Taking a zero-nonsense approach to game development: why Liquid Swords chose UE5 for Samson
Founded in 2020 and based in Stockholm, Sweden, Liquid Swords is a video game studio created by industry veteran and outspoken X user Christofer Sundberg. Christofer is renowned as the founder of Avalanche Studios and the brains behind the Just Cause game series.
Born out of a desire to return to the roots of what makes game development great, Stockholm-based Liquid Swords is led by gaming industry veteran Christofer Sundberg, who is best known as the founder of Avalanche Studios and the brains behind the popular Just Cause franchise.
Interestingly, when Sundberg and the newly-formed team set out to make its first title, a philosophical approach to game design and development took center stage. While most new studios strive to proclaim what they are, it can be said that the studio and its debut project, the gritty, open-world action game Samson, are equally as focused on what they are not—no fluff, no-nonsense, no BS. In fact, Liquid Swords is built around the idea of fostering a studio that is creativity-led, free from unnecessary distractions, and solely focused on developing the very best games.
So, how does this philosophy translate into practical application and why was Unreal Engine 5 selected by the team to facilitate its vision for both the game and the studio itself? We recently caught up with Sundberg, Founder and Creative Director, and Fredrik Lönn, Technical Director, to find out.
Interestingly, when Sundberg and the newly-formed team set out to make its first title, a philosophical approach to game design and development took center stage. While most new studios strive to proclaim what they are, it can be said that the studio and its debut project, the gritty, open-world action game Samson, are equally as focused on what they are not—no fluff, no-nonsense, no BS. In fact, Liquid Swords is built around the idea of fostering a studio that is creativity-led, free from unnecessary distractions, and solely focused on developing the very best games.
So, how does this philosophy translate into practical application and why was Unreal Engine 5 selected by the team to facilitate its vision for both the game and the studio itself? We recently caught up with Sundberg, Founder and Creative Director, and Fredrik Lönn, Technical Director, to find out.
Thanks for joining us! As a new studio, Liquid Swords’ motto is “Zero-Nonsense Video Game Development”. Could you explain what that’s all about?
Christofer Sundberg, Founder and Creative Director: It means we cut the BS.
We offer no filler features, no content for the sake of PowerPoint slides, and we don’t chase trends. We create only what earns its place in the game. Every system has a job. Every mechanic has weight. If something does not make the player feel tension, power, or consequence, it doesn’t make it into the game.
Zero-nonsense is about respect. Respect for the player’s time and respect for the team’s craft, but also respect for the game itself. We ship fewer things, but every one of them hits like a freight train.
Could you provide a brief overview of Samson and tell us how the studio’s development philosophy is reflected in the project?
Sundberg: Samson is a grounded, character-driven action adventure set in Tyndalston, a city with a history of bad habits and a long memory. You play Samson McCray, a former enforcer and getaway driver, coming back to his hometown with a huge debt to pay off. After the St. Louis heist went completely sideways, his sister Oonagh made a deal with a group of criminals, meaning that Samson's and Oonagh's lives were spared, but only if Samson paid back what they owed, with interest.
The philosophy shows up everywhere. The game is tight, focused, and pressure-driven. No endless grind. No checklist open world. You wake up, you owe money, the clock is ticking, and the city does not care how you feel about it.
Every punch, crash, and choice matters. The world reacts. Systems overlap. Consequences stack. That, to us, is zero-nonsense design made playable.
Which films, shows, or games did you draw upon for inspiration when developing Samson?
Sundberg: We pull from grounded crime and character-first stories.
Films like Heat, The French Connection, Ronin, and Sicario. Stories where violence is fast, ugly, and decisive. Where tension comes from choices, not explosions every five seconds.
In games, we look at titles that respect player agency and tone. Things like Mafia, Max Payne, The Last of Us, and even Disco Elysium in how they treat consequence and identity. Not because they play the same, but because they take their worlds seriously.
The common thread is restraint. When something happens, it means something.
Image courtesy of Liquid Swords AB
What qualities did you look for in an engine when setting out to develop your debut project?
Fredrik Lönn, Technical Director: Here are some of the criteria we were looking for:
- Proven support for our target platforms, so we know we can ship;
- Used before to ship high-quality AA/AAA games, so we are not the first to tackle issues;
- Full access to source code, so we can adjust the engine and add specific features needed for the specific game we are doing;
- Ability to optimize and customize workflows to let our content creators work efficiently;
- Performant, so we have room for all the content we want;
- It is actively under development, so we can build on it for the future; and
- A reliable company owns the engine, so we know it will continue to be supported throughout the development and lifetime of our game.
