Prodeus [retro FPS]

[Touchdown]

official_site
Steam

"Prodeus is the first person shooter of old, reimagined using modern rendering techniques. It reaches the quality you expect from a AAA experience while adhering to some of the aesthetic technical limits of older hardware."

I've been following this game for a while. Since we've apparently reached the point at which retro shooters do not universally suck (thanks to Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Maiden and Project Warlock) here's hoping that we might have another cool FPS at our hands. Time will tell I guess.

[KVELLER]

The overall aesthetics are reminiscent of Doom 2016. I feel like the environments could get stale if the devs are not careful, but we'll see.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Tentatively interested.  At least it's not yet another Wolfenstein 3-D clone or pixel game.

[Philnemba]

Its almost as if Doom 3 and Doom 2016 had a baby!

[boris]

Assets looks good. But I don't really like screen door shader. Especially since this artificial pixelation limits how good you can make out stuff in the distance. And what's with all the weapon effects and blood? It literally takes up most of the screen for seconds at a time, making it completely impossible to see what's going on.

 

Anyway, added to my Steam wishlist, let's see what visual customization options they'll implement.

[kristus]

Doesn't look very retro per se, looks much more like modern ZDoom mods the game. Which might be interesting, though I don't know if it'll be my cup of tea.

[KVELLER]

I watched the trailer on mobile the first time around (I just watched it again on my PC) and holy shit I hadn't noticed that terrible pixelation effect. Anything that lowers my visibility pisses me off, and this is no exception.

[Deadwing]

Yeah, I also got that mix of Doom 3 x Doom 2016. I haven't found it very interesting tbh. The HUD is way too big too.

[FractalBeast]

My first thought was a straight-up fully-voxel-based retro-FPS where you can tunnel through the level with enough rocket ammo... but I think it's just a quirky rendering system.

 

It looks interesting. I'm curious what they'll make with it. That's all I can really say about it now.

[Dragonfly]

I've been actively following the development on Twitter for a few months now. Very excited to see this!

[geo]

2016 is retro now. I shall dub it... Doom 3.16

 

In a sea of others that claim to be retro... I'd actually play this, even if I don't feel it's retro at all.

Edited November 25, 2018 by geo

[Mr. Freeze]

The HUD is obnoxious and ironsights are just lmao 

[elend]

So, I also checked this out on my phone and thought: "Nice, as if someone would have developed the Doom engine further, but never changed the resolution." Later, on my PC, I noticed that incredibly pixely filter. I am not really sure if I like that one.

 

In general it looks nice, though and I added it to my wishlist, just to be sure.

[Varis Alpha]

why bother making the assets that high quality if you're just going to cover them up in an ugly pixel filter?

 

we'll have to see where this is going i suppose.

[ReaperAA]

I am not gonna lie but this game doesn't really look retro graphically. It looks like running a modern game in low resolution. See below image of doom 2016 in low res.

 

But we'll see how its gameplay is.

[Teder]

Looks very interesting, but I don't like the pixel effect, and enemies animation either. Textures, assets are very fine. Map reminds me DOOM 2016, molten map 

I'd like to play this game!

[Touchdown]

Here are my extended impressions.

 

I really like the effects that they have in this game. Blasting enemies with a shotgun seems really satisfying and explosions look really neat. I'm not really opposed to the pixelization effect considering this is how I play Dusk:

 

 

My favourite thing is how they're using actual 3D models but limiting the frame-per-second rate of their animations which in combination with the low resolution creates this interesting jerky movement without being limited to the 8 sides of the sprite because, well, those are not sprites to begin with. People complain about the resolution but one has to wonder if making it a proper 1080p would render this sprite-like movement obsolete because it'd look weird with 3D models that actually look like 3D models.

 

With that said I hope they add some options to fine-tune all of those things. The HUD in particular is way too big and there's no real point in simulating the helmet because it just obstructs the vision. And hopefully we'll see other environments as well but this is the first look at the game so we'll just have to wait and see.

 

Also for those interested, here are some extra gameplay gifs from their site. Check out the effects on those crushers.

 

Prodeus gifs

Edited November 25, 2018 by Touchdown

[Varis Alpha]

the pixel filter works in Dusk because the aesthetics are intentionally lo-fi, whereas Prodeus bears a striking resemblance to Doom 2016 and the visuals are of noticeably higher quality than Dusk. adding a filter to it doesn't make the aesthetics more "retro", it just makes them look worse, because the art-direction is much more modern. note that there were other games with higher quality artwork in them than Doom but also has limited frames due to technical restraints, like the Crusader series and old Fallout games, or even Redneck Rampage having higher quality sprites. 

 

hopefully it'll at least be a toggleable effect, because it doesn't really mesh well with how this game looks.

[ReaperAA]

When i think about retro graphics, i think about graphics that could have realistically existed in the 90's. Prodeus has resolution that seems even lower res than duke3d but its lighting looks like that of 2010 era game (aka impossible in the 90's). And the gun models also seem too modern and post 2005-ish.

 

On the other hand look at Dusk and Ion Maiden. They both look authentically 90's. Dusk's lighting is little bit too good to be 90's but atleast the level geometry, enemy/gun models, textures look like they belong to a quake 1 engine game. 

 

Ion Maiden has the best authenticity. It's genuinely feels like a game that could have released in 1997-98. It would fit perfectly with the BUILD trio.

