Insomniac's Next Gen Powers – Seven Things They're Doing for the First Time

In the last week, Insomniac Games has lifted the lid on Sunset Overdrive, revealing its world, its gameplay, and some of its wild weaponry. The game represents a number of firsts for the studio: Insomniac Games’ first open world game, its first title built from the ground up exclusively for Xbox, and it’s also its first on this generation of hardware. Xbox One is the fourth generation of home consoles that many on the team have worked on, so I asked several folks working on Sunset Overdrive what they’re now able to accomplish that they never could before.

More of everything, both big…

This obviously is our first open world game, and we came in with some pretty high expectations. We wanted a very dense, very colorful world with a lot more detail than you see in a lot of games. We wanted a really high enemy count, our minimum we wanted to be able to load 120 enemies at a time. We wanted to be able to go a certain speed of traversing through the world which obviously involves loading things quickly enough. I think some of the less obvious things are a lot of the fourth wall effects that we have in the game… those aren’t cheap to do at all [in terms of system resources], and with the power of the Xbox One we actually are able to pull a lot of those off. Frankly I thought we set technical limitations that we weren’t going to be able to meet, like we’ll say 120 [enemies on screen] and 90 will be OK, but we actually hit all those things very well. – Drew Murray, Game Director

…and small

The exact opposite are the tiny details, so all of the clothes that you’re wearing react appropriately as you’re moving. Previous generations clothes were always really static or super, super expensive – prohibitively expensive [in terms of system resources], and now you’ll notice your vest is swaying in the wind or, like, the chain you have is flopping appropriately. Even the little tchotchke characters we have are dangling appropriately. There’s details like that in the world everywhere, and I think that adds up to something that just feels a lot more rich and immersive. That was not possible in previous generations. – Marcus Smith, Sunset Overdrive Co-creator

Not just more enemies, more varied enemies

It lets us do things with animation where our animation counts can go through the roof. We can have our enemies react – have multiples of variants vs what we had on hit reacts. Our enemies have personalities, so you’ll see a bunch of OD [Overcharge Drinkers] coming at you, and they’ll all have different movesets for a lot of their basic moves and stuff. That’s something that our memory would never let us do before. It lets us put a lot of variety and a lot more of a lived-in feel and a lot more of a natural feel to things while also letting …read more