Ryse: Son of Rome, which was first shown off at this year’s E3, garnered praises from a number of industry heavyweights, but was also criticized for its striking similarities to God of War, but slower, and for the combat being more QTE-based. The showcasing of the game at Gamescom, however, arrived with even more revamped changes for better combat and AI, and Crytek had more to follow up on the new changes.
Recently, design director P J Esteves was in an interview with Eurogamer where he described how the message was clear out of E3 that Crytek needed a more dynamic approach to the game, with more fluent QTE and AI.
"The QTE thing, yeah, we totally get it. Coming out of E3 we were like, we put all this damn time into the facial animation and what do you see? An X button,” he stated.
"We knew the mechanic worked within our combat system, so we're keeping the mechanic, but internally and with gamers' reaction we were like, yeah, it feels too QTE. And internally we didn't even like it because we have these great tech artists, Marius [Titus, Ryse's Roman soldier protagonist] and all the AI have this great facial rig, and what happens is you see Y, X. It just gets lost."
With the new changes to the game, even though the QTE quotient still remains, the way they will be displayed in the final game will be different from what was shown initially. For example, players will now see a different colored outline on the button that players will need to press.
Esteves revealed: “We went to Andy Serkis and The Imaginarium. We worked with some of the best performance capture people and all you saw was this X icon. Our cinematics director was like, you’re killing me man!”
"When you play it now it feels fresh. We still give you the hints: the blue outline or the yellow outline, but once we removed the buttons and went with the outline, aesthetically it felt better. You start seeing the facial animation. You still have this loop, okay, what button is it? And hit the timing. So it just made it a bit dynamic."
Ryse: Son of Rome is set to launch alongside the upcoming Xbox One this November. Check the video from Gamescom below.