Aside from the daring micro-transaction inclusion in Monolith Productions’ upcoming Shadow of Mordor sequel Middle-earth Shadow of War, the studio is pushing their best to make their Lord of the Rings’ inspired title to run and look better on Microsoft’s flagship, the Xbox One X.
In a recent interview with GamesIndustry, the Technical Art Director for Shadow of War, talked about how their game engine has layers of 16K and 8K body and face textures to prep for the powerful system, in which they just have to tweak these layers.
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“So our engine has a pretty cool layer, where the content guys just go and make incredibly high res stuff. 8K face textures for the orcs, 16K body textures… millions of triangles on the models.
And there’s a layer that says: I’m going to do this so it works on a low-end PC, and I’m going to do this for PS4 and Xbox One’. So that means when a more powerful system comes out all we have to do is tweak that layer, because the content guys are making stuff we still can’t show.“[/alert]
Matt also mentioned that Shadow of War didn’t have any struggles running on Xbox One X due to its similarities to Windows 10 – which they have the game already running on Windows 10. They got Shadow of War to run in just a day. However, they did encounter little issues but it didn’t take them a lot of work to fix it.
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“From a content standpoint, it didn’t take long to get it working. From an engineering standpoint, because it shares a lot of DNA with Windows 10 – and we are already running on Windows 10 – it took our engineering director about a day to get it running on the original Scorpio kits. It wasn’t perfect; there were edge cases, so it involved a bit of tinkering, but it was not a lot of extra work.“[/alert]
The Technical Art Director also added that they’ve fully added the stunning details to the Xbox One X version.
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“After we have shown the stuff to the journalists, the artists will come in and look at it because they have only seen their stuff in 4K. And seeing it in HDR, they get to see the full gamut of how the lighting affects all of these materials. And you get a row of artists just staring at their work… it’s like they’re seeing it for the first time.
When you just see it, and it’s new and you have nothing to compare it to, you think it looks cool. But if you know the content well, it is just so different. And when you have seen it like this, and you go back to the previous version, it just looks dull. We’ve had bugs where they’ve said everything looks a bit grey, but it’s just that they’re playing it in SDR, and they’re used to it in HDR.“[/alert]
Middle-earth: Shadow of War is expected to launch this October 10 on PS4, Xbox One, PC.
Source: GamesIndustry
