As Amazon continues contending with New World’s population boom following the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion, it’s releasing more than hotfixes, although it’s done several of those now. And among those releases is a new Forged in Aeternum video that focuses on the game’s cinematics – which also means some spoilers for players who haven’t gotten that far yet.
The developers naturally turn to a particular cinematic scene with Thorpe which was designed one way and then retooled on a dime when a dev brainstormed the idea to have a tentacle whip out of the pit of doom and snatch him away. In fact, it sounds as if the team was building its cinematics pipeline as it went and is only just now feeling as if it’s pulling off some of the complicated content it wanted to do.
“It was obviously a pretty big stretch for just diving into cinematics and not having the kind of pipeline and support completely there yet,” lead animator Brett Harris says. “This is just kind of the beginning of it right now. These will get better and better. We’re going to get more support, better facial rigs, better character animation, better cameras.”
