In a recent interview with Japanese media outlet CGWORLD, Cygames addressed the development status of its long-anticipated “first AAA project.” Titled Project Awakening, the game was initially announced at Cygames NEXT 2016 as an “upcoming high-end console game,” with more details, including a PS4 release, subsequently unveiled during E3 2018.
However, aside from some new footage revealed during 2021’s Cygames Tech Conference, there hasn’t been any word about the game’s actual development status for years now.
Talking to CGWORLD, Kimihiro Tomino, manager of Cygames’ Console Design Team, explains that the division is currently pouring most of its efforts into developing Project Awakening, and that the core elements of the game have finally been finished. While there’s still a lot of work to be done, he says that development is now at a stage where it will only continue to accelerate.
When it comes to visual direction, Tomino says that Cygames is aiming for “hyper-photorealism.” As he describes it,“We don’t want it to be just the pretty kind of photorealism. We also want to express the feeling of rawness, and the sense of everyday life and grittiness of the characters.”
Apparently, the characters were completely redesigned from ground-up at one point thanks to the upgraded in-house 3D scanning equipment Cygames adopted in 2019, which allowed them to obtain significantly higher-resolution data. To amplify the aforementioned “rawness,” the characters are scanned first and then manually adjusted by sculptors.
According to Tomino, the game is being developed under the theme of “How to translate the real world into the world of games.” Specifically, in order to achieve a realistic open world, which is based on 13th century Europe, Cygames hired specialized vegetation artists and geologists to design it. Since the placement of terrain and vegetation is also directly related to the gameplay, level designers worked closely with the vegetation and geology specialists to create game logic that is “as close to the real world as possible,” Tomino explains.
Interestingly, while it was originally announced that Project Awakening would be Cygames’ first game to use the in-house Cyllista Game Engine, Tomino reveals that the Console Design Team primarily uses Unreal Engine 5, suggesting that it is also being used for this title. However, since the CGWORLD interview was specifically published as a recruitment ad giving insight into how the company works behind the scenes, it is also likely that the adoption of a more general-use game engine is to create a more “familiar” environment for new hires.
Project Awakening is currently in development.
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