As far as recruitment pitches go, Black Myth: Wu Kong‘s “honest” trailer was one of the best videos released this year. But there’s always room for improvement. So what’s it look like in 8K?
The Upscale YouTube channel knows a good thing when they see one, and like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 2, they’ve done the hard work of putting Black Myth: Wu Kong‘s martial arts through some machine learning and AI filters. The end result is a game that was already goddamn pretty looking beyond spectacular.
The way the final boss in the video is designed also works really well with machine learning-based upscaling techniques, which tend to add a degree of noise to the edges of things like hair and softer textures. You can still see some of that in still frames, but in motion, it’s just fantastic.
Plus, it’s an excuse to rewatch Wu Kong footage. Which, quite frankly, I’ll take at any opportunity.
The developers responded to the global reaction to Wu Kong‘s footage too, saying they were taken aback by the warm response. There’s some translations of their comments on Resetera, but the basic idea is that the devs will be going dark to concentrate on the game’s development. They added that there’s plenty of bugs in the trailer too — some frame rate drops, some animation quirks and the like. I think most people understood that already, but the excitement was just for that almost Sekiro-style of action translated to a setting that many, many fans would love to see get this quality of graphical and animated treatment.
Short snippet of offscreen gameplay for Black Myth: Wu Kong, played by the CEO of Game Science Studio.
It is indeed playable. pic.twitter.com/7077F8fSzv
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) August 22, 2020
So, in short, Wu Kong is very much still a work in progress. No release date, and no guarantee if it’ll see the light of day in the West. But it’s nice to see the whole industry get massively, almost universally excited for a single project, especially from a smaller start up studio that’s helping a country break new ground in game development.
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