Hooray! The second Ori game has its demo now! New story, new scene and… new combat system! Although it’s not a tech talk I still extract some technical points and design concepts out from it.

So the Microsoft Studio launched a livestream on Mixer on 10th July to give those who cannot go to E3 (yes, me!) a chance to know the new gameplay. Actually the 12:00PM PT is 4:00AM in Japan so I had to sacrifice my sleep time (pain but with thrill).

Notes

  • The gameplay trailer are completely rendered by engine, even those cinematic moments.

  • Pipeline changed.

    • In the first game, things were rendered mostly through 2D sprites.
    • In the second game, team have gone to a full 3D treatment even though they present the game in 2D. This allows them to do much more with animation, like every single new weapon and many different abilities all featuring entirely customized animation sets.
    • The original game was 60 frames a second but the sprite animations were actually in 30. This time with a full 3D pipeline even all animations are in 60.
    • Because the pipeline had entirely moved to 3D, models’ passing through becomes inevitable.

  • Combat system

    • Reason to change: in blind forest, Sein was sent back to spirit tree so it’s necessary to consider a reasonable way to build new combat system.
    • In blind forest, combat was sort of secondary to traversal, and they found many Let’s Plays and livestreams have very similar playthrough to each other. Now with all these weapons and abilities, players can have very different and diverse playthrough experiences which is great.
    • Highlight: Burrow
      • The basic usage is to “diving” in soft material like sand.
      • Not only the diving, this action can also target on platform made out of sand so that the boost prduced from executing it can take you to higher areas, which feels totally reasonable and clever-designed.
      • As we can see, the border handling is also doing well.

  • Rendering

    • The lighting got a pretty big upgrade
      • Tech and art team had gone through with every texture and painted light masks in 6 different directions. (Hard-working…)