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PS5 game developers ‘will strive for photorealism’ with the power of the next-gen console

Published Mar 6th, 2020 8:15PM EST
PS5 release date
Image: PlayStation

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  • An indie developer talks about how significant the power increase from the PS4 to the PS5 will be.
  • He says the studio’s upcoming psychological horror game, Martha Is Dead, “will strive for photorealism.”
  • He also talked about the PS5’s solid-state drive and how raytracing will push graphics forward.
  • Visit BGR’s homepage for more stories.

PlayStation 5 news has been incredibly hard to come by in recent months. The last official word we got directly from Sony was a post on the PlayStation Blog in which the company talked about the new controller for the PS5, which we expect to be called DualShock 5. That was October of 2019. It is now a week into March of 2020, and while Microsoft has given us a lot to chew on in regards to the Xbox Series X, we still know next to nothing about the PS5. Therefore, even vague quotes from third-party developers are enough to make headlines.

Speaking of which, in the April issue of the Official PlayStation Magazine UK (via PSU), Luca Dalco, head of an Italian game studio called LKA, was surprisingly forthcoming about the power of the next-gen console:

PS5’s specifications are incredibly exciting – particularly for us is the additional graphical power and inclusion of ray-tracing architecture. Our studio has come a long way over four years and Martha Is Dead [which is a first-person psychological thriller] will strive for photorealism. We’re excited to see the next-generation hardware incoming to support us bringing our vision to players.

We worked a lot in order to use the highest-resolution textures as possible also on PS4; nonetheless, PS5 will allow us to use an incredible Texel density, up to 4096px/m – that means the visual will be fully detailed also in higher resolutions. It’s one of the most important advances in visual capacity that we were waiting for.

In addition to the quote above, Dalco also said the following in regards to the solid-state drive that will ship inside the PS5: “High-quality assets are naturally larger in size so will benefit from the faster loads times.” And as for raytracing, Dalco says it is “incredible technology for independent studios, allowing games to reach new levels of realism without the need for huge teams.” Sony, if you would like to confirm any of this, we’d be okay with that.

Here’s the synopsis and announcement trailer for Martha Is Dead, which doesn’t have a release date yet:

From the creator of The Town of Light, Martha is Dead is a first person dark psychological thriller, combining disturbing and dreamlike tones with a mix of history, superstition and psychological distress.

Tuscany, 1944. As conflict intensifies between German and Allied forces, the body of a woman is found drowned. Her twin sister must alone deal with the acute trauma of loss, while the truth of the brutal murder is shrouded by mysterious folklore and the extreme horror of war which draws ever closer.

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.