Oriand the Will of the Wisps' sublime platforming sets a new bar for metroidvanias It's a lavish, beautiful sequel, but the movement stands out above all else. From the first five minutes, I can tell Ori and the Will of the Wisps is going to try really hard to make me cry. With some brief narration, it shows Ori and his strange family at peace Présentédès l’E3 2017, Ori and the Will of the Wisps a finalement vu sa date de sortie révélée lors de l’édition 2019 du show. N’ayant pas changée depuis, le jeu sera disponible en version physique et virtuel dès le 11 mars AboutOri and the Will of the Wisps Episode. The Two Player Bros are taking a deep dive into the sequel to one of the best metroidvania's in gaming history; Moon Studio's Ori and the Will of the Wisps. In this episode, Mike and Dave talk about what makes Ori and the Will of the Wisps so great. From its excellent art style and music, to its 009- Scientific, nautical, surveying, electric, photographic, cinematographic, optical, weighing, measuring, signalling, checking (supervision), life-saving and teaching apparatus and instruments; apparatus for recording, transmission or reproduction of sound or images; magnetic data carriers, recording discs; automatic vending machines and mechanisms for coin-operated Oriand the Will of the Wisps is one of the most anticipated and ambitious games from the Xbox. The game is developed by the Moon Studios and will be released on March 11, 2020, on Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, Steam and day one on Xbox Game Pass.However, the game is made available for pre-order for the game lovers exclusively on Microsoft Store. Parcoureznotre sélection de ori will of the wisps : vous y trouverez les meilleures pièces uniques ou personnalisées de nos figurines d'action boutiques. EFobW. Ori and the Will of the Wisps Achievements Destiny achievement Destiny achievement in Ori and the Will of the WispsDestinyComplete the guidesHow to unlock the Destiny achievementAchievement seems to be glitched along with the max health, energy, and lost and found achievements. All 4 of these did not unlock for me after I beat the game Mine didnt unlock with patch. Not this, not hard mode and not all health upgradesPosted by Feiffer05 on 07 Apr 20 at 2215 mine popped as soon as i loaded the save file after patch installed this morning Mine popped during the last cut scene of the game earlier by pjameleven on 09 Apr 20 at 0303 Have you got any tips or tricks to unlock this achievement?Add a guide to share them with the in and add a guide 24 2 1I have yet to unlock this achievement, but I wanted to warn people in order to save time - replaying the final boss again and watching the whole ending again and even not skipping credits didnt help. This achievement like few others is broken and its really leaving a bad taste after a good game. only comment. I asked the other solution of when this should pop and no response yet. Is after beating shriek? Related Achievements Les fragments spirituels sont des ressources qui permettent d'avoir une compétence passive pour Ori lorsqu'elles sont ramassées durant votre aventure dans Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Elles sont dispersées un peu partout dans la forêt de Nibel et elles sont nécessaires pour l'avancer du jeu. Retrouvez toutes les localisations des fragments spirituels dans cet article. En cours d'écriture Le guide est encore en cours d'écriture, il manque quelques-uns des fragments spirituels d'Ori. Nous le remplirons dans les prochains jours pour vous fournir la solution finale. Caverne de Kwolok Aimant Utilise-le pour attirer les orbes situés plus loin. Appuie sur le bouton Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Aimant en image Marais de Mornonde Adhérence Utilise-le pour adhérer aux murs. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Adhérence en image Témérité Utilise-le pour augmenter les dégâts que tu infliges et que tu subis. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper Localisation fragment Témérité en image Résistance Utilise-le pour réduire les dégâts suibis. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Résistance en image Fragmentation Utilise-le pour que les tirs de l'Arc spirituel se divisent en projectiles plus petits. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Fragmentation en image La Source Moisson vitale Utilise-le pour que les ennemis génèrent davantage d'orbes de vie. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Moisson vitale en image Super grappin Utilise-le pour te projeter vers les ennemis avec le grappin. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Super grappin en image Pacte de vie Utilise-le pour lancer des sorts en consommant de la vie quand tu n'as plus d'énergie. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Pacte de vie en image Secret Utilise-le pour détecter les secrets à proximité. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Secret en image Épine Utilise-le pour infliger des dégâts aux ennemis qui te touchent. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Épine en image Territoire de Baur Catalyseur Utilise-le pour convertir les dégâts de corps à corps en énergie. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Catalyseur en image Force vitale Utilise-le pour infliger des dégâts supplémentaires quand ta vie est plus de la moitié. