![\"Entertainment](\"https:\/\/eu-images.contentstack.com\/v3\/assets\/blt740a130ae3c5d529\/blt9b4ba8ab1cef9157\/67ae06cade4a676028b40494\/avowedkaifeatured.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=95&format=jpg&disable=upscale\" "\\"Entertainment")
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Image via Obsidian Entertainment\/Microsoft.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This week Microsoft-owned Obsidian Entertainment is releasing <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>, a first-person fantasy role-playing game set in the same universe as the Pillars of Eternity series. Though the studio is no stranger to making first-person RPGs like <\/span>Fallout: New Vegas<\/span><\/span> and <\/span>The Outer Worlds<\/span><\/span>, bringing the Pillars series to first-person is a hefty challenge. The existing audience is used to turn-based combat and top-down exploration. And when it comes to first-person fantasy\u2014well, every game in the field is likely to be compared against Bethesda Softworks’ <\/span>The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim<\/span><\/span>, the 800lb gorilla of the genre.<\/span><\/p>\n It’s a tall task to be sure. Game Developer previously spoke with game director <\/span>Carrie Patel<\/a><\/span> about translating the wild world of the Pillars series to first-person fantasy, but we had more questions about the technical nitty gritty of the transition. When you play <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>, you quickly notice it feels distinctly different from the fantasy epic made by Obsidian’s cousins at Bethesda. There’s a certain snappiness to how the player animations feel, and the use of “hit stops” supercharges the impact of every swing of a sword, axe, mace, or other melee medium for violence.<\/span><\/p>\n The details are dense\u2014but luckily gameplay director Gabe Paramo, lead VFX Artist Ash Kumar, and senior animator Seth McCaughey had answers for us and fellow developers. In a conversation earlier this month, the trio broke down how those hit stops\u2014alongside carefully-crafted motion trails, 60 FPS source animations, and player response to the 2023 Xbox Showcase\u2014were all key parts of making the game’s combat so punchy and unforgettable.<\/span><\/p>\n Related:<\/span>Avowed director Carrie Patel explains how Obsidian pushes boundaries in the fantasy genre<\/a><\/p>\n You might recall that when Obsidian first teased <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>, it mentioned the game would include optional co-op multiplayer. That feature was cut later in development (in <\/span>a 2023 documentary<\/a><\/span> the team explained designing for multiplayer was interfering with single-player pipelines), but elements of its design were “foundational” for the first-person combat of <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n Paramo broke down how in a rather technical explanation, beginning with how the team was designing animations in Unreal 4 (and later Unreal 5). Paramo set up much of the initial combat design. The goal, he said, was to make sure a player’s console or PC could replicate the third-person view on another player’s machine during multiplayer gameplay.<\/span><\/p>\n “We needed to be able to utilize Unreal’s <\/span>slot system<\/a><\/span> in their <\/span>[animation] montages<\/a><\/span>, so that you’d basically have two tracks simultaneously going on. Then, depending on whether you’re in first or third-person view, they’re in that perspective, running that animation tree, and running that slot,” he said.<\/span><\/p>\n Translation: In order to design <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>‘s first-person view, Obsidian needed a functional third-person camera that could capture the animations of another player and let a player in first-person see what the other player was doing in third-person. That made the third-person camera that ships with <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span> (useful for players who might get motion sick in a first-person view) a “foundational” part of the game.<\/span><\/p>\n Developers familiar with multiplayer animation know there are inherent limitations to animating objects and characters in a way that can be efficiently tracked by two machines across great distances. Even with the multiplayer features removed from <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>, the work put into the Unreal slot systems was also “foundational” for the final game. “The constraints of animation timing and keeping those things in sync\u2014if you don’t do that, the gameplay feels off-sync on another person’s machine,” Paramos continued. “I think that’s where it all started from.”