When Ryse: Son of Rome was first revealed at the Microsoft E3 press conference, many criticisms were made of how the game’s combat was too QTE-oriented. At Gamescom however, the game was tweaked to make for better combat and AI. Design director P J Esteves also explained to Eurogamer that the message was clear after E3.
“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. 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.”
Even though the QTEs still remain, the way they will be displayed is far more different. Now, you’ll be seeing a different coloured outline representing the button you need to press. As 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 will launch alongside the Xbox One this November.
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