Ryse: Son of Rome is an action adventure game, which was developed by Crytek and published by Microsoft Studios in late 2013 on the Xbox One at the console’s launch. However, it was originally planned to be a first person brawler exclusively for the Xbox 360 under another title. This great turn in direction is just one of the numerous twists that occurred throughout its development.
Kings & Kingdoms
Years before the name ‘Ryse’ would come to be, the basis of the project was born in 2006. It was the brainchild of Crytek Co-Founder, Cevat Yerli, and was imagined then not as one game, but two. One half of the coin was a title called “Kings” – an ambitious MMO where the player joins the ranks of various factions to fight for supremacy in a mythical world of monsters and sorcerers. The other was Kingdoms, a smaller scale first person game focussed around more intimate ground combat between soldiers of warring sides. At this time, no platform was attached to it.
Early concept art for Kingdoms from 2006.
The initial plan for these two games was that they would have been set in the same fantasy-themed universe, informing one another as development went on. Crytek put together a variety of concept art and basic prototypes for them, attempting to flesh out their ideas and convey their ideas more thoroughly as the company began showing them privately to publishers.
Behind the scenes, the world of Kings & Kingdoms was steadily coming together and over the years that the developer toiled away on it, a multitude of concepts for everything from characters to settings was produced. Fortunately, we have been able to preserve a good amount of these for your curiosity.
2007 Art:
Later environment/character art:
Character Art:
That CryEngine 3 Demo
At Gamescom 2009, Yerli gave a presentation on CryEngine 3 to a small audience of attendees. Included in this was a brief tech demo with a medieval fantasy setting very similar to the one portrayed by the early art of Kingdoms, leaving many to retrospectively assume a connection after the game was announced in 2010.
Although this goes without any formal confirmation, there certainly at least seems to be a relation between Kingdoms and this demonstration based upon some of Yerli’s statements at the event. During his talk, a member of the crowd asked whether or not the medieval environment had anything to do with some of Crytek’s cancelled projects. Laughing, the developer commented:
“I don’t know… I don’t think we have so many cancelled projects. Time will tell. Sooner or later, we will all know”
Despite clarifying later that this piece was a tech demo specifically made for Gamescom, his answer definitely suggests that it was in some form based around the thematics of Kings or Kingdoms. It also gives the impression that he was unsure whether or not Kingdoms would ever be made, implying that Crytek still had yet to find a publisher at this point (which we now know to be true).
The connection is further supported by the fact that when the game would later go on to be developed for the Xbox 360, it was being built in this same engine.
Microsoft Comes On Board
Later that year, Microsoft began to take an interest in the projects in a move lead by Phil Spencer, who was head of Microsoft Game Studios at the time. Spencer had been looking for a good opportunity to work with the developer, after having met Yerli years previously. While Microsoft was not interested in developing an MMO for the 360, Spencer still wanted to pursue Kingdoms. He was looking to expand the console’s portfolio, which he thought was lacking in the melee combat genre and he also thought that it could open the floodgates for other developers wanting to license CryEngine 3 on the system.
Concept Art for Kings.
Without a publisher backing it and wanting to move forward with Kingdoms, Crytek cancelled their plans for Kings. With the scope of their ambition being effectively halved this decision, the company began to rethink the world of Kingdoms with first person melee combat still at its core.
The First Take On Rome
While Crytek UK and Frankfurt were busy working on Crysis 2, Kingdoms was given to their Budapest team towards the end of 2009. To help them reimagine Kingdoms with an entirely new look, German art team, Karakter Design Studio, was contracted to create concept art for characters and settings. Karakter was an integral part of moulding the game’s visual style, even if a lot of the work they did was ultimately strayed from.
“Numerous character and prop designs became obsolete or were changed drastically as the story was forged into its final shape.” – Karakter representative.
Together, the companies reworked the ideas driving Kingdoms into a more realistic Roman themed game, away from the fantasy realms of before. Their original vision for Rome was in many ways vastly different from the one seen in the final game. Karakter and the Budapest crew imagined a more colourful, majestic city at the height of its power. This more vibrant side of the locale would never really be seen in Ryse: Son of Rome, however, as it is regularly under siege from barbarians, on the brink of collapse.
