E3 2013: The Dark Sorcerer Rises in Extended Technology Demo

Much like last year’s Kara technology demonstration, The Dark Sorcerer is Quantic Dream’s latest experiment for the PlayStation 4. The video is running in realtime on the next generation console, and represents the first version of the French studio’s latest engine. However, the developer stresses that the footage is not necessarily indicative of the next project in production at the Parisian outfit.

In a lengthy post on the PlayStation Blog, director David Cage explained that the company wanted to challenge itself with comedy, as it requires a very different approach to fear and love. The demo itself composes of a set rendered using roughly one million polygons, while each character employs a similar figure, as well as 350MB of textures, and approximately 40 shaders.

And this is just the first iteration of the technology. “The features scheduled for the final version of the engine haven’t yet been implemented,” explained Cage. “This demo is only a first test that is well below the visual quality that we hope to achieve in our next game.” That title is rumoured to be based on Ray Kurzweil’s speculative novel The Singularity Is Near, and is believed to explore similar themes to the aforementioned Kara video.