Game Changer

Cutting Features to Cutting-Edge Tech

Game Changer

Cutting Features and Cutting-Edge Tech

Hi!

This week we chat with Paul Hellquist, lead designer on the original BioShock and creative director on Borderlands 2, who shares the dirt on how some of gaming's most iconic characters - Big Daddies and Little Sisters - were almost cut from the game. Then we look at Unreal Engine 5 and the cutting-edge tech that’s powering Immortals of Aveum™.

How BioShock's Little Sisters Almost Got Cut

We’re back with another podcast episode of Rise Above, and this time we’re venturing into the depths of Rapture and the far reaches of Pandora. In this episode, Paul Hellquist shares his journey from gamer to archaeologist to video game designer to running his own studio, and what he’s learned along the way.

Paul Hellquist is a BAFTA Awards nominated game designer who was the lead designer on the original BioShock and the creative director on fan favorite Borderlands 2. He is now the Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer at the independent AAA game studio, Stray Kite Studios.

What saved BioShock’s Big Daddies and Little Sisters from the chopping block? Find out in this episode - Available now! Watch on YouTube and Spotify, or listen on your favorite audio platform.

New episodes drop every other Monday - Follow and subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode on May 15th.

Future-Proofing Video Game Graphics

When Bret and our team began building Immortals of Aveum, we knew we wanted it to be a visually stunning game with fluid, responsive, fun combat. We also asked ourselves, how do you future-proof a game so that the visual fidelity scales as new consoles and better PC hardware is released? This led to the decisions like developing on Unreal Engine 5.1 and ensuring a satisfying 60fps gameplay experience. But accomplishing all of this simultaneously is not without its challenges, and in our case, pushing the envelope forward also means leaving Gen 8 consoles and older PC hardware behind.

“Ascendant is drawing a line in the sand between systems that support ray tracing and those that don’t — that’s why the PS5 and Xbox Series X qualify with their integrated AMD RDNA2 graphics but an old GTX 1060 won’t.”

Sean Hollister, The Verge

Immortals of Aveum is one of the first AAA video games to take Epic’s Unreal Engine 5.1 features from tech demos into a fully featured playable experience. The Nanite and Lumen technology allows us to create a breathtaking cinematic experience for the player, while maintaining 60fps performance. Taking a look at tech driving our system spec requirements, the experts at Digital Foundry and The Verge said:

“People might be balking at the relatively expensive cost of this rendering, but it is specifically talking about 60fps. If they’d actually put in a 30fps as a minimum specification, we’d be looking at an entirely different, entirely more reasonable range of specifications and no one would really be fussed about it.”

Rich Leadbetter, Founder of Digital Foundry

“This doesn’t surprise me at all for a minimum spec, because if you look at the Matrix demo or how Fortnite runs in UE5, to get 60FPS in those titles, it actually would require something like an RTX Super with settings turned down, which is exactly what this describes. So it doesn’t seem super surprising to me.”

Alexander Battaglia, PC Specialist at Digital Foundry @dachsjaeger

“Immortals of Aveum does look good! And by building the world a little differently, Ascendent is promising it will take advantage of future graphics cards more than you’d normally expect, too.”

Sean Hollister, The Verge

Whether you’re watching a cinematic or battling on a 400 foot mech in the middle of the ocean, the visual fidelity is the same. UE5 has provided the tools and technology to create a game that will be able to take advantage of future graphics cards and consoles, and we hope players will enjoy Immortals of Aveum for years to come.

To learn more about the tech behind Immortals of Aveum, head over to this blog, watch the Digital Foundry podcast, and read more from The Verge.

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