Here's one way to spend your Friday lunch time: populate an imaginary high school prom with teenie movie incarnations of the Xbox One's launch games. Forza 5? Bit of a daddy's little girl, no doubt, but an impressive student. Killer Instinct? He'd be the bellowing jock on the table there, holding a keg of lager over his head. Dead Rising 3? The self-reliant goth who's often seen driving cars that don't belong to her. And Crytek's Ryse: Son of Rome? She's "the hot one", in the words of design director PJ Esteves.
He's got a bit of an agenda, obviously, but Son of Rome is a dashed fine-looking specimen, you have to admit. Speaking to Develop roundabouts launch day, Esteves discussed how easy it was to pull all that off on the Xbox One.
"Honestly, the engine has been one of the smoothest parts of the whole project," he said of Crytek's fearsome CryEngine 3 tech. "From the time of Crysis 2 we were working with DirectX 11 already. We were two games deep with DX11 and working with a 360 game learning about how the ecosystem works. So that all helped.
"I think it was about a week to get up and running on Xbox One from the time we got the first kits," Esteves went on. "Having a great partnership with Microsoft helped, to prepare us as the platform developed alongside our game. Any launch game lands hot; it doesn't matter who you are.
"But having a mature engine really helped, and getting to harness things like physically based rendering was incredible. Improvements in facial animation pipelines are great too. It's a terrible way to say it, but CryEngine and the Xbox One have let our game be the hot one at the launch prom."
According to Esteves, "one of the most important things about the Xbox One is pure processing power. The amount of RAM we had available to us helped a great deal. The NPCs in the game all have cloth, facial expressions, and the same fidelity as a character in the cinematics. We were able to give the AI characters the same detail as the player characters, and they express a lot more emotion than is seen in other games.
"The Xbox One gave us AI that really feels just human enough. You can see pain as you slice at a guy, or you see surprise. It's always hard work, but the Xbox One let us give the game more emotion as we took Ryse forward."
So what you're basically saying, Esteves, is that this is a teen slasher flick, not a high school rom com, and the attractive young lady on the dance floor is an axe-murderer waiting for us to drop our guard? Hmm, you know what, I think I'll ask Dead Rising 3 if she can give me a lift home.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/67238/ryse-is-the-hot-one-at-the-launch-prom-thanks-to-xbox-ones-pure-processing-power/
