During a recent Lords of the Fallen preview event, Wccftech's Kai Powell went hands on with the upcoming Soulslike game developed by Hexworks and published by CI Games.
Following the play session, he also talked with Lords of the Fallen Creative Director Cezar Virtosu and Executive Producer Saul Gascon. During the lengthy conversation, Kai extracted the technical details about the game's Performance and Quality modes on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X.
Saul Galscon: On both consoles, we offer performance and quality modes. The performance mode goes at 60 frames per second and 1080p resolution upscaled, which is kind of the standard in the industry. The quality mode is 2K (1440P) upscaled, running at 30 FPS. But even if you play at 60, Lords of the Fallen looks really good.
Hexworks' game will be one of the first triple-A Unreal Engine 5 showcases. During the interview, the developers highlighted the significant advancements enabled by Epic's latest version of UE.
Saul Galscon: When we started the project, Unreal Engine 5 was not available back then. But we always had a branch with whatever UE5 pre-launch builds were available. We always made sure that the game was compatible. When it was production ready, we just swapped the whole thing to UE5. The most powerful and, let's say, game-changing technology was Lumen because it allowed us to forego lightmaps, the old-school way to light environments. Whenever we came back to the designers or the artists and asked 'Hey, can you move that window just a bit to the right, so the light focuses on this corner? They would be like, 'Yes, sir!' They would move it, then click render with the towers, and then maybe we went, 'Oh, sorry, I meant three meters, not two'.
With Lumen, all this process is now in real-time, so it was the most impactful UE5 feature for us. Nanite is also great because you get a bump of quality everywhere. On top of those two, there are other elements, like the Chaos physics, which really helps with all the clothes, and a lot of improvements on animation pipelines that allowed us to make movement more fluid for both enemies and player characters. UE5 is a huge leap in terms of tech, and it's gonna get even better.
Lords of the Fallen is scheduled to launch on October 13th for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
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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