The Riftbreaker is among the most interesting indie games on the horizon, particularly when it comes to its tech features. Powered by the studio's own Schmetterling engine 2.0, The Riftbreaker features support for several DirectX 12 Ultimate features such as ray traced shadows, ray traced ambient occlusion and variable rate shading.
If you also follow Wccftech on YouTube, you might recall that Keith checked out the preview build a couple of months ago. We've now been able to interview Paweł Lekki, COO at Exor Studios, to learn more about this promising game. The full interview will go live tomorrow, but in the meantime here's an excerpt featuring the developer's opinion on the Xbox Series S hardware and what it means when developing next-gen games as a whole.
Yes, the Xbox Series S requires additional optimization. While we were able to simply compile The Riftbreaker for the Xbox Series X and it "just works", the XSS requires additional optimization. Still, it doesn't look like it will require that much work to be running well at 1080p on the XSS. The best thing about the current architecture is that the CPU power on both Xbox models is practically the same. Scaling graphical effects is a lot easier than scaling gameplay. The amount of available memory is a determining factor in a lot of cases when we talk about the size of a game world or about how many things can be happening within it at any given time. The size of the memory that is available in the XSS is the actual determining point for the entire console generation as gameplay features have to be fitted to the lowest spec. From the point of view of a developer it would be much easier if there was a single XSX SKU, but given the circumstances I think that Microsoft has made good choices in how to create a much cheaper console, that can still run next-generation games.
Lekki also told us that the studio's plan is to enable ray tracing effects in the next-gen console versions of The Riftbreaker, too, although they may have to be reduced when running it on the Xbox Series S.
Yes, we plan to have raytracing effects enabled on next -generation consoles, however we don't have final performance results from all of the console models. For example we will probably be aiming for all raytracing effects to be enabled on the XSX while the XSS may have them in a reduced capacity.
The Riftbreaker doesn't have a release date yet, but we'll let you know once it does.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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