From anime art to Best RPG award: The making of Bandai Namco's Tales of Arise

This is the first game in the series to use Unreal Engine. Why was it a good fit?

Hirokazu Kagawa, Director at Bandai Namco Studio at Bandai Namco Studio: We’d already used Unreal Engine on several other projects at Bandai Namco, so it made sense to update Tales of Arise to bring it in line with everything else we’d been working on. With Unreal Engine, we were able to easily make Tales of Arise compatible with multiple platforms, which was especially important when we began developing it for next-generation consoles. We also took advantage of the ability to customize the source code in Unreal Engine. It makes it easy to build a system that fits your project.

In Tales of Arise, each area is much more open than past games in addition to being much more varied and visually unique. What was the process of designing the world, so that each area felt fresh and exciting to explore?

Minoru Iwamoto, Art Director at Bandai Namco Studio: Together with the map planner, I designed the world, expressing its narrative and game roles, while adding imagery that made each region unique.

​​I placed the planet Rena in the sky so that the opposing structures of Rena and Dahna can be seen. The castles of each region and each lord are also located high up in the sky, looking down on the player to highlight how awe-inspiring each structure is.

I also incorporated the idea of “walls” into the design. This is because walls are key to the game’s narrative: the story is about Alphen, the main character, who breaks down the walls that physically and psychologically confine the enslaved people of Dahna. Calaglia, a closed space, is represented by a "physical wall" and the Gates of Fire. Meanwhile in Cyslodia, the wall is represented by a barrier of suspicion that prevents people from trusting others: a "psychological wall."

Finally, I also decided on elements like the climate and key colors for each area. These were then adjusted to create variation so that each region felt fresh and exciting to explore. The final product was made by actually playing the game over and over again, checking the placement and look of everything from the monsters to trees, then making detailed adjustments in real-time using Unreal Engine.

In the midst of battle, spells and combat offer dazzling displays of visual effects. How did the team optimize the game to keep performance up during these action-packed moments?

Minoru Iwamoto: We focused on three main optimizations: Speeding up the drawing process, asset optimization, and effect data optimization. To speed up the drawing process, we introduced a system that divides the drawing resolution of effects like translucency into two stages for drawing and compositing.

This allowed us to maintain the same resolution, even in areas where there are large changes to the amount of information on screen. We also reduced the semi-transparent rendering load by rendering the other areas at a lower resolution.

Semi-transparent effects often also use depth fades and refractions, so we ensured the depth and color buffers used for these expressions were reduced in size in advance. This helped to reduce the load on texture access. We also introduced measures to reduce the load on texture access by reducing the size of the depth and color buffers used in these expressions. In addition, we ensured that any post effects used at the same time as semi-transparent effects were fine-tuned for performance.

Meanwhile for asset optimization, we regularly monitored texture resolution and compression settings to make sure they were appropriate during development. We also aimed for optimal texture settings by checking the static analysis of assets as needed. In addition, since battles are conducted in a special field, we also took measures to reduce the drawing load by separately optimizing the dedicated battlefield.