Using Unreal Engine 5 for Eternal Strands
For developers in the triple-A space, chasing high-fidelity photorealism is often the norm as a way to immerse players into believable worlds. The most impressive aspects of Unreal Engine 5 has also been how it’s able to push photorealism to new heights that’s also made more accessible with MetaHumans or its huge Quixel library of 3D-scanned environments. Yet while Yellow Brick Games is founded by Ubisoft veterans, including game director Frederic St. Laurent and CTO Louis Tremblay, for new action RPG Eternal Strands, the decision was made early on to pursue a more stylised aesthetic that also serves the gameplay.
As a fantasy game where you play as Brynn, a weaver who is able to use magic, these aren’t just spells that involve shooting elemental projectiles. Instead, the laws of thermodynamics are applied, so fire burns and spreads while even forming ice around a dragon’s foot can stop it from flying.
“Because we knew from the first week that we wanted something akin to the thermodynamic system that we have, this requires dramatic change visually to be understandable by the player,” Tremblay explains. “So having something that is more stylised lets us say that a hot rock is red, or something that is really cold is blue, which, in reality, makes no sense.”
Stylised Aesthetic
The fantasy setting was similarly suitable based on the kind of materials players would be interacting with. “It’s easy for the player to understand the physical properties of rock and wood,” Tremblay continues. “You can make rock brittle because it’s seen so many times in movies, as opposed to different alloys, which makes no real sense, and you need to look at the stats to understand.”
Level Design
Going hand in hand with that was also a desire to make environments destructible, which might cast back to PS2-era games like Red Faction. That such an immediate example is also a game from over two decades ago also speaks to how rare or difficult such a gameplay feature is when considering the many worlds you traverse in modern games often amount to super detailed set dressing.
“We wanted to destroy trees and walls, but if you go realistic, a tree has a lot of splinters when it starts to break, and it’s harder to do,” St. Laurent says. “We manage to have a full wooden house that is destroyed by a dragon walking into it, which just explodes into planks, and the style kind of allows it. When I worked at a triple-A studio, the house would not be breakable because making it interactable like a game should be is too costly.”
Conclusion
In other words, Eternal Strands makes shrewd use of Unreal Engine 5 by, not pushing for photorealistic perfection in favour of stylisation that complements its ambitious gameplay ideas, while smart design decisions allows that vision to be stretched in imaginative ways manageable for the studio’s mid-size team of around 60 people. Yellow Brick Games may not have the big budgets of triple-A but it can still make magic happen.
FAQs
Q: What is the main difference between Eternal Strands and other action RPGs?
A: Eternal Strands’ stylised aesthetic and focus on thermodynamic systems set it apart from other action RPGs.
Q: How does the game’s level design contribute to its gameplay?
A: The game’s level design allows for destructible environments, which adds a new layer of strategy to the gameplay.
Q: What is the significance of the game’s art style?
A: The game’s art style allows for a range of creative freedom, from in-engine cutscenes to anime-style cutscenes and hand-drawn portrait art.
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