As expected, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is releasing on July 14 in North America and July 15 in Europe for the PlayStation 4, developer The Astronauts confirmed.
Here’s the official description:
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a first-person story-driven mystery game focused on exploration and discovery. As a private detective Paul Prospero communicate with the dead to discover the fate of a missing boy and the mystery behind a dark ancient force lurking in Red Creek Valley.
In a PlayStation Blog post about five weird tales Astronauts experienced during development, Founder Adrian Chmierlarz talked about how they had to censor the reality:
Graphics aren’t always that important in video games, but they are extremely important in our game. In order to offer never before seen visual quality, we used a technique called photogrammetry. In short, you photograph the real world, and then special software spits out a 3D game-ready asset that looks exactly like the real thing, like something that could never be achieved by hand. Of course, it’s never that simple, but that’s the gist of it.
However, with assets like that, and the realistic “global illumination” lightning offered by the Unreal Engine, the game looked… too real.
I mentioned earlier that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a weird fiction story, and with that comes a certain mood of otherworldliness, melancholy, and unease. While believability of the environment is important — hence our use of photogrammetry — it cannot dominate the artistic intent.
It’s nothing new in art. True Detective TV series is a good example. It’s obviously something believable and with that extra touch of authenticity, but at the same time it’s highly stylized, soft, and impressionistic, with that famous yellow tint.
So we created our Red Creek Valley that looked and felt like a real place… and then we had to remove bits and pieces of that realism and added some post-processing and shader effects that made it less mundane. You still feel the wind in your hair, but you also feel there’s something special, something supernatural about the valley.
No price was given for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
[Source: PS Blog]
