Empire of the Ants spawned a strategy video game adaptation over two decades ago, and Microids and Tower Five are now set to take another crack at the license with a new game. Touted as a real-time strategy game with an emphasis on tactics, ecosystems, exploration, and more, the upcoming Empire of the Ants has looked promising in what’s been shown so far- thanks in no small part to its impressive visual fidelity. We recently had the chance to send across some of our questions about the game to its developers at Tower Five, and in the process learned plenty more about what to expect. Below, you can read our interview with game director Renaud Charpentier.
"The game starts at the first page of the first novel with Bel-o-kan waking up from winter and it ends a few weeks after the end of the original story as Autumn fades back into the next winter. So story wise it is a very faithful adaptation and we made sure of it working with the author from day one."
I imagine one of the games’ biggest draws will be playing in microscopic environments that have been recontextualized as these large battlefields. What can you tell us about how you approached designing these environments and effectively capturing that juxtaposition?
We treated all our environments as huge epic battlefields or intricate jungles to explore and get lost in. The objects are all photographically realistic, some have been scanned in the actual Forest de Fontainebleau, near Paris. But the trick is the scale of course, the scale of 103, the ant you play all along the game, and it is a 1 centimeter war machine of chitin and pheromones. Adapting the camera to that, the sound design, the controls, you get to feel that this small deadwood branch is in fact a giant arch bridge over a raging river; out of the microscopic, you evoke the gigantic and the contrast is pretty strong.
How many different wildlife species will players be able to encounter? How crucial will they be to strategies for ensuring the survival of your ant colony?
Without spoiling the explorations, you will discover dozens of them, some crawling, some running, some flying… But the most important ones are those composing your armies and they go far beyond ants. From legions of small aphids to huge elephants that are in fact snails, many other insects will fight for you or against you, including some exotic (and ecologically invading) species like the Asian hornets.
Empire of the Ants’ story will supposedly follow the flow of seasons, which is going to have an impact on the gameplay as well. Can you elaborate on what that will entail? Similarly, how will the day/night cycle affect gameplay?
Insects and especially ants are extremely influenced in their behaviors by the climatic conditions they operate in. Temperature for example directly dictates their state of activity: too cold and they go to rest, even colder and they enter hibernation. We wanted to embrace that fully at a gameplay level so we considered three separated climatic characteristics: luminosity, temperature, and humidity. They each directly influence the simulation. Luminosity influences your economy, temperature influences your legions and humidity influences your pheromones, the “powers” you can use on the battlefield to influence your legions. Night and day as cycles didn’t really fit with our heroes: most insects are either active during the day or more rarely, during the night. So instead of a full cycle which would not have made much sense, or forced to interrupt battles during the night, we went for specific missions set during the night or in extreme light conditions. Including missions that are not during the night or the day as they are fully underground where no daylight is ever present.
"We treated all our environments as huge epic battlefields or intricate jungles to explore and get lost in."
How will Empire of the Ants’ scalable difficulty work? Will the game also feature fixed difficulty options for those who want them?
We treated the difficulty question another way: by allowing a non linear path through the game. In each hub, which are actually ant colonies, you have the choice of several missions to progress the situation and those missions are of very different types and difficulty. So you can progress by playing the ones you like or find right for you in terms of challenge and bypass the others. So it is the player which adapts his path through the story according to its skills and tastes rather than having a rather abstract choice of difficulty at the start of the game.
Empire of the Ants is touting photorealistic visuals, courtesy of Unreal Engine 5. How much of a factor was the engine in being able to achieve the game’s visual ambitions?
Unreal 5 was instrumental in reaching the visual look we were aiming for from the start. In fact, we experimented with a very early version of Unreal 5 to prototype the documentary look we were gunning for. So the new techs the engine offered, like Lumen, Nanite shaped the way we produced our graphics and allowed us to reach what we wanted with a fairly minimal art team. In the process, with our publisher, we took the decision to focus on the PS5 gen of hardware and not support the previous generation, that allowed us to make technical choices which are not backward compatible but allowed us to effectively reach the look and feel we wanted.
Roughly how long will an average playthrough of the story campaign be?
It really depends on your skill level and which missions you decide to play to progress forward as you always have the choice on that. Probably something around 20 hours. Maybe 15 if you really rush through it, probably above 30 if you take the time to explore and search for the many secrets this world has hidden to the hurried eyes.
What can you tell us about Empire of the Ants’ multiplayer offerings?
