Hello!
With the release of Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga approaching, we wanted to give you an in-depth look at the extensive work that's gone into this remastered version. There's quite a bit to cover, so we'll be splitting this into a series of posts, which will focus on the visual improvements we've made to give the game a refreshed new look appropriate for the current generation of platforms.
Note that, outside of a few PC-specific features, such as support for arbitrary aspect ratio, the improvements we're going to introduce in this series of posts are coming not only to PC, but to all other console platforms as well! Feature parity hasn't always been a given in the past, so we're excited to be able to deliver these enhancements without compromises.
With that out of the way, let's get right to it:
Texture quality enhancements
Of course, the most expected and immediately noticeable improvement is going to be the overall increase in texture quality across the board. Textures can be divided into 2 sections which we'll cover separately:
UI textures, which is what you'll be seeing on all menus and during the story mode cutscenes
In-game textures, which includes all the textures you'll be seeing in game, such as map textures, 3D character model textures, and support characters.
UI Textures
Almost all the UI textures have been completely revamped, consistently targeting 4K resolution. This process involved redrawing most UI textures from scratch, and reexporting the original high resolution art whenever it was used. Renders of map previews were also recaptured at a higher resolution.
This means that you'll be seeing a crisp image not only during gameplay, but also in the menus, without inconsistent lower resolution UI elements elsewhere. This required a lot of effort but we're very satisfied with the end result:
In-game textures
Beyond the UI, we went through an elaborate process to enhance every other aspect of the game. Before applying any enhancements, we went through an effort of documenting and sourcing the best version of each texture that we could:
Where available, we sourced higher quality map textures from the original PC versions of the games the maps originated from, to ensure we're working with the best versions.
For some assets, the original high resolution project files were still available.
For most of the rest of the textures, low resolution but lossless texture sources from during the development of the original release were used, which saved us the effort on running a restoration pass on them (eg., de-dithering).
Only after this did we proceeded to upscale the textures with various techniques. There was no silver bullet, and each technique provided different results, so we went through each variation and chose the best one. In some cases, even the best one had flaws or were simply unacceptable, so we applied manual fixes ranging from minor corrections to full redraws. Some textures that could be considered "UI Textures" also went through this process in exceptional cases.
Compared to other titles, the texture count is a fraction of the usual amount, but it was still a non-trivial amount of work for which I'd like to thank our in-house texture whiz Vimiani for leading the texture selection and correction process, as well as Momo, and those from Studio Pom who helped with redraws for some story mode and UI sections.
Here are some comparison screenshots (low quality versions captured from a development version of the game, using textures from the original release for reference) - Click the arrows to switch between the old and new look:
The difference is night and day - I hope you enjoy the results while playing the game!
60 FPS support
Another improvement that will be immediately apparent as soon as you get to the title screen is the increased framerate target of 60 FPS across all platforms. As you might've heard before, increasing the framerate in these games isn't a simple step, as the logic of the game, which was designed with a fixed 30 FPS target in mind, has to be revised in order to support a different target. As part of this process, some balancing to the parameters had to be done so that the game plays as close to the original as possible.
While we investigated support for other frame rates, we ultimately focused on delivering a rock-solid 60 FPS experience to ensure consistent behavior during online multiplayer, which is one of the key features of this release.
Aspect Ratio
PC displays come in various shapes and sizes, even more so recently with the advent of handheld gaming PCs like Steam Deck, so we made it a priority to use the extra available screen space in aspect ratios other than 16:9 whenever we could. Most of the UI and story mode cutscenes will remain at 16:9, pillarboxed to fit any other aspect ratio, as that's how they were designed. However, the main gameplay has support for arbitrary aspect ratios, and we tested support for ultrawide screens up to 21:9 as well as narrower screens down to 5:4 (and yes, we tested 16:10 for Steam Deck).
(
21:9 screenshot)
Map Geometry & 3D assets
Increased resolutions, as well as supporting more aspect ratios the original game didn't, will expose some minor flaws the original geometry had. Some animations like support characters, which were done on 3D space as well, had to be revised for the new resolution and framerate as well. In one specific case, a specific map was optimized for PSP by mirroring a texture, which wasn't apparent in the original 480x272 target resolution, but became an obvious issue at higher resolution.
Thanks to internal tooling specifically developed for this title, we were able to go back to work on the 3D geometry for these assets via Blender, and corrected some of the cases I explained. I want to thank one of our beta testers, Geheimen, who contributed to these efforts.
(screenshots from a development build)
Other enhancements
Alongside all of these, we're providing other usual graphic enhancements and options:
Unlimited Draw Distance - Some breakable objects in the distance faded out to decrease the load on PSP, but this load is trivial on today's platforms, so this is no longer needed.
Anti-aliasing options - MSAA (x2, x4 and x8) is available as well as FXAA for lower-end systems.
Anisotropic filtering - ideal for some of the angles the camera uses, practically essential for any modern release.
Arbitrary resolution support - This comes hand in hand with the already mentioned arbitrary aspect ratio support - you'll be able to choose any resolution supported by your monitor.
Conclusion
This first post was all about the enhancements to how the game looks. In the next post, we'll explore improvements to how the game plays, specifically diving down to the new play modes that weren't a part of the original release, including online multiplayer and offline multiplayer, as well as mouse, keyboard and controller support, and etc.
I hope to see you on the next post!
Best regards,
Adrian Graber - Producer & Lead Developer @ refint/games