Why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for Samson?
Lönn: Unreal has proven itself as a high-quality AAA engine, both by Epic itself in Fortnite and by other studios worldwide shipping amazing games on Unreal. Epic has been improving Unreal’s open world development, and developers have full access to the source code. As an added bonus, Unreal’s integrations with other software and pipelines are excellent.
Which Unreal Engine 5 features stood out to you most during development (and why)?
Lönn: Tool support stood out the most with how easy it is to extend and customize the toolset. When we wanted to test an external art tool, it always had integration with Unreal, and we could run actual tests right away. With a custom engine, we would have had to spend a month integrating, only to later find out that the workflow was not optional.
We have built tons of validators and custom tools just for our game. This helps content creators know when something is wrong right away, the moment they add it to the game. We automated much of the testing and added a bunch of custom debuggers to quickly find errors that are often hard to debug in an open world setting.
And I love Unreal Insights, it’s really easy to use, and it keeps getting better. With Unreal Insights, we get a view of what's really happening across all cores and the GPU. Often, when profiling, you find that each individual frame performs well; the bottlenecks are rather dependencies between threads, locks, or oversubscription of worker threads.
With Unreal Insights, we can record a whole section of gameplay—not just a few frames—and it has really helped us to find and eliminate a number of hitches that would have been really hard to do otherwise. The use of Unreal Insights has really helped us minimize hitches and deliver a smooth game experience.
Image courtesy of Liquid Swords AB
Samson brings some unique mechanics to the table, including Action Points, Law Response, and a Daily Debt Quota for players to manage. How do these mechanics combine to impact the overall experience?
Sundberg: They create pressure. Real pressure.
Action Points limit what you can do in a day, while the debt tells you what you must do. Law Response and Debt Collectors punish how you do it. Together, they force hard decisions.
Do you take a risky job for fast cash and bring heat on yourself? Do you play it safe and fall behind on debt? Do you push one more fight when you should go home?
There is no perfect route. You are always trading safety for speed, control for power. That tension is the game. You are not role-playing stress. You are managing it with your fists. That is Samson.
Each day in Tyndalston is a brutal lesson in risk–reward management. You can lose any money you’ve earned if you get knocked out, which puts real weight behind every decision you make. While a variety of jobs are available each day, several factors influence not only which jobs you take, but also the order in which you attempt them.
For example, a new powerful perk is randomized three times per day. These perks can dramatically alter gameplay, ranging from double cash rewards for vehicle-based jobs, to a strong temporary defense buff, or even the rare chance to keep all your hard-earned money even if you get knocked out.
If one day you see that vehicle jobs pay double in the evening, you might decide to pursue them—even if racing isn’t usually where you perform best. But what if your car is already banged up from the previous day’s action, and your nitro boost tanks are empty? Repairing and refilling them costs cash, directly impacting your daily results and how much you can put toward your overall debt.
So do you play it safe and stick to the job types you’re most confident in, or gamble by trying to squeeze maximum value out of the day’s perks? Even if you still have Action Points left, one wrong turn in Tyndalston can land you in serious trouble, or a failed high-risk job could wipe out an entire day’s earnings.
With that in mind, when do you call it a day—head home, crash on your couch, and lock in your progress? And when do you push your luck, staying out just a little longer to squeeze everything you can from the day?
The game features the unforgiving, gritty, and immersive city of Tyndalston for players to navigate and explore. Which UE5 tools were used to make the city and its open world districts possible?
Lönn: We use one large World Partition level for the city where the buildings are put in PackedLevelActors (PLAs). PLAs significantly improve editor performance when working with a large world.
Buildings that you can enter are created as level instances, and the interiors are put in a separate streaming layer. Having interiors in a separate layer lets us avoid streaming interior data when you are driving fast around the city.
We use a customized version of the FastGeo Streaming plugin for streaming static geometry. The plugin basically removes UObjects from static geometry. This allows us to stream static data much more quickly, move asset creation to worker threads, and reduce the number of objects in the scene, which in turn helps reduce garbage collection time.
Roads and sidewalks are created through custom tools built on the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework and ZoneGraph. ZoneGraph gives us a high-level topology of the traffic network. We use it for path visualization in the UI and for the general civilian and traffic population. ZoneGraph is also used by the police when you are wanted and chased.
