Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Backer Portal Delay and how Cutscenes are made

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has a new update announcing a delay to the rollout of the backer portal. Additionally Owlcat describe what goes into the making of cutscenes.

Cutscenes can be quite complex! Imagine you command your character to hang an artifact banner over the gates of Drezen. Control is taken away from you, the character runs to the edge of the wall, and a special animation is played. The banner appears, it unfolds with the corresponding animation and a special effect that shows the banner’s magical impact on the environment. Then the camera smoothly moves to the square in front of the gates, the fog of war clears away, and you see a group of friendly crusaders fighting demons. The crusaders are inspired, the demons are weakened by the banner and try to use teleportation to flee. But teleportation does not work, so they try to flee on foot, and they die. The crusaders triumph. All this is one giant cutscene. Each crusader and each demon follows a designated sequence of commands: they hit, use abilities, die, or try to flee at the right time at the assigned locations. It's like a puppet show, where all the string-pulling is scripted in advance.

In the editor, this scene will look like a lot of parallel command sequences, which are started and stopped by different conditions and events. Depending on their complexity, cutscenes can take from a few minutes to several weeks to create.

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In most cutscenes, characters carry out the same sequences of actions as during gameplay—they run, fight, and use spells and abilities. All this is assembled in the editor by one person, usually a level designer. But sometimes we need to show special animations that have never been used before: pensively scratching one's head, hitting something with a battering ram, or running to a balcony and leaping off. Inanimate objects might need to be animated, like stones rolling down a hill, a gate breaking open, or a column collapsing. In these cases, cutscenes will require extra work by artists, animators, and FX artists.

That’s why we normally use existing assets in cutscenes, but sometimes we order new unique animations and effects. Needless to say, we use the coolest cutscenes to emphasize the most important, emotionally significant moments in the game. In Wrath of the Righteous, for example, we'd like to celebrate the player's character reaching each subsequent stage of the mythic progression by adding dramatic camera spinning, zooms, and distinctive animations and effects.

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