Q: You’ve confirmed that we’ll see a whole host of Ray Traced effects in the title, including shadows and reflections. How is the PS5 hardware in terms of ray tracing in your eyes, and also – as a games developer, what is HW based RT allowing you to accomplish – especially given the atmospheric nature of the game I imagine (like titles such as Control) it would benefit greatly with RT.
A: Currently, we can only speak on the Unreal Engine side of these details. But what I can say is what the Ray-Tracing is allowing us to do is pretty amazing. Visually, QE is starting to take on an almost Silent Hill modernized type of feel, there is a “thick” feeling to the air and the lighting we are doing makes you very uneasy, even when there are no enemies present. And it’s the same for 3D audio… sound is the most important thing in gaming after the visuals and hearing the world around you is quite the experience.
Q: On the same subject, what are you planning to do with the PS4 version of the code, will it use more traditional effects such as Shadow Maps / SSR?
A: The PS4 version of Quantum error will definitely be missing all the awesome new features of the PS5, like ray tracing, 3D audio enhancements, and CPU heavy features. SSR will definitely be the technique used on PS4; we will have to scale back some of the physics and resolution to 1080p.