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).
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 entire core UE5 feature set (Lumen, Nanite, etc.)? If so, what would you say is the most exciting technology for a game developer?
Yes, we heavily rely on both Nanite and Lumen; we also make good use of features that existed already in UE4 but became empowered by NVMe drives: Texture streaming and Virtual texturing. For us, Nanite was the real game changer; getting rid of most LODs and not having to handle mesh transitions is both way simpler and way nicer visually.
Will you enable ray traced Lumen Global Illumination in the game?
Lumen is a set of tools and render passes handling various aspects of rendering, so it uses ray tracing for some of the render passes but it does more than that outside of ray tracing.
Will the PC version support frame generation techniques from NVIDIA and/or AMD?
Yes, the PC versions will support all DLSS3 features at release, including frame generation. We also plan to support the AMD solution, most likely at release or shortly after. If we can use any technology that improves the player’s experience, we will.
What do you think of the PS5 Pro’s hardware? What’s the single feature you were most impressed with?
It is a kind of natural evolution of the Ps5 hardware, same paradigms but more processing power on the GPU and “ray tracing” cores. For us, the gain of about 50% more GPU processing power is the most interesting of course, as our game is GPU bound, not CPU bound.
Compared to the jump between PS4 Pro and PS4, would you say the PS5 Pro-PS5 difference is similar or reduced (e.g., the advancement is less pronounced)?
It seems comparable in terms of evolution philosophy. It is the same gen console but with better rendering capacities. Now, it is early and so hard to compare what the PS5 Pro will do for PS5 games to what the PS4 Pro did for PS4 games. But globally, it seems many games will go from 30 to 60 fps on the Pro version, and that’s comparable to what we had on PS4 Pro. It will probably scale better for an engine version: most games today do not rely on frame rate to sync/time their simulations. So they are more capable of rendering faster without altering their behaviors.
On PlayStation 4, you still had fantastic games like Bloodborne, where the game can’t run above 30 because the simulation is linked to the rendering. So if you don’t modify the engine and render at 60 fps, then your game will run twice faster, all the game, so everything will be twice faster for the player. Such frame rate bound simulations were still relatively common in the PS4 era, and they made taking advantage of a GPU upscale much harder. So, possibly, PlayStation 5 games will take better advantage of the PS5 Pro’s capacities. The fact that most games nowadays use a form of variable resolution also helps with scaling up the quality with the GPU.
How much of an improvement is there between the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of the game? Also, how does the PS5 Pro version stack with the maxed-out PC game?
As said and as presented by Sony, it is expected that most games will double their frame rate on the Pro or improve scene quality if they were already running in 60 on a PS5. Still, maxed out PCs are kind of “no limit” so they will of course be more powerful, but you can’t compare them. A maxed out PC is going to cost easily 3 to 5 times more and consume 3 to 5 times more electrical energy. But what is interesting and says a lot about the flattening silicon evolution curve is that your game on your monster PC is not going to look or play 3 to 5 times better than on a PS5 Pro console. There is a huge diminishing return now on high end silicon, and that might have an impact on the life cycle duration of console hardware.
Will there be different modes for the PS5 Pro version of Empire of the Ants?
No, there is a single 60 fps mode, so double the frame rate of the PlayStation 5 version.
Are you using PSSR in Empire of the Ants?
We don’t. It came very late in our development cycle for this game, so we stuck to the
Unreal equivalent.
Pricing is the big controversy about Sony’s new console. Based on the hardware, do you believe it to be fair or excessive?
I think the base PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X were incredible pieces of hardware when they launched at the price point they were released at. At the time, it was impossible to build a PC that was as powerful on the same budget. Since then, there has been massive inflation of prices in the world, not to mention inflation of prices on the games themselves, so comparing the PS5 Pro price with benchmarks and prices of decades ago doesn’t seem very relevant.
The interesting question would be how much it costs in terms of average salary percentage in each region and how much previous top-end consoles cost relative to their time. I don’t know about that, but I remember that in my youth, many consoles were already considered pretty expensive by my parents and my friend’s parents.
Thank you for your time.
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