Do you know what’s worse than corrupt journalists? 960 x 1080 interlaced resolution. You know what’s worse than $17 trillion dollars worth of debt? 1080i instead of 1080p output. You know what’s worse than our crumbling society under the rising tide of Cultural Marxists, economic collapse, a failing jobs market and legislation to further take away the freedoms and rights of anonymity and speech online? KillZone: Shadow Fall’s 1080i resolution in the multiplayer.

While that may sound absolutely silly, the reality is that someone really is suing Sony over Killzone: Shadow Fall’s 1080i native rendering that’s scaled for 1080p display units. I wish this was all a joke but alas, it is not.

Hardcore Gamer is reporting that there is a budding lawsuit over KillZone‘s advertising of 1080p resolution by Sony, and that the game fails to deliver native 1080p, and instead has native 1080i with fitted rendering for 1080p televisions or monitors.

Lead plaintiff Douglas Ladore in the USDC document that…



“Killzone’s multiplayer graphics were blurry and did not appear to be rendering at a native 1080p resolution.” ... “[and it] has an odd motion blur effect that makes the game look overly blurry.”



The “odd motion blur” is from the interlaced frames from a slightly lower resolution frame put in between the 1080 sized images. When the screen refreshes from the buffer you get the lower and higher resolution output between frames that causes the blurry look. This was described earlier in the year at great lengths by Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter, who brushed away some of the concerns by stating…



“Here Guerrilla Games has opted for a 960x1080 framebuffer, in pursuit of a 60fps refresh. Across a range of clips, we see the game handing in a 50fps average on multiplayer. It makes a palpable difference, but it's probably not the sort of boost you might expect from halving fill-rate.”



This is 100% verified and true. Even having snapped a screenshot between the refresh from a GamerSyde video, you can take a look at the game’s 960 x 1080i buffer in action.

If you zoom in you’ll see the literal interlacing on the frame.

Judge Edward Chen has allowed the suit to go forward for now, enabling the plaintiff a bit of leeway in potentially nailing Sony on a false advertising charge.

According to Sony, their defense is that they didn’t advertise the game as containing “native” 1080p for the multiplayer. The only way to know for sure would be to collect all of the pre-release advertising and promotional material and see if the word “native” is used. A lot of games use 1080p on the back of the box because many games are upscaled to that resolution instead of actually running in that resolution natively. Additionally, KillZone: Shadow Fall does run native 1080p in the single-player… for what it’s worth.

I know I rag on the Xbox One’s resolution quite a bit, and there are a few games where resolution actually fluctuates during mid-game, like Wolfenstein: The New Order, but I do think it’s taking it a pinch too far to sue over resolution… especially on the native 1080i to native 1080p grounds. I do, however, stand firmly behind the suit against Sega and Gearbox over Aliens: Colonial Marines and their continued usage of the E3 footage to promote a game leading up to release, only for consumers to find out that the game was nothing like the highly promoted E3 demo.