We wanted to offer a focused and competitive multiplayer experience; so we went for 3 game modes, 2 of them through competitive ladders and one as a private games you can set exactly as you want. The competitive modes are 1 versus 1 and 3 FFA, so indeed, 1 vs 1 vs 1. There you enter a global, cross platform matchmaking which will match you against an opponent close to your ranking. The private game mode allows you to create your own server and invite friends to play in it by sharing a code across any platforms. In this mode you can choose the map, the climatic conditions and even to play against an AI, choosing its personality and level of intelligence. At the end of every multiplayer game you have the possibility to watch a complete replay of what happened: legion movements, power used, evolution of each player’s economy over time.
"We are waiting to see the final specs of the Switch successor and would be very happy to be able to propose Empire on it."
Given the game’s technical ambitions, I imagine a Switch port is unlikely, but could we perhaps see the game release for the Switch’s successor down the line?
We are waiting to see the final specs of the Switch successor and would be very happy to be able to propose Empire on it. What is for sure is that the switch format and controls will suit Empire very well, as the experience on a Steam deck proves; now it is mostly a question of visual fidelity.
Given that you have experience working with all the current-gen consoles, I was hoping to pick your brain on some of the differences between them. For instance, where their GPUs are concerned, the PS5 clocks in at 10.28 teraflops, behind the Xbox Series X’s 12 teraflops. In real terms, however, how much of an impact does that difference have during development?
To be honest, not much, the PS5 and Series X versions render with the exact same graphical parameters and both of them in very stable 30 FPS. The challenge was more to get the best visual parity possible on the Series S which is noticeably less capable, especially in terms of GPU. But here Unreal tech helped us a lot and we are pretty happy with the final result. We mostly traded on native rendering resolution and the upscaler does a great job behind the scene.
The PS5 features an incredibly fast SSD with 5.5GB/s raw bandwidth. How can developers take advantage of this, and how does this compare to the Xbox Series X’s 2.4GB/s raw bandwidth?
Again, not a massive practical difference in the end, loading times are extremely short on both, counting in just a few seconds and the virtual texturing works very well on both. Having these consoles with fast MVMe disks was the real game changer for a game like Empire, it means your mass storage disk is almost a slow, but huge, chunk of additional RAM where you can read massive amounts of data with almost zero seek time. Compared to the hard drives found in the previous generation it is night and day and probably what changes the experience the most.
Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X boast Zen 2 CPUs, but there is a difference in the processors of both consoles. The Xbox Series X features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz, whereas the PS5 features 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz. Your thoughts on this difference?
Here too the difference is not big enough to noticeably impact what you can do and can’t do on each platform. Also, in this gen, many games are in fact GPU bound, not CPU bound, in many of them you have entire CPU cores that are sleeping or not doing much while most of them submerge the GPU capacities. That’s why modern engines use variable resolution to cope with the GPU overload and lowering the native rendering resolution usually doesn’t help the CPU much or at all, the game thread, the physics, the audio, the animations, all the work that the CPU typically handles doesn’t diminish when you compute less pixels in a frame.
"On both PS5 and Xbox Series X, we mostly target between 1400p and 1600p native, upscaled to 4K, and that is at a stable 30 FPS."
The Xbox Series S features lesser hardware compared to Xbox Series and Microsoft is pushing it as a 1440p/60 FPS console. Do you think it will be able to hold up for the more graphically intensive games as this generation progresses?
The S is close to the X in many aspects, apart from raw GPU power and RAM space. RAM space potentially limits texture quality but not framerate, so it is really a question of native resolution. On the S the strategy is obviously to lower the base render resolution and then to ask the upscaler to interpolate more. Reaching 1440p in 60 FPS is possible but it depends how much trade off you are willing to make on individual pixel quality. For us, 30 FPS was the limit on this gen to reach the render quality we wanted, but other games can have different priorities.
Which console, PS5 or Xbox Series X, responds better to Unreal Engine 5 in terms of performance and optimization?
Hard to tell again, probably thanks to Epic work on the engine, there are very few differences between the builds and you relatively easily get exact visual features parity. To be honest modern multiplatform games are optimized globally, at their core, with improvements which give gain on all hardware, including PCs. For us it was the huge challenge of displaying up to 15000 animated agents at the same time in 30 FPS, and the techniques we used for that are not platform dependent; it is all a question of simulation, multithreading, pre-processing and all these work exactly the same way everywhere.
What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S?
On both PS5 and Xbox Series X, we mostly target between 1400p and 1600p native, upscaled to 4K, and that is at a stable 30 FPS.
On Xbox Series S, the native render is in 972p upscaled to 1080p, still in 30 FPS.
On the PS5 Pro, we run at 60 FPS with a native target of 1440p upscaled to 4K.
These are the stats for standard scenes, light scenes can render natively above 2K, while very heavy battle scenes will temporarily lower native resolution down to 1080p to maintain framerate.
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