The half-man, half-machine RoboCop wouldn’t be the icon he is without his impressive technology. To make the most of modern high-performance gaming tech, developers Teyon collaborated with Intel to optimize RoboCop: Rogue City for bulletproof gameplay. Game director Piotr Łatocha, lead programmer Piotr Derkowski, Teyon CEO Michał Tatka, and Florent Naigeon from publisher Nacon tell how our work together made gamers’ dreams of dispensing justice a reality.
All this technical effort ultimately serves one goal: to give players the authentic feeling that they’ve stepped into RoboCop’s steel shoes. Simply eliminating bad guys wouldn’t be enough to explore the muddled morality of RoboCop, because upholding the law takes more than just a loaded Auto-9. Of course there are plenty of exhilarating shootouts to flex Alex Murphy’s metal muscles, but RoboCop: Rogue City rounds out the image of RoboCop with more. Investigative work, street patrols, an expansive RPG-style perks system, and story-rich dialogue featuring original actors bridge the gap between the silver screen and PC monitors.
Visuals worthy of the big screen
Director Piotr Łatocha explained, “the story in RoboCop: Rogue City is a brand new story. It introduces a lot of new characters and villains, and the story itself fills a gap between films RoboCop 2 and 3.” The singleplayer first-person RoboCop: Rogue City needed to retain the cinematic qualities which cemented the franchise’s place in pop culture, so naturally the game’s graphics had to be worthy of the big screen too.
Lead programmer Piotr Derkowski shares with us the challenges in balancing awe-inspiring visuals and smooth performance. “The more fluid the gameplay, the better experience the player has.” Stuttering frames undermine immersion, so bidirectional collaboration between Teyon and two of Intel’s software engineers ensured both RoboCop: Rogue City and our Intel® Arc™ graphics drivers were well-oiled before the game’s release. “It would be nice to have it this way with many other hardware vendors,” Derkowski added.
Half man, half machine, all optimized for hybrid CPUs and AI upscaling
Teyon chose to optimize RoboCop: Rogue City for Intel® Core™ CPUs and Intel Arc GPUs. As CEO Michał Tatka put it, “We spoke a lot about multi-core hybrid architecture. This is an important thing because Intel Core CPUs have a few of the really fast P-cores, and E-cores to do the background tasks.” Properly guiding the game’s threads makes the most effective use of newer Intel Core processors, ultimately maximizing performance.
On the graphics side, Michał explained “[Intel Arc graphics] is the third player on the market that brings a new, quite fast graphics card, and performance-to-price, it’s like #1.” Piotr D. added, “Whoever is going to get this Intel Arc GPU is going to have a good experience playing RoboCop: Rogue City.”
Beyond supporting Intel hardware, Teyon also chose to incorporate Intel XeSS for faster framerates via AI-powered upscaling. “We didn’t find any compromises here, so the image in the end was as crisp as it could be. For us, it was as easy as taking XeSS and activating it in our custom Unreal Engine 5 version. This is something we always appreciate as developers,” Piotr D. commented. “The best of it is that even though it works best on Intel Arc, it’s still something that other people can take advantage of.”
Despite the ease of XeSS implementation, ensuring the game ran smoothly wasn’t always easy. Investigation by Intel engineers on the low level layers resolved instability, and a public demo revealed more could be done to stabilize the game on a wide variety of hardware. Teyon took a risk in changing the Unreal Engine version just months before release, and it paid off in preventing game crashes.
Even after the game was stable, the collaboration’s work wasn’t done as there was still stuttering to resolve. Graphics shaders fill in every pixel — millions per frame — and the enormous variety of textures, reflections, and particle effects around Old Detroit required a great deal of shaders. The sheer amount of shaders needed to be streamlined for a smooth experience. The bilateral collaboration again benefitted both Teyon and Intel, who each respectively optimized Pipeline State Object (PSO) caching and graphics drivers for RoboCop: Rogue City.
Building excitement and a unique PC
Intel’s support didn’t end once all the performance optimizations had been made. Among other ways to spread awareness about RoboCop: Rogue City, we built and gave away a fully custom PC built in the shape of the ED-209 robots in the films and game. That’s a lotta firepower!
With Intel’s help, the efforts Teyon put in to release RoboCop: Rogue City in a fully finished state hasn’t gone unnoticed, especially in an age where gamers are rightfully critical of cut corners and buggy performance. Since the game’s release on 2 November ’23, thousands of protectors of the innocent have Very Positively reviewed RoboCop: Rogue City on Steam. The positive reception is motivating Teyon to keep up the good work, having recently added a New Game Plus mode and using their knowledge to make more great games in the future. Until then, RoboCop will keep upholding the law by any means necessary.
Notices and Disclaimers
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ROBOCOP – ROBOCOP 3 © 1987-1992 Orion Pictures Corporation. ROBOCOP: ROGUE CITY © 2023-2024 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. ROBOCOP & ROBOCOP: ROGUE CITY are trademarks of Orion Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
ROBOCOP: ROGUE CITY published by Nacon and developed by Teyon. © 2023 Nacon. All Rights Reserved.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, Core, Arc, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.
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