Poland has been hailed as an increasingly prosperous land for game development, with developers such as CD Projekt RED, Techland, Flying Wild Hog, People Can Fly, 11-bit Studios and Bloober Team often cited as the best examples thanks to its global successes. There is also an interesting indie scene thriving in the country, however, and among these Exor Studios it is certainly worth highlighting.
Originally formed as a modding group in 2003 (its first project was DIPRIP, a full conversion mod for Valve Software’s Source Engine), Exor Studios went on to make Zombie Driver HD and the defense / double stick X shooting game -Morph: Defense, which received a score of 7.8 from Dave a few years ago.
X-Morph: Defense already featured impressive technology for its elements of destruction (powered by NVIDIA PhysX), but the studio’s next survival action / game RPG, the Riftbreaker, goes further, supporting a number of DirectX 12 Ultimate features , such as beam tracking and Variable Rate Shading. Implemented in partnership with AMD, both features are also available for NVIDIA cards, as you can see in the video review below, where Keith compared the AMD and NVIDIA cards in the preview version of the game.
Earlier this month, we contacted Exor Studios’ COO, Paweł Lekki, to discuss The Riftbreaker ahead of its release in 2021. Check out the interview transcribed after the break.
How long do you expect Campaign Mode to be on The Riftbreaker?
We estimate that the campaign has about 40 hours of play for an average player.
Did you consider adding a cooperative mode? Can it still happen as a DLC?
Yes. This is the number 1 most requested feature to be added to the game. It is a technically challenging task, but we are planning to start working on it as soon as we launch the game. We are planning to add an online cooperative mode as a post-launch update, but it may take 6 to 12 months after launch to be ready.
As far as I know, The Riftbreaker may be the first title played from an isometric view to implement lightning tracking technology. Do you think that isometric vision may be more or less adequate than regular third / first person views to show the benefits of ray tracing?
We also didn’t see any other isometric perspective games with ray tracing, so we had to create many specific solutions for that perspective without any previous inspiration. The isometric perspective and an open world environment allow us to make many custom optimizations, for example, we know that in 99% of the cases the sky is clear, so there is no reason to fire rays at it. This allows us to have a much more efficient implementation of the radius tracing environment occlusion. This effect is generally much more computationally expensive in first or third person perspective games. Shades of drawn radius also allow us to skip the calculation of cascading shadow maps, as we can achieve the perfect shadow resolution, no matter how close or far an object is placed in relation to the camera.
You mentioned support for AMD FidelityFX Variable Rate Shading. Can you clarify whether this feature, which is in the DX12 Ultimate specification, will also be available for NVIDIA cards with hardware support for VRS?
This feature is now available on NVIDIA cards. What we like most about all FidelityFX features is that they work on all GPUs that meet the required DirectX standards. Intel GPU users can also benefit from this technology.
Do you plan to support lightning tracking in the next generation versions of The Riftbreaker as well? If so, how does it compare to the ray tracing on the PC in terms of quality?
Yes, we plan to have raytracing effects enabled on next generation consoles, however, we do not have the final performance results for all console models. For example, we will probably aim to have all raytracing effects enabled in XSX while XSS can have them in reduced capacity.
Some developers commented that the Xbox Series S may pose a problem due to its lower minimum specifications compared to the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, particularly its memory. What do you think?
Yes, XSS requires additional optimization. Although we were able to simply compile The Riftbreaker for XSX and it “just works”, XSS requires additional optimization. Still, it doesn’t look like it will require much work to run well at 1080p on the XSS. The best thing about the current architecture is that the CPU power on both Xbox models is about the same. Scaling graphic effects is much easier than scaling gameplay. The amount of available memory is a determining factor in many cases when we talk about the size of a game world or how many things can be happening inside it at any given time. The size of the memory that is available in the XSS is the real turning point for the entire generation of the console, as the game’s features must be adjusted to the lowest specifications. From a developer’s point of view, it would be much easier if there was a single XSX SKU, but given the circumstances, I think Microsoft made good choices on how to create a much cheaper console, which can still be run next- generation.
On PlayStation 5, do you plan to support the unique features of the DualSense controller in The Riftbreaker? If so, how?
We haven’t thought about it in detail yet, but we strive to take advantage of all the hardware resources that are at our disposal.
You are also shipping the game to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. What kind of technical concessions do you need to make to run the game on these old generation platforms?
State-of-the-art console versions are currently optional in our plans. We plan to work on them after releasing the game on the next generation consoles. This will certainly require decreasing the number of creatures that can attack the player and reducing the texture resolution to conserve memory. Making changes that affect gameplay is time consuming and is best performed when the entire game is finished and balanced. We don’t want to limit gameplay on the PC and next generation consoles, so we’re leaving the previous generation as an additional post-launch task.
Do you think The Riftbreaker could be ported to the Nintendo Switch too? Is this something that you will try in the future?
We don’t think this is realistic. Of course it is possible, but it would require very large gameplay and changes in the size of the world. The Schmetterling 2.0 engine has also been tweaked with the assumption that it has at least 4 CPU cores at its disposal. It would be difficult to optimize this for a dual CPU scenario. It would be very close to a complete overhaul of the game, so we don’t think it’s worth the effort.
Looking at your next game, what kind of positive impact on game design would you expect from not having to deal with older generation platforms anymore, taking advantage of the much larger CPU, SSD and memory resources of next generation hardware?
The Riftbreaker was already designed as a next generation game, with possible gameplay changes when downloading to older consoles. The things we think will be adopted even more is ray-traced rendering. We are still at the beginning of the process of adopting ray tracing technologies. We can see many improvements in terms of lighting and effects, like reflections or fluid caustics later on. I think, again, the biggest game changer in terms of gameplay is planning a much larger memory budget. This allows us to really go crazy with the amount of objects that are simulated simultaneously within the game world.
Our engine is also too parallel to support the living world of The Riftbreaker. Many PC users still have 4 CPU cores, and the game works very well in that scenario, but the 8 CPU core scenario that is present in high-end consoles can provide us with a lot of extra breathing space to simulate physics and calculations. additional features to support raytracing.
Thank’s for your time.