Sunset Overdrive Dev Denies Resolution/Framerate Rumors, Talks Gameplay, Day/Night Cycle and More

Giuseppe Nelva May 10, 2014 5:26 PM EST

After the latest unveiling of Sunset Overdrive a couple days ago, a few media outlets mentioned specific resolution and framerate targets for the game, some even specifying that they were told by developers. Interestingly enough both 1080p/60 fps and 1080p/30 fps combinations were indicated by different sites.

Today Community and Marketing Lead James Stevenson took to NeoGAF and Twitter to squash those rumors:

No one on our side confirmed the resolution. we are still optimizing.

That’s not really surprising considering that the game is still months away from release, and Stevenson continued by explaining what the technical goals are, mentioning that framerate and textures aren’t final as well:

The technical goals are all set around gameplay/design. Drew and Marcus knew they wanted an open-world, with a large number of enemies on screen, and tons of crazy effects (think KISS concert, pyro, fireworks, etc). That’s the vision of the game, so everything we do technically (resolution/framerate/textures et al) is all in support of hitting that vision. So we’re still optimizing, and once we are locked in we’ll share the details.

We also learn that while there’s a large focus on the difference between day and night gameplay, there won’t be an actual cycle, but just sections set during the day or during the night.

Stevenson also talked about a few elements of the gameplay:

Also on the grinds: the goal is to have not really have super long grinds in the game that auto-pilot you across an area (or especially across the city). The idea is that traversals are broken up so you’re always having to jump and plan your next move. We want you comboing and actively traversing as much as possible.

Interestingly enough, he also mentioned that in order to wall run around corners, you actually need to time a X button press in order to correctly navigate the corner itself.

As a final note of color, looks like Microsoft Usability is into giving strange awards to game developers:

Just the health meter was awful. we got an award from Microsoft usability because it was so bad. but other stuff wasn’t final and is still being iterated on, so we didn’t show it in the videos.

We also get the promise that we’ll see more about the co-op multiplayer feature of Sunset Overdrive at E3. Considering how fun the single player looks, and how much the game seems to fit a “horde mode” perfectly, my curiosity is definitely piqued.