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Force vitale en image Fracture Utilise-le pour diviser l’Éclat de lumière en trois. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Fracture en image Terriers de Minuit Déflecteur Utilise-le pour que les attaques au corps à corps dévient le projectiles. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Déflecteur en image Bassins de Luma Moisson d'énergie Utilise-le pour que les ennemis génèrent davantage d'orbes d'énergie. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Moisson d'énergie Bois du Silence Conversion Utilise-le pour convertir l'excédent d'énergie en vie et l'excédent de vie en énergie. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Conversion en image Tréfonds de Fongesylve Déferlement spirituel Plus tu as de lumière spirituelle, plus tes dégâts augmentent. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Déferlement spirituel Étendues Tourmentées Tourment Utilise-le pour que les ennemis réapparaissent plus vite. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Tourment en image Clairières de la Source Prime Utilise-le pour que les ennemis génèrent davantage de lumière spirituelle. En contrepartie, ils ont plus de vie et infligent plus de dégâts. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Prime en image Transmission Utilise-le pour que les tirs de l'Arc spirituel touchent également les ennemis à proximité. Appuie sur Menu pour t'en équiper. Localisation du fragment Transmission en image ive been having long loading times at the ori running screen since ive installed the game, its takes around the same amount of time everytime i launch it. ive tried reinstalling the game, verifying game files, made sure my graphics driver is updated, and i made the game run with my dedicated GPU, still the same. Has anyone had this problem as well? are there any solutions to this? Welcome to the Luma Pools section of the IGN Ori and the Will of the Wisps walkthrough and wiki guide. Here, we’ll break down everything you need to know about Luma Pools, including how to reach the next section of the game, what consumables and items to look out for, and more. Please click or tap the links below to jump to different sections advertisementLuma Pools EntranceKwolok's Wisdom Side QuestFindin Ultra BashKeystone Gate and Swim DashLuma Pools Anemon PuzzleFinding Energy HarvestKwolok Boss FightKwolok's Wisdom Side Quest Post-Kwolok FightInto the Darkness Side QuestPost-Game CleanupCleanup Gorlek OreCleanup Gorlek Ore 2Cleanup Energy Cell FragmentCleanup Life Cell FragmentCleanup Gorlek Ore 3Cleanup Energy Cell Fragment 2Cleanup Gorlek Ore 4Luma Pools EntranceFirst things first, if you haven’t already purchased the ability that allows you to breath underwater from Opher, do so before the Luma Pools trek. From the Wellspring Glades, head to the area where our Ori is on the map below. This is the entrance to the Luma Pools. If you’re following this guide, you’ll be backtracking to the points where Ori is below. You should see a giant unmoving wheel. Climb atop it and jump off the right side of it. Dive down below and when you see the plant shooting projectiles at you, use bash to redirect the projectiles to the barrier blocking your way east underwater. Continue east and use the next set of projectiles to destroy the eastern barrier and to destroy the giant green bulbs above you. Doing so will set the wheel we were at previously back into motion. Climb atop the wheel and when a large pillar sticking out from the wheel approaches, use it to jump to the northeast wall. Climb up this wall and jump left to the nearby platform. Jump off of this platform and glide west. You’ll land in a previously-unreachable area and a small cutscene will play out. advertisementKwolok's Wisdom Side QuestHead forward and jump onto the bubbles floating up for a quick launch into the air. Jump up and land on the platform with a Moki on it. Talk to the Moki to get the Kwolok’s Wisdom side quest. You need to find Kwolok’s whereabouts and report back to this Moki to complete the quest. For now, let’s continue through the Luma Pools. Use the bubbles floating on the left to reach the high wall to the west. From that wall, jump onto another floating bubble and double jump-dash your way to the northwestern corner. Pull the lever here. Jump down and go west through the newly-opened area. Finding Ultra BashHead down and drop through the piece of wood into the water. Swim down and allow one of the enemies to chase you to the left side. Use bash to redirect this enemy into the barrier glowing purple. This will allow bubbles to float up and out of the water. Climb up and when a bubble comes out of the water, quickly use Flap to push it into the wall. Then, quickly grapple to the point that’s northeast of you, jump up, dash left and if you’re fast enough, you should be able to jump on top of the bubble you flapped. This will launch you up to some land where Tokk is. Head left — don’t worry about what’s above as you can’t do anything up there just yet — and jump into the water. Go down and hit the glowing hair-like things sticking out from the terrain beneath. This will open up a path for you. Take the path and swim through more of the hair-like things until you can reach the upper right corner’s alcove. This will open up every path and release water into a new area below. For now, head back out of the water and save at the newly-above