The EMP effect has aged gracefully, but it's starting to show its age next to the Mantis QED or the new engine effects. Any aspirations for a polish pass?
TL;DRMike Snowdon agrees the EMP effect is a prime candidate for improvement and says it's on the list to be redone from scratch through the VFX concept pipeline, with no look or timing given.
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for saying they've aged gracefully. They are quite old. I would agree that they are definitely a prime candidate for an improvement, and especially because we have a lot of better options now with the toolset that we've got. We've massively expanded our GPU particle system since we did the EMP effect, and lots of effects actually as well. So yeah, absolutely, it is on the list to be updated.
What's it going to look like?
Well, we'd have to go through the pipeline, wouldn't we, Jared? So we'd have to go through the VFX concepting process, work out what we can and can't do, work out if there's any kind of things that the designers need from it that the current version doesn't offer. And that's how we kind of define the look, really, just taking all that into consideration and concepting.
So it's a back-to-one kind of thing with it. It's not just taking what's there and remastering it, right?
No, no. Starting again, really. To be honest, we didn't even have VFX concept back then when we did the EMP effects. So we would definitely go through that pipeline now.