Matt Allen, the director of technical art behind Middle-earth: Shadow of War, has expressed his affection towards Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox Scorpio.
“So far, we really like it,” Allen told TechRadar. “I don’t know how much they’ve revealed the specs, but it is an upgrade. It’s not just sort-of, We’re going to upgrade some stuff. There’s things that you can do with it. So, we’re pretty excited to be working with them specifically.”
While it’s exciting that Xbox Scorpio is going to be a significant upgrade when it launches this fall, Allen also mentioned Shadow of War’s focus on providing HDR on Xbox Scorpio. He said, “Until you’ve seen the game at 4K and HDR, it’s a different experience.”
While its focus on Xbox Scorpio and 4K HDR is definitely appealing, Shadow of War has a lot more going on under the hood than just these two features. “We have a new renderer than we did,” Allen said. “A new facial animation system, a new core animation system. We really picked a lot od things and started to go crazy. It’s basically a full upgrade of the engine. The last game we really focused on the game, but this one we knew what we were doing from a game standpoint and then the engine guys were like, Alright, can we show off a bit?”
Middle-earth: Shadow of War launches on Xbox One, Windows 10 and Xbox Scorpio as part of Xbox Play Anywhere on August 22. While the Xbox Scorpio version won’t be available at launch, you’ll still get the version for free when it launches alongside Xbox Scorpio towards the end of 2017.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.