Ryse is "the hot one at the launch prom" thanks to Xbox One, CryEngine's power

Ryse: Son of Rome developer Crytek has nothing but praise for the Xbox One, both in terms of its power and ease of development.

Speaking with Develop, Ryse design director PJ Esteves said the Xbox One allowed Crytek to do a lot of things that would otherwise have been very difficult.

"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," he 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."

Ryse was originally in development for Xbox 360 but Esteves said the transition to Xbox One was smooth and easy.

"I think it was about a week to get up and running on Xbox One from the time we got the first kits," he said.

"Having a great partnership with Microsoft helped, to prepare us as the platform developed alongside our game. Any launch game lands hot; it doesn't matter who you are.

"But having a mature engine really helped, and getting to harness things like physically based rendering was incredible. Improvements in facial animation pipelines are great too. It's a terrible way to say it, but CryEngine and the Xbox One have let our game be the hot one at the launch prom."

What a beautiful image.