Sony facing lawsuit for ‘deceptive marketing’ of Killzone: Shadow Fall

Sony Computer Entertainment America has come under legal fire due to alleged “deceptive marketing” of Killzone Shadow Fall. The accusation specifies sub-1080p visuals in the game’s multiplayer despite advertisements claiming otherwise.

As Polygon reports, the suit comes from California citizen Douglas Ladore in Northern District California court, stating Sony “used a technological shortcut that was supposed to provide ‘subjectively similar’ results.”

Eurogamer found that Shadow Fall’s multiplayer does indeed run at 960×1080—a far cry from 1920×1080—and makes use of a “high-quality temporal upscale.”

Producer Poria Torkan of Guerrilla Games took to the game’s site to clarify this visual upscale: “In both [single-player] and [multiplayer], Killzone Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60 FPS. Native is often used to indicate images that are not scaled; it is native by that definition,” he said.

Torkan went on to address the visuals unique to the game’s multiplayer.

“In multiplayer mode, however, we use a technique called ‘temporal reprojection,’ which combines pixels and motion vectors from multiple lower-resolution frames to reconstruct a full 1080p image. If native means that every part of the pipeline is 1080p then this technique is not native.”

He also explains how those visuals differ from a standard visual upscale.

“When up-scaling an image from one resolution to another, new pixels are added by stretching the image in X/Y dimension,” Torkan added. “The values of the new pixels are picked to lie in between the current values of the pixels. This gives a bigger, but slightly blurrier picture.

“Temporal reprojection is a technique that tracks the position of pixels over time and predicts where they will be in [the] future. These ‘history pixels’ are combined with freshly rendered pixels to form a higher-resolution new frame. This is what Killzone Shadow Fall uses in multiplayer.”

Ladore and law firm Edelson PC argue that temporal reprojection does not qualify as “the ‘native 1080p’ that Sony promised,” hence their claims of false advertisement and negligent misrepresentation. The suit seeks over $5 million on multiple charges.

And you thought you were finicky about graphics.

[Polygon]