Empire of the Ants Tech Q&A – Pushing Visuals with UE5 in an RTS Game
In a couple of weeks, French duo Microids (publisher) and Tower Five (developer) will release Empire of the Ants for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. The game is an adaptation of a French sci-fi novel and will offer a combination of real-time strategy gameplay elements and stunning Unreal Engine 5 powered visuals, the latter being not so common in the RTS genre. The reception for the demo, available as part of the Steam Next Fest (which ends in a few hours), has been very positive: 87% of 131 user reviews gave it a thumbs up.
Ahead of the upcoming launch scheduled for November 7, we interviewed Tower Five CEO and Game Director Renaud Charpentier with a focus on tech features in Empire of the Ants. We got confirmation that the game will support NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation and probably AMD FSR Frame Generation too, and Charpentier also talked about the studio's impressions of the PS5 Pro console (for which the game is enhanced).
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Real-time strategy games do not usually focus on delivering photorealistic visuals. Why did you make this choice for Empire of the Ants?
Empire is based on a series of novels by French author Bernard Werber, and one of the key concepts in these is to project you into the ant world, at their size, through their eyes, through their perspective of the world, both literally and figuratively. We wanted to respect that and transpose this unique point of view, a pretty realistic one, so we went for a documentary visual style, something akin to the BBC documentaries on wildlife, hence a photorealistic look independent of the game genre. But you already have RTS games that aim to be pretty close to reality, like the historical Total War games, and it works very well for them, so we were confident we could go in this direction, too.
What version of Unreal Engine 5 are you using?
The latest one we can integrate and test; the game will release using version 5.4.2.
Are you using the
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