<\/span><\/p>\n Image via Obsidian Entertainment\/Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Throughout that process, the team began reckoning with the challenges of a first-person combat system that would be dominated by melee attacks. Players can use guns, bows, and magic pepper enemies from a distance, but in the fantasy world of <\/span>Pillars of Eternity<\/span><\/span>, enemies are always rushing toward the player with a violent urge to be smacked upside the head. McCaughey explained that melee animation is “a lot more difficult in first-person to make it readable and feel comfortable.”<\/span><\/p>\n He called out how much time the animation team spent on “motion trails”\u2014subtle animations that follow the movement of the players’ weapons as they attack. They’re not generally visible to the human eye, but their presence tricks the brain into getting a more clear sense of how objects move in the game. It’s the equivalent of adding “woosh” noises to swords in fantasy movies. Swords may not make those sounds in real life, but it helps the viewer sense how heavy a swing is.<\/span><\/p>\n “We pushed the source animations of those to up to 60 frames per second to get good, clean motion trails and good readability,” he said, adding that <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>‘s motion trail rendering is calculated in real-time. “You need lots of samples so they aren’t taking a strange path through the frame as they go.”<\/span><\/p>\n If the motion trail animations don’t work properly, they might render in a completely different direction from where the player swings. Imagine swinging your sword left-to-right, but an animation appears showing from right to left. “Or in a loop de loop,” McCaughey said with just a hint of exasperation.<\/span><\/p>\n A number of weapons and magical spells in <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span> generate a mix of flashy, colorful visual effects. You’ve got fireballs, chained lightning, sparks of energy shooting out of a wand, and more. In a strictly third-person game, those effects would render in the midground of the environment. When you’re in first-person view, those big effects are playing front-and-center.<\/span><\/p>\n According to Kumar, that means the fidelity of the animations needed to be “way higher” while being careful about how much space they took place on the screen. What helped, in part, was the creation of “hit stops” on all the weapons that play on the animation as the player makes contact with the enemy.<\/span><\/p>\n “Hit stops” for the uneducated (like I was before this conversation) are brief pauses in an animation where an object freezes, then accelerates to mimic the feeling of colliding objects. Kumar said combat designer Max Matzenbacher was the one responsible for implementing them in <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>, and explained those brief pauses were a huge opportunity for the VFX team to spice up the combat visuals.<\/span><\/p>\n “On the effects side, we try to underline it with different bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing effects,” he explained\u2014largely referring to blood spatters. Those spatters, he said, also had to play differently between first-person and third-person view, because the different camera position would automatically make the effects play at different distances.<\/span><\/p>\n McCaughey said <\/span>Avowed<\/span><\/span>‘s hit stops have another interesting feature. “They’re not just a pausing of the animation,” he said. “It actually branches to [another] unique animation where the weapon hits and draws through\u2014the blade hits, is deflected, and pulls through the cut so you can feel the difference between swinging at air and swinging and hitting the target.”<\/span><\/p>\n Image via Obsidian Entertainment\/Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The system also accounts for attacks on enemies whose defenses are too strong for the player’s current power level. Different animations play on those attacks that show the player’s weapon bouncing off the target instead of powerfully swinging through.<\/span><\/p>\n That’s a new trick for Obsidian\u2014if you study the animation of <\/span>The Outer Worlds<\/span><\/span>, you’ll notice it has conventional swinging animations for melee weapons, with no fancy redirects based on where the blow lands.<\/span><\/p>\n Tuning all of these animations and effects, as always, demanded hours and hours of staring at fast-moving loops to assess if what they’d created felt good for players. With so many different moving parts, we wanted to know how Mcaughey, Kumar, and Parano could keep track of the different variations and figure out what worked and what didn’t.<\/span><\/p>\nEarly multiplayer design had long-term payoff<\/h2>\n
![\"Entertainment](\"https:\/\/eu-images.contentstack.com\/v3\/assets\/blt740a130ae3c5d529\/blt5698b6f9812fa891\/67ae05e8b9191b699c4d433e\/Avowed_GT_VISTA_1.png?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale\" "\\"Entertainment")
<\/p>\nMaking visual effects that play up-close and personal<\/h2>\n
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