Ryse is historical fantasy on a huge scale, rendered at a level of detail and intricacy that’s close to photorealism.

By giving Xbox One its mandatory early visual powerhouse – despite all the doomsaying about the hardware’s horsepower – Ryse was arguably the console’s most important launch title. It disrupted the narrative, leaving many players clueless as to what the platform can really achieve. It’s certainly hard to imagine more on day one in terms of presentation and ensemble performance capture. As technical art director Christopher Evans and cinematic director Peter Gornstein explain, achieving such results involved risks, experimentation and lots of research.How long ago did you suspect that the new generation would start at sub-1080p?
Christopher Evans: When we set out our pillars of the game very early, we didn’t even think about what resolutions we were going to do. We really wanted to focus on the characters, the emotion. Those were things we’d never really conquered before. Resolution is more a gamble of numbers – a sliding thing for us. For the Crysis franchise, we’d built a really intelligent upscaler, and most people didn’t even know it wasn’t running at a specific resolution. We just felt that when you play the game and see the images that are generated, there’s going to be another discussion happening.Are those pillars different when dealing with a console launch title?
CE: The tech core pillars are always built off of the game’s core pillars. That meant we had to make a decision about the characters. For us, the next gen was going to be about having amazing characters in the game as well as in the cutscenes. That ‘play the cutscene’ idea really made us have to rethink. How are we going to do facial setup? How are we going to set up levels of detail? It was difficult enough that it ran the entire course of the project, and there were many times I was told that what we wanted to do for faces and characters was, tech-wise, one of the riskiest things on the project.One of the things that I found myself defending a lot was the idea that, yeah, we’re going to take tons of scan reference of the actors themselves and replicate their exact performance, but the characters are going to be sculpted by human beings [in] an artistic process. The world, the armour, the face: everything is consistent. It’s not slapping a bunch of photo textures everywhere. When we did our facial scanning, we actually drew lines on the faces so I could check the skin sliding and stuff, so we didn’t even have the actual scan data with diffuse textures for the project.

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