Author: dpugh007

Last night’s episode of HBO’s Westworld was one of the best–and most mysterious–yet. The nature of the futuristic park, the world that surrounds it, and the key players continues to boggle the mind.

Producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have now responded to some of the episode’s key sequences as part of a postmortem interview with Entertainment Weekly. First off, are the opening sequences of every Westworld episode so far, scenes where Bernard is speaking with Dolores, flashbacks? Nolan isn’t giving anything away. “I think that’s up to the view to decide. I think you want to assume as little as possible when watching this show.”

Some elements of Westworld are intentionally ambiguous, Nolan added. The same was true for Memento, the movie he worked on with his brother Christopher Nolan.

“My brother gave an interview about what he thought [Memento] meant but stressed it was ambiguous,” Nolan said. “And afterward we talked about it and I felt from then on that the best thing to do is get out of the way of the audience and let them play with it.”

We also learned in Episode 4, titled “Dissonance Theory,” that Ed Harris’ character, the Man in Black, is a celebrity of sorts outside of Westworld. One of the park’s guests comes up to him and thanks him and his foundation for saving his sister from an unknown ailment. Joy teased that there is more to learn about the Man in Black, for sure.

“For him, he’s looking at this as just a game and he’s an expert-level gamer,” Nolan said. “Just like a life-saving doctor can play Grand Theft Auto really violently doesn’t mean he can’t be a wonderful doctor and parent outside that world. So that’s what we’re approaching here, is a shift in perspective that might allow us to imagine a different side of his character that he shows the outside world.”

There was also a Man in Black scene in Episode 4 that might have left you scratching your head. We never saw him get locked into the armored stage coach, so it felt like a scene might have been missing. It wasn’t.

“No. We wanted to move the story forward so you’re asking yourself how he wound up in there, but then they arrive at the prison and the deputy fills in the details–they just walked out and tried to steal a couple horses right in front of him,” Nolan said. “As an expert gamer, the Man in Black knows how to play this, he knows how to get inside the prison. We just wanted to get into the fun of it.”

One of the standout scenes in Westworld Episode 4 was undoubtedly the showdown between Dr. Ford and Theresa Cullen over lunch in the park. Ford threatened Cullen and displayed his mighty, mysterious power by simply wagging his finger to make the hosts stop in place. He also suggested that he is aware of the relationship between Cullen and Bernard.

“Here, we’re reminded that you underestimate [Ford] at your peril,” Nolan said. “He has his own designs of what he wants this place to be. You’re also reminded he has an extremely controlling relationship with the hosts. Like the moment when he cuts a host’s face open and you realize why they’re all stripped bare in cold storage, that it’s a very practical measure on his part to make sure nobody makes Arnold’s mistake again, that treating these hosts as machines is vital to ensure that the techs who work with them don’t mistake them for people. You’re reminded that Ford is not a friend to the hosts. He’s a father figure and that can go a number of different ways.”

Go to EW to read the full postmortem for Westworld Episode 4.

Powered by WPeMatico

Titanfall 2 is among the games that will support Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro. However, don’t expect it to run in native 4K. Producer Drew McCoy told Stevivor that it takes “so much processing power” to render at native 4K, so much that he said he would be surprised if any AAA games hit native 4K on PS4 Pro.

“It’s not native 4K,” McCoy said about Titanfall 2’s resolution on PS4 Pro. “And I would be surprised if anyone saw native 4K with AAA level games any time soon. It just takes so much processing power. It’s unbelievable amounts of just GPU grunt to do that [native 4K].”

In September, PlayStation president Andrew House acknowledged that the “majority” of games for PS4 Pro will be upscaled to 4K instead of running natively at that resolution. For its part, Microsoft has said all of the Microsoft-developed Project Scorpio games will run at native 4K.

McCoy added that the PS4 Pro’s extra power will allow it to more steadily hold its target 60 FPS frame rate while simultaneously achieving a higher resolution. All console versions of Titanfall 2 make use of scalable resolution to make the game look as good as it can.

“It’s a PS4 that’s faster,” McCoy said about PS4 Pro. “We’re able to increase the resolution, we have high-res shadows, and maybe higher particle counts. The frame rate is more stable; we have dynamic resolution scaling on all consoles, but it scales down less often on PS4 Pro to maintain 60 frames-per-second.”

“Because we also made the PC version, we have some nobs we can tweak, so we just spent some time making sure it still runs well and looks good on PS4 Pro.,” he added. “You know, making sure it doesn’t look any worse at all. That’s the requirement: it can’t run any worse or look worse than on PS4. So it runs better, looks better and has no bugs on PS4 Pro.”

Read the full Stevivor interview here.

In other news about Titanfall 2 and the PS4 Pro, McCoy also recently confirmed that the patch that includes support for the new console will be featured on the disc. Titanfall 2 comes out on October 28, but the PS4 Pro doesn’t launch until November 10.

Titanfall 2 is not the only game getting a PS4 Pro patch, as other EA games like Battlefield 1, FIFA 17, and Mass Effect: Andromeda also are. You can see all the games that are getting PS4 Pro patches here.

Sony’s PS4 Pro is priced at $400. It comes with a 1 TB hard drive, which you can replace. For lots more on the PS4 Pro, check out GameSpot’s recent feature that covers everything you need to know.

Project Scorpio, or whatever Microsoft ends up calling it, will launch in holiday 2017. Pricing has not been announced, but Microsoft has referred to the system as a “premium” device, so you can expect it will not be cheap. The system boasts 6 teraflops of performance, making it the “most powerful console ever made,” according to Microsoft. The performance gap between Project Scorpio and PS4 Pro will be “obvious,” Microsoft has said.

Powered by WPeMatico