Ryse Director: Processing Power is One of Xbox One’s Most Important Features

Ryse: Son of Rome is pretty. You can say all you want about the repetitive combat or reliance on quick-time events, but it’s difficult to deny the game an A+ when it comes to presenting players with a beautiful, fully realized world. The game’s visuals are a truly amazing feat – especially considering it started out as an Xbox 360 Kinect game – and Design director PJ Esteves recently spoke to Develop about how the Xbox One’s power allowed for such striking graphics to exist.

“One of the most important things about the Xbox One is pure processing power. The amount of RAM we had available to us helped a great deal,” Esteves said. “The NPCs in the game all have cloth, facial expressions, and the same fidelity as a character in the cinematics. We were able to give the AI characters the same detail as the player characters, and they express a lot more emotion than is seen in other games.

“The Xbox One gave us AI that really feels just human enough. You can see pain as you slice at a guy, or you see surprise. It’s always hard work, but the Xbox One let us give the game more emotion as we took Ryse forward.”

Sure, we can sit here and argue about the game running at 900p and not 1080p. If you really, really wanted, we could do that. However, no matter the resolution, Ryse is one of the best looking console games out there. That’s something we shouldn’t take away from Crytek.