For the first time in the history of Microids’ point-and-click adventure series, Syberia, the game will be fully rendered in 3D.
The developer diary goes quite a bit in depth about how much they’ve added to the game since the last entry in the series a decade ago. They’ve added depth of field, HDR lighting, dynamic shadows and plenty of particle and lighting effects that could only be done by being made in full 3D. In this day and age and with the lowered cost of tools, it’s just so much cheaper to make games in 3D than to do it the old fashioned way with hand-painted backgrounds or rendered scenes plastered over linear gameplay paths.
You can check out some of the upgrades that they’ve made to the new game with the developer diary below.
I could be wrong but it also looks like Kate Walker has aged a bit since her last outing; Microids taking a page out of Naughty Dog’s playbook, eh?
Despite making the leap into a fully rendered 3D game world, the interactivity is still centered around point-and-click gameplay, with lots of environmental interactivity. They also brought back the old keyframe animation pipeline for the more intricate elements of interactivity where players will pick up objects, examine them or move them around. For the cinematics and broad character performances, motion capture was employed.
The video ends with them mentioning that the release date will be revealed in full in the next developer diary. For now, gamers can look for the title to launch in December of this year for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
Fans of 3D point-and-click games will likely be looking forward to the game given its classic throwback appeal to mysteries to uncover and adventures to go on while pointing, clicking and talking one’s way through the perilous journey.
You can keep track of Syberia 3 by hitting up the official website. They don’t mention if the game will launch on home consoles as a physical release, but you can definitely expect to see it on the PlayStation and Xbox Store.
