Developer MachineGames, along with Nvidia, has announced that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be getting support for Nvidia RTX Hair when the expansion for the title – The Order of Giants – comes out on September 4. When the expansion is out, PC players running the title on an Nvidia graphics card will see key characters throughout the game with improved hair effects.
According to Nvidia, RTX Hair will make use of strand-based hair techniques to render hair effects in games. Through this technology, developers can make hair that looks more geometrically detailed. This hair will also interact with the in-game lighting in more realistic ways, complete with realistic light and shadows.
To achieve this high-computation technique, Nvidia makes use of Linear-Swept Spheres primitives, which allows the game engine to render the hair complete with path traced lighting in more performant ways.
It is worth noting that, since RTX Hair needs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards, the enhanced hair won’t be available on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game. Rather, it will be exclusive to the PC version, and even then only for players that are running on a current-gen Nvidia graphics card.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – The Order of the Giants was announced back in June during an Xbox Games Showcase. The expansion will take protagonist Indiana Jones to underground catacombs beneath Rome in a quest to “uncover the dark legacy of the Nephilim giants.” The DLC was announced with a trailer.
Back in July, design director Jens Andersson spoke about why MachineGames opted to go with a first-person perspective for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. In a talk at Develop:Brighton, Andersson said that going with a first-person camera for the game “was a given” for the studio.
“If you’re going to be Indiana Jones, you need to look through his eyes, you need to feel like him,” he said.
“How would we make you as a first-person player feel like Indiana Jones? We knew that would be really hard, but actually it was one of the things that we felt we hit,” he said. “It took years, of course, but it wasn’t the hardest part making this game. It was a lot of the other things that I would highlight as ‘we didn’t get this right until at the very end.’”
Interestingly, MachineGames has a history of telling narratively-rich stories in single-player games while never leaving the first-person camera angle. This could be seen in the studio’s Wolfenstein titles – The New Order from 2014 and The New Colossus from 2017. Even the VR-only Wolfenstein spin-off Cyberpilot, as well as co-op spin-off Youngblood never left the first-person camera behind.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was originally released on PC and Xbox Series X/S, ultimately making its way to PS5 back in April. The title quickly became quite successful on Sony’s console, with reports indicating that it was on track to be one of the fastest-selling releases of all versions of the game, with around 117.2 thousand copies sold in its first week.
For more details, check out our review.
