Asobo Studio deserves kudos for the scale of the achievement delivered in the recently released A Plague Tale: Innocence. Where many smaller studios tap into established engines like Unreal Engine 4 or Unity for their technological needs, this outfit did things the old-fashioned way, developing its own proprietary engine technology. The end result is an absolutely beautiful game and one that scales remarkably well as we climb the console ladder and beyond to the heights of PC’s most powerful graphics hardware.
I think what makes A Plague Tale really work from a visual perspective is more than just the core engine technology – though its accomplishments are significant. Combining a linear, story-driven experience with a striking art style and design running on tech sees all components deliver something greater than the sum of their parts.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is a wonderful-looking game from its environments, to its characters, and its effects work. Just the first scene is an absolute treat, revealing a rich post-process pipeline that’s reminiscent of Unreal Engine 4 at its most resplendent. There’s an embarrassment of riches here, with a beautifully soft volumetric lighting solution, which looks good on all platforms but absolutely shines on PC at its highest settings. Volumetrics don’t just come from the sun: lighting piercing fog, suggesting that colour and shadow are drawn from smaller point lights, such as lanterns or torches. It’s also impressive to see volumetrics beam through stained glass windows, with the varying colours of the glass illuminating light shards and – impressively – the ground too. It’s just one example of an attention to detail that is much appreciated and sometimes overlooked.
Also impressive is the sheer density of the scenes. No doubt the linear nature of the game makes authoring and rendering these environments easier than some of the open world epics we see from the triple-A studios but even the simplest levels are thick with forest, brush, undergrowth, leaves and twigs. A Plague Tale takes advantage of Quixel Megascans – a library of photogrammetrically-sourced textures and materials. Using this drastically lowers the burden of asset creation, with Asobos able to tap into a pre-existing library of textures and material surfaces, allowing the staff to focus on modelling, placement and lighting instead. The end result is a high level of quality and consistency, with an aesthetic reminiscent of the Dark Souls games or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
The characters themselves also possess a high level of quality that stands up against games created with a much higher budget. It starts in the soft glow of the game’s direct lighting with an approximation of sub-surface scattering on character skin along with an effective hair shader. It seems to use alpha-to-coverage cards that clean up over time using temporal anti-aliasing. Hair also shows a particularly nice, authentic-looking multi-coloured sheen, with a soft look around its edges. While the game offers very high resolution shadow maps (on PC at least), even these would still suffer under the closer inspection on characters. Asobos instead utilises screen-space self-shadowing that seems to apply from any light source. This keep shadows on faces tight and detailed in close-ups, but do have typical screen-space problems where they disappear when obscured, or when the shadow-casting object falls out of view. Eyes are the only aspect that fall noticeably short, looking rather glassy,