[jupiter_ex]

I did a lot of old school run and gun (as many of us here I suppose) and since my computers have historically been crap, I usually force everything to 800x600 / 640x480 so this game is basically a description of my gaming life. I'm going to be expecting it eagerly.

 

6 hours ago, Viscra Maelstrom said:

why bother making the assets that high quality if you're just going to cover them up in an ugly pixel filter?

they're not. As I expected, the Steam page says the game takes up only 4Gb in disk.

[boris]

 

29 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

When i think about retro graphics, i think about graphics that could have realistically existed in the 90's. Prodeus has resolution that seems even lower res than duke3d but its lighting looks like that of 2010 era game (aka impossible in the 90's). And the gun models also seem too modern and post 2005-ish.

 

They are not claiming to do 100% retro graphics. They are cherry picking (I'm not meaning that in a negative way):

Prodeus is the first person shooter of old, reimagined using modern rendering techniques. It reaches the quality you expect from a AAA experience while adhering to some of the aesthetic technical limits of older hardware.

Besides that, IMO if you want to create a retro game, the gameplay is way more important that the graphics. Doom 2016 has pretty retro gameplay, but the graphics aren't.

 

4 minutes ago, jupiter_ex said:

they're not. As I expected, the Steam page says the game takes up only 4Gb in disk.

The models look pretty high res, the textures don't. On the Steam forums they also say that "the specs are a bit arbitrary atm", so that could very well change.

[lazygecko]

The problem is that their approach of seemingly just applying a downscaling effect to pixelate the entire screen as the final part of the visual chain is not really indicative of how old games rendered their visuals, and more importantly it just garbles the overall readability. Everything looks as it was supposed to be rendered in higher res with anti-aliasing, and then all the different objects, UI text and elements etc blend together into a muddy mess from the pixelation post processing.

[ReaperAA]

11 minutes ago, boris said:

They are not claiming to do 100% retro graphics. They are cherry picking (I'm not meaning that in a negative way):

 

"Prodeus is the first person shooter of old, reimagined using modern rendering techniques. It reaches the quality you expect from a AAA experience while adhering to some of the aesthetic technical limits of older hardware."

 

Still I would have preferred if there was more effort to make it feel consistent. This might feel nitpicky but i don't really like how they simply downscaled high-quality modern models and assets and called it a day.

 

6 minutes ago, lazygecko said:

Everything looks as it was supposed to be rendered in higher res with anti-aliasing, and then all the different objects, UI text and elements etc blend together into a muddy mess from the pixelation post processing.

 

I feel the same. It just looks like a modern game turned into a low-resolution mess. I hope the gameplay is atleast better than the graphical presentation.

 

[Touchdown]

All I can say is that I personally like this graphical direction. That's actually the first thing that caught my attention when I first saw it. They might add a way to tweak it but you have to realize that the entire aesthetic relies on pixelization and jerky animations. Removing it would completely alter the intended look that's based on simulating technical limitations. Not to mention the assets are not as high quality as it might seem (just look at the screenshots and how low-res the textures are) and are probably made with pixelization in mind. It seems like some people think that without those filters Prodeus would look like a AAA modern game which I very much doubt is the case. Don't let the shiny surfaces fool you.

 

Another thing is that it might look better when actually played. This is just my guess but it's no mystery that certain things that involve a lot of small elements like foliage usually get destroyed when turned into a video on YT. When you take a closer look at screenshots you can see that it's not just pixelization - every "square" has sort of a border which means there's A LOT of small elements on screen that probably make it look worse in the video than it actually is in-game. This fancy filter might be just very sensitive about that sort of thing.

[GuyMcBrofist]

I like the idea of low resolution as an aesthetic, but if you're going to go that route, every individual pixel counts and needs to represent something. The trailer and screenshots both look a little too filtered and 'blurry' to me, particularly on the characters.

 

It still looks awesome, and I want to play it.

[Bauul]

I don't personally get the "low resolution is good for retro games" argument. I play Doom and Quake at 1080p and they look excellent.

 

It doesn't matter about asset quality IMO: any first person game has distance as a factor, therefore higher resolutions (allowing you to see more detail on geometry that's further away) is never a bad thing. 

[whirledtsar]

If they give you the option to disable or configure the filter then I'd be interested. The combat looks fun. But as it is it literally just looks like Doom 4 with all the graphical settings on low, lol.

Edited November 25, 2018 by whirledtsar

[boris]

31 minutes ago, Bauul said:

I don't personally get the "low resolution is good for retro games" argument. I play Doom and Quake at 1080p and they look excellent.

 

It doesn't matter about asset quality IMO: any first person game has distance as a factor, therefore higher resolutions (allowing you to see more detail on geometry that's further away) is never a bad thing. 

Exactly! For me low resolution textures aren't a problem, but not seeing anything because of pixel sludge is.

 

The difference between 1080 and upscaled 320 is very clear in this comparison (click for full size to make it even more clear):

 

 

Edited November 25, 2018 by boris

[KVELLER]

25 minutes ago, boris said:

The difference between 1080 and upscaled 320 is very clear in this comparison (click for full size to make it even more clear):

 

To be fair, the antialiasing there makes things look blurrier than usual in 320x200. If mipmapping is enabled, that doesn't help either.

[boris]

It's actually worse without the upscaling GZDoom does...