The destruction setup is done with Chaos Destruction. On the rendering side, we use Nanite, Lumen, and Virtual Shadow Maps.
How have Unreal Engine 5’s lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you achieve the game’s dark and distinctive visual art style?
Lönn: We decided early on to go with a dynamic lighting model, i.e., Lumen. Being able to do real-time global illumination lighting in the editor and instantly see final-quality results helps our artists iterate quickly. In the end, it's all down to hard work and lots of iterations from great artists who have a clear idea of the desired result.
Image courtesy of Liquid Swords AB
The game’s combat mechanics leverage player momentum, the terrain, and even improvised tools to deal damage. Which UE5 tools were utilized to get the feeling of combat just right?
Lönn: The experience we’re going for is more of a wild bar brawl and less like tactical boxing. We want it to feel like you’re in it up to your neck, and you will have to make it up as you go to get yourself out. The fighting is built to encourage improvisation, there are moves that you can string together on the fly rather than fixed combos. You’ve got tools to plan your engagements, but still need to react.
You have your movement, attack, and defense actions, as well as weapons. Enemies know when you're becoming too predictable in your fights, so switch up your tactics to avoid them anticipating your next move. Make space, dodge punches or block them, then charge back into doing damage. Stay aware of who’s behind you, and stay moving, or your enemies will crowd you from all sides. If they do, then use the crowd to your advantage by throwing people around, knocking them down, and generally getting them in each other’s way. Learn the timing and rhythm of different moves, and use that knowledge to stay alive.
The space you’re fighting in matters. You might walk into a clean room and leave it completely wrecked. You might block off parts of the room or at least make them harder to reach, or you might smash open new areas. If you’re causing that kind of chaos, we’ve made sure you’re able to use it. Broken objects can become weapons. Debris can slow down your enemies, or even kill them. We’ve made it so you can use the whole world to really hurt your enemies.
For melee combat, we have built a pretty complex combat system on top of Unreal's animation systems and tools that allows us to pick, morph, sync, and blend the right animations. The feel of the combat is very much down to the animations being used and their timing; the hit reaction animations are just as important as the actual hits to get the feeling, and then, of course, the sound. I think the most-used tool has been the Rewind Debugger, which lets animators record combat moves and then single-step through all the curves that contribute to the final pose.
Image courtesy of Liquid Swords AB
The cars in Samson are not only used for traversal, but can also be used as weapons. Could you tell us how this plays out in gameplay and how you leveraged UE5 to make the vehicles feel believable?
Lönn: Samson is a seasoned enforcer and a resourceful guy who will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Reminiscent of John McClane from Die Hard, when the stakes are against him, in the heat of the moment, he will need to improvise with the things around him. Even if that means slamming his own car into another to take them down.
Our core vehicle pipeline is built on Chaos Vehicles, pretty similar to what was used in the City Sample demo, but we have a bit more C++ code and less Blueprint. All driving is physics-based, which gives a realistic feel. We run physics asynchronously to ensure a constant simulation timestep, even when the framerate varies.
We’re using the out-of-the-box handling model and Chaos Physics from Unreal 5.7, and have applied real life data where appropriate for each vehicle’s physical setup to maintain their feel with a sense of authenticity and weight. Combat moves in vehicles are applied with added physics impulses, and then there's a lot of tuning to get the feeling just right. Our vehicle team worked on vehicles in Mad Max and Rage 2, and we applied the lessons we learned over the years to the vehicle experiences of Samson—but tailored to the organic and tight streets sprawling through Tyndalston.
The vehicles have been tuned so players of all abilities can have fun driving them, with each one offering a different experience. However, players have depth to explore and inertia to manage when cars are being pushed to the edge of what their tires can cope with.
Having said that, we have also applied some of our own features on top of the base model to define our own handling DNA. For example, we developed a countersteer model to give the player some extra control with countering the momentum in a drift when they need it, allowing them to finesse the movement of the car without breaking the sensation of weight transfer.
Our approach has been applied to car combat too, with the relative speed and mass of the vehicles in an impact dictating the damage. Also, cars don’t just die. Like real cars, they are made up of parts, and each part can break down, changing how the car behaves, sometimes with deadly consequences. Tires can pop, reducing grip; wheels can be damaged, causing steering to be offset, and even come off completely, leading to barrel-rolling takedowns at speed.
