The company touted the product as running in native 1080p when in fact it does not

Aug 7, 2014 06:45 GMT  ·  By

A man in California decided to sue Sony over "deceptive marketing" of Killzone: Shadow Fall for the PlayStation 4, which was advertised as running in native 1080p when it fact it does not.

After the game's launch, the talented individuals at Digital Foundry analyzed the game and found out that the multiplayer portion of the first-person shooter actually runs in an upscaled 960x1080 resolution, and plaintiff Douglas Ladore decided that the traumatic experience of not enjoying Killzone: Shadow Fall's multiplayer in native 1080p had to be worth around $5 / €3.75 million.

The California-based class-action lawsuit was started by Ladore and "all others similarly situated" calls for Sony to advertise its games more accurately in the future, after paying them the hefty damages, of course.

"Sony admitted that it did not in fact design Killzone to display multiplayer graphics in 1080p, but instead used a technological shortcut that was supposed to provide 'subjectively similar' results. But Sony never advertised and convinced consumers to buy a technological shortcut," the lawsuit argues.

After the guys at Digital Foundry outed the fact that Killzone: Shadow Fall used a horizontal interlace technique where every other column of pixels was generated using information from previously rendered frames, developer Guerrilla Games was quick to issue a clarification of the subject matter.

"In both SP and MP, Killzone Shadow Fall outputs a full, unscaled 1080p image at up to 60fps. Native is often used to indicate images that are not scaled; it is native by that definition," the studio explained.

"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," the statement continued, promising to use more precise language in the future.

It seems that Ladore and many others are not satisfied with Guerrilla Games' explanation and promise, hence the lawsuit for false advertisement, unfair competition, fraud and misrepresentation.

The suit describes how Ladore researched Shadow Fall's 1080p promise before purchasing it, and describes the plaintiff's first experience with the game.

"After opening Killzone's packaging (thus rendering the game un-returnable) and playing the game, Plaintiff realized that the game's multiplayer graphics were not the '1080p' graphics that Sony advertised. Instead, Plaintiff noticed that Killzone's multiplayer graphics were blurry and did not appear to be rendering at a native 1080p resolution," the case reads.

The suit is being handled by law firm Edelson PC, the very same one behind the suits against Zynga, related to some Farmville information leaks, Sega and Gearbox, regarding Aliens: Colonial Marines' low quality, and Electronic Arts, for not providing Battlefield 1943 buyers with new copies of Battlefield 3.

Killzone: Shadow Fall multiplayer screenshots (5 Images)

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