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The God of War Collection Volume II, which features remastered versions of the PSP’s Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta, has had all of its cinematics remastered in full 1080p HD for PlayStation 3.
“Besides adding up-scaling in-game content and [adding] 3D support, there was one other challenge that is worth noting,” explains art director Nathan Phail-Liff on the PlayStation Blog.
“Between Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta we had over an hour of pre-rendered cinematics, and the gap in video resolution between our PSP source footage and full HD was so extreme that no matter how many custom video up-scale solutions we tried, there was just a glaring quality difference between the 1080P real-time gameplay and the video.”
“It was pretty demoralizing for us to play the game in beautiful HD and hit a cinematic trigger where Kratos looked like he was rendered through a dirty sock, so we realised we would just have to bite the bullet and properly re-render all cinematics in full 1080p.” he continued.
“To do this we ported all of our cinematic scenes to the PS3 and, months and terabytes of data later, had every single frame re-rendered in HD through the new collection’s engine. From there we had to up-rez all of the post production effects and re-composite every single cinematic again in HD, giving us a final result that blended seamlessly with the in-game quality.”
A video comparison of the PSP version next to the remastered PS3 version can be seen below.
God of War Collection Volume II is due for release on PlayStation 3 September 16.
