from acclaimed Ico and Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda, I saw two strains of reactions. Mostly there was gushing praise and excitement for a new Ueda game a decade after The Last Guardian.
There was also: "That framerate tho."
I wasn't shocked at the reaction. In 2006, Shadow of the Colossus pushed the PlayStation 2 to its limits, often running at below 30 frames per second to deliver on the scale of enormous colossi and the physics that made the whole world feel tangible. To this day, people use a specific workaround to be able to play 2016's The Last Guardian at 60 fps on a PlayStation 5, rather than a not-so-stable 30 fps on the PlayStation 4 where it launched. So when a few scenes in the trailer for the still-in-development Gen Atlas seemed to be a bit choppy, of course people immediately glommed onto them.
Fumito Ueda wasn't shocked by the reaction, either.
"Our team is well aware that parts of the trailer were not fully optimized, so I'm not surprised to hear and see those comments," Ueda said in an interview with PC Gamer.
The goal with the Summer Game Fest trailer, he said, was to set the stage, "giving the audience enough to really start thinking about and wondering what Gen Atlas is all about." Being able to show players a glimpse of the game's world outweighed concerns about it being unfinished.
"I was fully aware, but I have no doubt that our skilled engineers, with support from everyone at Epic, are going to get us to the level that we need to [be]," Ueda said. "In-development games always go through this phase of what can we show and how much. We did our best we could in delivering this trailer for this moment."
The one major difference between this Ueda game and the three he's directed over the past 25 years, of course, is that it's on PC. PC gamers certainly have strong opinions about framerates, but we're also accustomed to being able to throw extra horsepower or upscaling algorithms at any game that's running poorly.
Hopefully Gen Atlas's choppy moments will be smoothed out by the time we can play it, which is "closer than you might think," according to Epic. But if not, well, I have no doubt that the modders will come running.
