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Through The Looking Glass has news that a site called Stygian Abyss has put up a hands-on preview of Arkane Studios' Arx Fatalis. The editor is a beta tester of this highly promising 3D first person RPG and the preview is based on his most recent gaming experiences so you should get a good impression of what the final game is going to be like.
Here's a teaser:
Now comes the part where I get a little excited. Don't say you were not warned. I'll be brief: Arx is beautiful. The environments in Arx are a combination of extremely high scene complexity using a mesh-based terrain engine; textures of astounding quality and perfect application; very high object counts providing lush settings which truly feel real, lived in, ancient, and dirty; and as frosting on the cake, bump mapping which actually looks bloody fantastic. I often found myself drawn away from my tasks at hand to simply admire the way the torch-light interacted with the textures, or to examine the multitude of junk strewn about the dirty abandoned mine floors. Rats scurry across the ground. Torches flicker and crackle. Darkness is provided via a fog effect which shrouds everything more then several dozen feet away from you in pitch blackness - save for the halo of distant torch light. It really is well done! So well done, in fact, that two recently released Quake 3 engine games looked bland and primitive in comparison. Sadly, all of this comes at a price - recommended specs are 700 Mhz. That's something that has my frowny face weeping. (The machine I did the testing on was P4 1.7 Ghz, and it ran perfectly … but that doesn't mean much. Hehe.)
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Arx Fatalis: Hands-On Preview
