In the latest interview, it was revealed that The Callisto Protocol will include ray tracing support.
Chief Technical Officer Mark James recently spoke with the media outlet TechRadar discussing the importance of detailing and the visual realism in the game. According to him, the characters are created with such detail that some fans will believe that they were pre-rendered, but it is not. He says that this is just how they designed the game’s characters. Even the eyeballs will have ray tracing and it is possible to see the reflections on them.
“Our characters are the most realistic characters you’ll see in a game,” says James. “So much so, that when we first showed our game, everybody thought it was pre-rendered. We were like, ‘No, this is how our character looks. This is how Josh [Duhamel, the actor behind the game’s main character] looks’.
“We’ve got a full scan, even down to ray-traced reflections for the eyeballs. So if you look into the [character’s] eyes in our game, you can see their reflected optics. It’s a really tiny detail, but it’s those tiny details that actually are so important to our game.”
James says that in order to create precise optical details, the development team meticulously modeled light reflections at every angle. They rotated lights around the character models to accurately recreated the bounce properties in the character’s eyes. It even has changes in direction and type of light source.
“Our rendering guy, Jorge Jiminez, used to send round photos of Josh and the digital render [of the game’s main character], and he would get people to guess [which was which]. If people thought there was any difference, he then worked on that area. It’s so important to us that that realism is in our game.”
James says that creating convincing faces is really important in order to sell the realism of the game’s wider world. He says that it brings a connection to the player that they would not normally get. “If realism doesn’t exist in the faces, then you start to not believe the realism in the rest of the world. We really wanted to concentrate on where you spend the most brain power in assessing an image.”
The Callisto Protocol launches on December 2, 2022. It will be available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.