This wasn’t all that would change. The characters, too, evolved quite considerably as the game’s story grew more elaborate. Tobias Mannewitz, the creative director of Karakter mentioned their younger version of emperor Nero as a particular example of this:
“At this point during development, the emperor was thought of as a cold hearted, power hungry technocrat. His palace reflected these uncomfortable qualities. Eventually, the emperor developed into a more luxurious, lavish character.”
It appears that entire characters were cut from the script as time went on, including an elderly man called Lucious and a sidekick for the main protagonist, Marius, named Severus. The concept image for Severus gives us a little bit of insight into what the character might have been like.
Karakter helped to realise the location of Glott’s Hop, a Caledonion (Scottish) base of occultist Barbarians; a level from from partway through the story mode, as well. Originally, Karakter had planned to represent these lands as snowy blue forests instead of the dark, grey landscapes seen in the released game.
The art team was also playing around with the idea of introducing minotaur enemies into the mix. In Son of Rome, Glott’s Hop is populated by foes based on picts, who are dressed in tribal outfits that include masks made from the hollowed skulls and horns of dead bulls. To exaggerate and better portray the “superstitious horror” felt by the Romans as they encountered these hostiles, Karakter wanted them to appear to the player as actual minotaur-like creatures. This element of psychological horror was dropped later in development and in the final game, they are shown to be regular barbarian soldiers.
Codename: Kingdoms
After years of tinkering behind the scenes, the existence of the Kingdoms project was finally divulged to the public at E3 2010. Crytek showed the first trailer for the game during Microsoft’s press conference, an enigmatic teaser that was intentionally vague. The game had been given the tentative title of ‘Codename: Kingdoms’.
“We were trying not to show that it was Roman at that stage. There were kind of hints of Roman in the trailer, but that was our secret we weren’t sharing.” – Nick Button-Brown
The clip, which can be seen below, showed a live action video of three actors posing as soldiers and a voiceover hinting at the game’s themes of rebellion and corruption.
Around this time, the game was being targeted for a 2011 release.
The Game You Never Got To See
The first reveal of ‘Codename: Kingdoms’ came and went, but Microsoft and Crytek remained completely tight-lipped as to the title’s nature. To the wider world, the game would remain a mystery for some time and when it did finally emerge, it had changed in a big way. No screenshots, gameplay clips or other material ever was released of the original first person game that was in development in Budapest. Not even a single leak managed to penetrate the publisher’s walls of strict non-disclosure agreements. It would take years for anyone to be able to recover anything on it, but we thankfully have been able to.
An in-game screenshot of Codename Kingdoms.
The image above is an unaltered in-game screenshot of what Kingdoms apparently would have looked like running on the Xbox 360, according to our source, a former employee of Crytek Budapest. At this stage in development, Kinect control had yet to be introduced and it was a first person melee combat game with conventional button controls. According to Yerli, who spoke to CVG about the project in January 2011, they were intending for the game to use the full capacity of the 360’s hardware.
“… I think when we put Crysis 2 out we will show a level that is, multiplatform-wise, maxing out, but we will look into with Microsoft how Kingdoms can push the Xbox 360 110 percent, to its limits.”
During this part of development, the story of Kingdoms was still very different from the released game. Much of it revolved around Roman general, Julias Caesar and his elite guard, made up of the toughest warriors from around the world, who he handpicked himself. Caesar, in the end, was never present in Son of Rome, having been removed completely.
Although they never got as far as rendering most of them into the game, Crytek Budapest did create profiles for the member of Caesar’s chosen soldiers, which give us a bit of background on each of them. This varied group of characters would have accompanied the player throughout the campaign.
The hero of Kingdoms, who had not been given a name yet, was younger and less experienced than Marius, the protagonist of the Xbox One game. Little of the narrative itself had been figured out at this stage outside of these details, as Crytek Budapest had still yet to decide on much of the project’s overall direction.
The original hero of Ryse.
In addition, the team drafted concepts for a battle in the campaign set during Winter with a backdrop of arctic mountains. Just like the original version of Glott’s camp, there was no snowy locale realised ultimately in either Budapest’s Kingdoms title or Son of Rome.
We’ve also been able to recover a number of the character models made to give you a greater idea of the level of graphical fidelity being aimed for. These were created between 2009-2010 during Budapest’s time on the project and were all scrapped later in development.
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