Many of gaming’s most compelling stories come from those who’ve helped to create our favorite Xbox One games. In our Inside Xbox One X Enhanced series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of the work involved in enhancing these epic games for Xbox One X, how they’ve helped chart the course of the world’s most powerful console, and what that means for the future of gaming. Today we’ll be talking with Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 Technical Director Carl Johan Lejdfors.
What specifically is your development team doing to enhance Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 for Xbox One X?
Our team utilized the increased memory and powerful GPU to improve high resolution rendering in all areas of The Division 2’s Washington D.C. We include support for features like HDR, and 4K rendering even on displays that only support 1080p, which helps leading to sharper details and less aliasing. Also, the faster hard drive makes load times better and in-game streaming faster.
How do these enhancements impact the gaming experience?
Players will experience a richer, more detailed and vibrant world for Agents to explore and interact with. The game will run smoother, look better, and load faster.
Why did your development team choose to focus on these enhancement areas?
The visual richness and sheer amount of detail in the world of The Division 2 is a key distinguishing feature. Taking that experience to the next level would strengthen that aspect even more. By rendering in 4k and taking advantage of the increased memory to allow crisper textures and more details, we judged that this would be the best possible player experience on the Xbox One X.
How do you expect fans of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2will respond to seeing/playing it on Xbox One X with these enhancements?
We put a lot of work into the details of D.C., so we hope they are able to take in every little detail! A lot of research with specialists has been done to make sure that we produced the most realistic reproduction of D.C. 7 months after a catastrophic event.
The result is our massive open world, with lots to see and even more to experience in The Division 2. Players will be even more immersed in our world and truly experience what we call the “Environmental Storytelling”; you will always be tempted to try to understand what could have happened here.
How has the process been to get the game up and running on Xbox One X?
Getting everything up and running on the Xbox One X was very straightforward and we had it up and spinning after about 1 day of receiving the development Xbox One X hardware. Tuning the graphics experience took a bit more time, but the Xbox architecture, for both the base and X versions, is a natural fit for the internal architecture of the Snowdrop engine powering The Division 2.
What enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for Tom Clancy’s The Division 2on Xbox One X?
One thing we loved was being able to use 8k textures for our skies, which leads to super-detailed clouds and gloriously beautiful sunsets. This makes the weather changes and day/night cycle in Washington D.C. a truly breathtaking experience on the Xbox One X.
What does 4K and HDR mean for your game, games in the future and development at your studio?
The use of HDR can lead to a vastly better looking games where players can experience more details in dark areas, more vibrant colors, and even better looking lighting. The support of high resolution 4K rendering capabilities also leads to sharper details on all compatible monitors and TV screens. HDR and 4K together makes all the hard work of our art teams really stand out by giving it that extra 110% awesome.
Tom Clancy’s The Division was visually spectacular on Xbox One and later Enhanced for Xbox One X, what was different about developing Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 natively for Xbox One X?
Well, one of the key differences in The Division 2 is that we have completely overhauled the render pipeline to scale better with increased resolution. So, with 4k rendering this is where the Xbox One X really shines. This gives us even better rendering performance on the Xbox One X compared to the previous game, giving all the players out there a better experience.
Thanks to Carl Johan Lejdfors for taking the time to sit down with Xbox Wire to talk about enhancing Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 for Xbox One X. Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for future Xbox One X Enhanced features as well as news on your favorite games.
See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire
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