 So back in 2013, a group of the world's best hardware journalists, and me, I was there too, were in Montreal for the NVIDIA G-SYNC launch event, and we got to tour a local game studio. Except for one problem. It was trash. We got basically the same tour, totally surface level, as the school bus full of kids that was there at the same time. Well, you know what? That is not going down today, because courtesy of Microsoft, we're going to be taking you guys under the hood at Monolith Productions. Perhaps best known for their work on the development of Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor and Middle-Earth Shadow of War. INTRO So here in the lobby, we are greeted by the reception desk. I guess that's what that's for. A case full of awards, and a super cool like Halloween theme thing that they got going on here that seems to extend across the entire office. This whole place is dark. And believe it or not, that is nothing to do with the time of year. It's always dark. So I guess it's appropriate then that the first stop in our tour is lighting, where a little ironically, you will find the darkest offices in the entire building. Full of monitors and TVs where the developers can make tweaks to the lighting engine, then see in real time how the game will look across multiple platforms on multiple display technologies. Now, during the development of Shadow of War, this department actually went through one of the steepest learning curves, because while fundamentally the hardware of the Xbox One X is similar to the One and the One S, just more faster and with more bits, to utilize its HDR or high dynamic range capabilities added a new and enormous level of complexity to this lighting process. And it affects both engineering and content. Monolith's Firebird engine is physically based, so in theory, it actually uses real world values and reflectance values to determine algorithmically the color of each pixel. In practice, they did a demo for us though, where they changed the color of the sun and the fog looks pretty convincing, but you can see that there's a lot of work that needs to be done to tune the appearance of the world. And, oh yeah, it has to look good in SDR as well. Fortunately, they've already got a couple of years experience under their belts with these ever-evolving HDR standards, because otherwise, getting this done in time would have been an absolute nightmare. By comparison, the character modelers, digital asset creators, and texture artists had a relatively easy time, because whether they're making like a hat or tuning facial capture animations, they already build their content at a much higher resolution than most of the hardware on the market can show. So, when a more powerful platform like the Xbox One X comes along out of the blue, the producer goes to the artist like, so, um, awkward question. Do you happen to have, you know, that thing you built at twice the res? They're just like, uh, duh, I already created it at 10 times the res, and it's off to the races. Now, obviously, that's a bit of a simplification. Cinematics, for example, are done in-engine, yes, but they're actually rendered frame by frame by the render farm at some kind of reasonable resolution, like 6K down sampled to 4K, so that kind of thing would need to be redone, but this kind of workflow, made possible by Monolith's heavy reliance on their own proprietary game engine and creation tools, makes it a lot easier to cooperate with initiatives like, for example, Xbox Play Anywhere, which lets somebody buy the game for the Xbox, then, when they upgrade down the road, play it in all of its 4K glory on the Xbox One X or the PC. Speaking of their own in-house tech, this next room is absolutely incredible. Monolith's Motion Capture Studio, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is actually the reason for their figure-eight shape to the rest of the headquarters. These guys take this stuff really seriously. The operator here, Jim Gentile, has literally been doing mocap since before mocap was actually a thing. Like, back when he was working on the original Mortal Kombat, it was literally actors in costumes in front of a blue screen, so it was just 2D capture. We have clearly come a long way since then. So in here, you'll find a lot of things that you would expect, like an array of high frame rate eagle and Kestrel cameras linked up with sophisticated software that can use the data from them to triangulate the position of each individual reflective marker, and stuff that you wouldn't, like big pieces of cardboard for power slides, hunks of wood to represent guns or barrels and beat-up dummies to kick the crap out of. And on that subject, they used to have actors or professional martial artists do most of this stuff, but now they actually lean on their animators to do a lot of it, and these guys really go at it. Like, if you're playing the game and you see some action, you're like, oh wow, that looked like it hurt. There's actually a very good chance that it did. They'll even get on the ground and be grappling with each other, making Jim's job of figuring out which one of these trackers belongs to which actor a lot more difficult in post. So the guys that we're shooting during our visit here actually have over 20 years of experience at Monolith between them. And to be clear, guys, this is not some kind of cheesy cost-saving measure. By having seasoned animators act out all but the most acrobatic of character moves, they're actually able to more easily account for the size and shape of art assets like weapons, so they don't end up with a bunch of mocap footage that looks super professional, but ends up with the character's shield, you know, clipping through their other arm half the time, making it unusable. So in this case, the hero shield that Patrick is wearing here is being represented by a shin guard. So that's something that he has to account for as he goes through all of these actions. And I'm willing to bet that you guys never noticed the difference, thanks to the way that they expertly blend their acting with the acrobats. Now, unfortunately, we were not allowed to film inside them, but they've also got two server rooms rocking a, for some reason, confidential, fat internet pipe, greater than 10 gigabit network connectivity to future-proof against, I don't know, 8K, 12K textures. Who knows? You got to be ready for anything. Render farms and 800 terabytes of on-site storage, which is good for Monolith. Hey guys, that's almost as much as we've got. But what do they store on all of that space? Well, digital assets and video, sure, but believe it or not, sound is actually one of the biggest culprits. So while Monolith does some vocal recording off-site down in LA to be closer to the talent, they actually do all of their music and sound effects right here on-site. And the studio is surprisingly compact, so Nate, who does their music composition, and Brian, who is focused on sound effects, need to use a lot of creative tricks. Wind? How about a stick with feathers glued to it? Orc farts? This potty-putty will do the trick. Characters walking around in armor? Well, it was explained to me that for that, they actually went to the Goodwill down the street, bought some barbecue utensils and a belt, and just walked around with it, returning the aforementioned utensils and belt to the Goodwill the next day. At which point I was going, wow, you guys are terrible people. Not only did you do that, you even told me without being embarrassed. And then they explained that they returned them as a donation, not to get their money back. And then, of course, there's the obvious stuff too. So down here, check this out. They've got everything from, you know, stuff you'd expect to see, like, you know, this decorative sword or... Oh, is this gonna come out? It's got a thing on it. Yeah, here we go. This decorative sword, all the way to, you know, more utilitarian stuff like this sledgehammer, all the way to some pretty scary freaking stuff, like... What could a pick-blade-slash-meat tenderizer, or this machete welded to a pipe, possibly before, other than roughing up some deadbeat who hasn't paid you? So that pretty much concludes our tour. Thanks for watching, and I want to give a huge shout-out to both Monolith for being so open about everything today, and Microsoft's Xbox team for sponsoring this video. If you guys want to check out Middle-Earth Shadow of War and its full 4K HDR glory, you guys can, of course, check out the link in the video description where you can get your very own Xbox One X. And I'm sure you guys will appreciate the game even more than you already would have, now that you've seen a glimpse of what went into making it.