Shadow of War has gone through some changes since it launched last October. The much-criticised loot box marketplace is gone, leaving a fairly unsullied orc murder/management sim. So I looked up that the game can be around 67 GB or so with the basic textures, and it's only 93 GB with the 4K textures and cinematics. I do not have a 4K display, and my internet isn't that good so it's gonna take a few days to download the game in the first place, yet alone with the 4k textures. Of course, I would've bought the game on PC DVD to bypass all of this, but Warner Bros hasn't.
When you were fighting orcs in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, you may not have noticed your sword-fodder was increasing and decreasing in size.
We don’t mean different orcs just being different sizes, which of course happened as well. We mean the actual, single orc you’re pummelling would inflate and shrink as you gave it what-for. It happened right under all our noses.
Shadow Of War Size Pc
In a recent talk to fellow animators at the Game Developer’s Conference, we heard from art animation lead Camille Chu and art advanced animator John Piel about some of the challenges in synching up the animations of two models.
Just counting the combat animations between protagonist Talion and orcs, there were 1,200 animations that locked Talion and his prey into a synched sequence. If you count all the other beasts Talion can slay, that number goes up to 2,500.
Shadow Of War Mithril Edition
These execution animations were a big part of the game, and the development team knew players would be expecting a variety of moves and weapons. It took two years to make them all.
That’s a lot of motion capture and debugging, when you consider all the different variables. What if Talion goes for the killing blow from behind, instead of from the side? What if the Orc is at a different altitude? What if Talion is mounted, or moving at speed? What if someone is on all fours?
To keep things a bit simpler, all the orcs in the game actually use Talion’s skeleton (most bipedal models do, if not all). They do, however, vary in size.
In the case of these complex, synchronised animations, it was necessary to make sure the two models align. Weapons clipping through each other would look ugly, as would hearing a “clang” when your sword never touched theirs. A big part of aligning those animations was making sure the models were the right size by the time they clash. Talion was a constant, but the orcs themselves came in all shapes, sizes, and cockney accents.
That meant changing the orc size mid-combat. This would happen multiple times in every fight. Often this would be somewhat masked by cinematic camera movements, but Monolith made sure there were never any camera cuts. Each fight was one continuous “take.”
According to John Piel, “The scale of the orc quickly changes to 110% of Talion during the animation and then drifts back.”
Having its own motion capture studio helped a lot with these challenges. It also helped that Monolith’s animators were also the actors — many of them had done some kind of martial arts and knew exactly what they wanted to capture.
That allowed Monolith to use the facility as needed, instead of booking expensive shoot days. When the operation scaled up to include contract workers to get that hefty haul of 2,500 animations done, they would record the movements and do a bit of cleaning before sending them out to be polished.
That was just one aspect of the combat — even running around the world was a complex cocktail of model movement.
“Even just a run animation could be blended with 8-12 other animations at any given point,” said Camille Chu.
While we didn’t think too fondly of certain aspects of the game (what did you do to Shelob?!?), this is one aspect that Monolith certainly nailed. It pulled a fast one on all Shadow of War players — little did we all know orcs were scaling up and down right before their eyes, multiple times every fight.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War is set for release on Tuesday, and for PC players, you may want to free up some room in preparation for the game’s installation.
Over on NeoGAF, a user has posted a screenshot, which you can see below, of the download size required to play the highly anticipated sequel. According to the image, players will need a rather eye-watering 97.7GB to install the game on PC. As mentioned in the post, this might prove troublesome for those playing with SSDs and have bandwidth caps on their ISP.
Meanwhile, players on PS4 Pro can expect to download the game at a file size of 63.93GB, as shown by the following image.
This is probably going to be something that will be an inevitability as games begin to aim for 4K resolution going forward. Still, it isn’t going to be the most welcoming news for those who are limited in their PC capabilities.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War presents the follow up to 2014’s Shadow of Mordor, as the franchise continues the story of protagonist Talion and his fight against the Dark Lord, Sauron. The game is finally set to launch on PC, Xbox One and PS4 on October 10th, 2017.
Shadow of War certainly looks promising so far, boasting a map three times the size of the previous outing, as well as a vastly enhanced Nemesis System, which was something that made the first game so enticing. Whatever it holds in store, we won’t have much longer to wait, with the release being just a couple of days away.