Image courtesy of Liquid Swords AB
Can you speak to the character animations in Samson and how UE5 helped you make them feel natural and fluid from one moment to the next?
Lönn: There are so many components that go into making realistic characters.
We used the MetaHuman rig, and almost all animations are motion capture. Animators mostly work in MotionBuilder, and we have developed custom pipelines to efficiently bring the data into Unreal.
In Unreal, we build State Machines in Animation Blueprints, and most animation selection is done using Motion Matching.
For melee combat, we really wanted to try and get a good mix of physics chaos, impactful brutal feeling animations, movements, and responsive character control. So we built a custom fighting system, designed to let us balance timings, choose and control how animations play, and how the physics interacts with it all.
This way we can for example, in a single attack, start with controlled character movement, then mid-frame find an animation that best fits the intended action for both hit and reaction, ease into this animation to get a good feeling and good looking punch. And then react to physics interactions like weapons, debris, or cars. From there, it can transition immediately into another action, sometimes sampling objects from the nearby environment and giving players opportunities to interact with it.
This system is trying to balance, at runtime, between response time, travel distance, alignment angles, animation timings, and a whole lot of other things. Also, the NPC enemies use the same systems as the player. This lets us build a lot of different actions that can be plugged together in different ways. This technology gives players flexibility to experience fights that feel fluid, reactive, and unpredictable.
Image courtesy of Liquid Swords AB
Which UE5 feature(s) had the largest quantifiable impact on cross-discipline workflows? How did these features help the team reduce iteration time, improve team collaboration, and/or lower production costs throughout the development process?
Lönn: I don’t think it is down to specific features. Unreal has been really good for creating quick prototypes and mockups. Designers can quickly implement an idea, and we can try it out and iterate on it before committing to a production-quality system.
Game designers using Unreal are rarely blocked by code. They can implement what they need in Blueprint to get unblocked, and then when we have time, we circle back and see what should remain in Blueprint and what should be systemic. In general, I think Blueprints should be for configuration and C++ for systems, but having the flexibility reduces blockers.
The same goes for art; we were able to implement some of the concepts in the engine and quickly test different ideas with paintovers.
What was the team's approach to optimization and how did specific UE5 features help ensure optimal performance?
Lönn: We have automated performance tests that run continuously using Unreal's Gauntlet Automation framework. Performance is reported as CSV and converted to HTML using the PerfReport tool.
We also have our own custom metrics system that reports key performance data, for example, how many characters/vehicles are spawned at specific points in the game. We also record metrics for tools, including how long it takes to start the editor.
A summary of the build status is displayed on screens around the office, so everyone can see it when they walk in. Then, every week, we have a performance meeting where we dig deeper into the metrics, decide on the actions we need to take to make progress, and follow up on actions from the previous week. In the meeting, we have all the key stakeholders, so we can prioritize tasks right away.
Then, of course, we use Unreal Insights to profile the build. I personally profile at least once a week, but usually daily. Looking at profiles is a great way to get an insight into the real status of the build, and if you do it often enough, you get a feeling for how frames should look and can quickly notice when something new crops up – and it will).
Image courtesy of Liquid Swords AB
How has access to UE source code helped the team work faster when it comes to debugging, modifying the engine, and/or optimizing performance?
Lönn: Access to the source code is essential; we would not have been able to make this game without it. Even if Unreal provides strong support for extending the engine through plugins, sometimes you just need to make changes to the engine itself. Sometimes there are bugs in the engine that you need to fix before the next update. And, having access to the source is the only way to actually understand in detail how systems work.
Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Lönn: Yes, all of the above. We use the documentation all the time; it is a great start, and Unreal is actually pretty well-documented. And then, as mentioned before, we have access to the source, so we can investigate in detail when documentation is missing or insufficient.
Epic Pro Support has been great, providing expert feedback when we run into engine bugs or limitations, and we've solved quite a few issues by searching UDN.
We’ve based our texture library on Quixel textures. We use a few customized models from Fab, but that’s less than 1% of the assets in the game. We built a highly efficient asset pipeline in Unreal, enabling us to create the assets we need ourselves and ensure they perfectly fit the game's style. We use the MetaHuman rig for our characters.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about Samson?
Sundberg: Thank you! To stay up to date with Samson, follow us on our social media channels. You can also check out our Steam page or Epic Games Store to explore screenshots, videos, and development diaries from the team. Please watch our announcement trailer, visit our game site, and wishlist the game on the Epic Games Store.