Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 Dev Diary Details Game's Graphical Improvements
Shifting from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 was a big move for Paradox and The Chinese Room when developing Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. The team broke down a ton of the details in a new dev diary published to the Bloodlines 2 website.
The move to Unreal 5 brought Nanite, virtual shadow maps, and Lumen technologies into play in particular. Lumen is a real-time global illumination technology that should significantly improve the visual fidelity in Bloodlines 2, but presented a number of challenges to the developers in keeping performance consistent while allowing for dynamic changes to the game’s lighting.
Virtual shadow maps made huge improvements to the game’s shadow rendering, allowing for sharp shadow detail with little performance impact.
Nanite, designed for geometry handling, virtualized assets, reducing draw calls and allowing for detailed, photorealistic environments.
All of these improvements should be a treat for fans, but took significant effort for the development team to navigate in terms of overcoming complexities, engine upgrades, and necessitating additional communication across teams. Tackling the challenges as a team and all the other effort involved brought the dev team together and solidified the bonds between team members.
The result of those efforts should be evident in the final result and the team intends to show their work off in a new gameplay extended reveal this coming January.
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