Dear Adventurers,
Since the last developer's insights post, we have launched the Adventurer Season 5- Battlecar Rises, reached the 10 million total player milestone, and participated in the Gamescom 2019 in Cologne, Germany, sharing the spotlight with other world-class AAA titles. While we continuously improve the game, we still pay close attention to player feedback and actively carry out related development and optimization. Last week, we deployed a series of gameplay and QOL changes, including the G36, Glider/Flashbang buffs, character movement improvements, and more. This time around, we're going to continue the momentum and release another significant improvement for the graphic side of ROE. In addition, we will also reveal some details on the upcoming first anniversary celebration month of Ring of Elysium, which starts on September 19. Let's jump in!
DX12 client - graphic quality improvement
After the client team "allocated the DX12 skill point," they began to continuously upgrade the client from both a technological and performance standpoint. This is not the first time Ring of Elysium has been optimized for graphic quality, and it won't be the last. This time around, we are going to improve the graphics of the game from three aspects: environmental lighting upgrades, new exposure, and post-processing technology.
We expect this update to be released on September 19, 2019, which is the 1st anniversary since Ring of Elysium's Early Access launch on Steam. To experience this update, players will have to use the DX12 client and select the "standard" graphics quality.First, let's talk about environmental lighting
For a very long time, we've been committed to presenting you a better visual experience with a focus on optimizing the game's artistic style, dynamic weather, and terrain/vegetation designs. And environmental lighting performance is another one of the most important direction we have been paying attention to. This feature allows the player to experience a more immersive game world by visually and intuitively, letting players sense changes in time and weather through different ambient lighting effects.
For ROE, the difficulty of ambient lighting is the challenge that comes from our dynamic weather system, which is rarely seen in Battle Royales. Usually, game environment lighting is fixed in time or weather, this makes it easier to handle static time and ambient light rendering in weather conditions. But Ring of Elysium has more than a dozen of different weather settings, which cause varying light and shadow performance in both indoor and outdoor environments, traditional solutions cannot deal with complicated scenarios like this.
Finally, our client team has made a breakthrough and implemented the first iteration of the "real-time dynamic global illumination" system that supports these real-time dynamic weather changes.
After this update, the ambient lighting system will be upgraded in a comprehensive way, enhancing the realism and integration of characters and scenes to improve the overall quality of graphics rendering, making it look more natural (especially indoors).
For a more intuitive presentation, let's take a look at the comparison screenshots!
(Looking closely at the character and the weapon in the comparison screenshots, we can clearly observe that after the lighting update, the indirect illumination of the environment causes the light to be reflected on the floor and reflected on the weapon and the character. Through the indirect illumination interaction of the environment, the object, and the scene in the ambient light is more uniformed.)
Later this year, we will release the finalized, complete version of the "Full-time dynamic global illumination system," where players will be able to experience subtle and realistic lighting changes during the weather transition for an even better gaming experience.
Exposure and post-processing technology
As you can imagine, color and post-production are very crucial parts when it comes to graphics, they both play a key role in the overall visual presentation of the picture.
We are happy to announce that the QuickSilverX engine can now achieve a "perfect docking" with DaVinci Resolve, a professional application widely used in the film and television industry.
This means that the game will automatically select the most suitable brightness in various lighting environments, not only to make the graphics look better but also to make the shadows and other dark spots display more details.
In other words, with the help from DaVinci Resolve, we can finally present the delicately designed color palette to players accurately. As an example, among the widely used game engines in the industry, only powerful engines such as Frostbite used in Battlefield 5 fully supports DaVinci Resolve. Our vision is to continue making breakthroughs and innovations in ROE's graphics to bring you the best game quality possible.
In addition, we will be adding some movie-style filter options to the graphics settings: Vignette, Film Grain, and Color Fringing. Players can choose them according to their preferences.
---------------------[In-game screenshot after the filter options are all turned on]---------------------
Ring of Elysium - 1st Anniversary Celebration Month
Ring of Elysium's Early Access was launched on September 19, 2018, we went from 0 to 10 million total players, from Adventurer season 1 to season 5, scored an 8.5 review by IGN, and a 73% rating on Steam. All of that progress is inseparable from the support and encouragement of our amazing players. To express our gratitude and give back to the community, we have prepared a variety of in-game and community events for the occasion.
During the Anniversary Month, we have prepared a FREE Anniversary DLC (downloadable via the ROE Steam store page), a limited-time event for players to collect and redeem exclusive special-variations of previous season characters, 4 weeks of special limited-time modes, and an official eSports event. On top of that, we're also going to sprinkle some fun decorations around the map to fit the theme of the celebration month.The 1st Anniversary Celebration Month officially begins on after the September 19 update. Let's join the celebration!
More QOL changes
We've been continuously optimizing various details of the game and making QOL improvements to provide a better gaming experience for everyone. Here are a few more changes you can expect coming very soon:
- Allow spectating in Squad mode after the entire squad is eliminated
- Marking system optimizations, allowing customization for teammate mark colors, and set separate keybinds for different quick-marks
That sums up this issue's Developer Insights. As always, thank you for reading and your support, make sure to leave your feedback in the comment section below and we'll see you next time, cheers!
-ROE DEV Team
