Lords of the Fallen - Inteview @ Worldsfactory

Worldsfactory posted a new interview with Deck13‘s Michele Giacalone, and asked a bunch of questions about Lords of the Fallen. Here is a small sample.

You’ve built an in-house engine called FLEDGE for Lords of the Fallen. Can you tell us why you decided to do this instead of just using a third party engine such as Unreal Engine 4 or CryEngine?

We have been using our engine in the past for several other projects, such as Venetica, and we continued to extend and improve it for each new project we had building over the time a technology and a set of tools that matches closely the needs of our team. Using a third party engine, especially for large projects, may not be an ideal solution, especially if the whole team has to switch to a completely new workflow and there are still big technical questions on consoles performance. For us it was more convenient invest in our own technology, it required a lot of efforts, but it paid out in the end.

What’s the single feature of FLEDGE you’re most proud of? Also, would it be possible to create a seamless open world RPG with it, or would it be necessary to make a lot of changes?

It’s hard to answer to this question, I am proud of many aspects of our engine, but probably one of the best feature that can be appreciated in LotF is the volumetric lighting system. Our engine doesn’t support any complex streaming features yet, so a seamless open world would have been really difficult to achieve, but this is one of the aspects we are investing time and research for the next engine iteration.