water spirit well. advertisementJump back into the water and head left past the bubble-shooting creature to find a Gorlek Ore. Head back past the bubble-shooting creature and go down to the area where the water recently poured into. Use the projectile enemy in the bottom left corner to bash a barrier to the right of it and a barrier to the northeast of it. The northeast barrier blocks the Ultra Bash shard and the barrier on the east blocks a shortcut to a previous Luma Pools section. Keystone Gate and Swim DashNow, use this same projectile enemy to break the barrier that’s quite a ways northwest of you. You’ll have to get the projectile enemy to follow you all the way to the surface of the water and then bash it to redirect it into the barrier. Head up here and you’ll enter an arena room. Defeat all of the enemies in here to progress west. Jump back into the water on the left and go down. Swim through the hair-like creatures to remove the barrier in front of the purple aquatic plant just southwest of you. A projectile enemy will come out and you need to guide it up, right, hit the hair-like creature to progress right, and then bash the projectile enemy to destroy the northern barrier. Grab the large spirit light container and go right to talk to Lupo. Buy the Luma Pools map from them. Head back down and this time, use that same projectile enemy to destroy a western barrier. Guide it up and then left to the glowing purple barrier. With that out of the way, head north until you can get out of the water. Just a few steps east is Kwolok. Talk to them. After talking to them, climb up the east wall and jump to the lantern. Bash to the small ledge hanging from the ceiling and then double jump and glide west from there to the small alcove jutting out. You’ll find a mysterious seed here. advertisementNow, for the next part, dive into the water and use the projectiles being shot at you to blow up the bubble-making creature right below you. Bubbles will begin to float up. Go back up to land, climb the wall, bash off the lantern and hang off the ledge hanging from the ceiling. When a bubble is close, jump and glide over to the bubble and bounce off of it. At the top of the jump, attack with your spirit edge to give you a small boost up and then dash right to the wall. Stick to it and jump left to reach land. Destroy the two enemies here and continue left. Jump down into the water on the left and guide the projectile enemy left so you can bash Ori up with it to grab the keystone here. Use this same projectile enemy to hit the bubble-making creature. Bubbles will now float up. Jump up onto the land on the left and when a bubble comes up, Flap it to the right. Quickly jump on the jump pad to the left of you, dash left to the wall, jump right to the platform and then bounce on the bubble you flapped to get the second keystone. Now, go right and bash Ori off of one of the enemies. Grapple to the hanging blue point and dash left to grab the third keystone. Use this grapple to jump to the hanging wooden piece northeast of you. Jump to the life cell plant to the left of you and grapple up to reach a pedestal. Activate it. This unlocks a challenge shrine in Luma Pools. Head west from here and when you see the fourth keystone, jump down, grab it and dash to the wall on the left. Then, head east to the keystone door and unlock it with the four keystones you have. Head east through here and you’ll find a spirit tree. Absorb its light to acquire the Swim Dash ability. Luma Pools Anemone PuzzleadvertisementHead into the water below here and swim dash into the bubble-making creatures so that the bubbles can float to the surface. Then, head to the southeast corner and swim dash into the blue-white stone that looks like a mushroom cap. This will unlock a new area of Luma Pools. To get there, allow a bubble to get stuck under a tree branch on the right. Swim dash out of the water and glide to above the tree. Jump on the bubble stuck under this tree branch and launch yourself up. Glide right to reach the new area. Once here, swim dash out of the water below and grapple to the point northeast of you. From this grapple point, jump to the ledge on the right to find an Energy Cell Fragment. Now, jump to the right side and go into the water below. Use the projectile enemy down here to destroy the purple glowing barrier in the middle of this chamber. Now, swim through the anemone in the southeast corner, then the southwest corner you’ll need to swim dash from southeast to southwest to do this fast enough, then to the northwest corner swim dash from southwest to northwest and then grapple up and glide through the northeast anemone. Dive into the water, swim through the southeast anemone once more and bash to redirect the nearby projectile enemy into the stone structure acting as the eastern wall. This will open the wall and give you entrance to a new part of the Luma Pools. If you swim to the southwest corner of this area, you’ll find a large spirit light container. Head east and jump down to reach the spirit well again. Time for some backtracking with our new swim dash skill. advertisementFinding Energy HarvestHead left and bounce atop a bubble. Then head left back into the locked arena room from earlier. Defeat the two enemies in here and water will fill the room. Keep fighting the waves of enemies and eventually the room’s water will return to normal. Before exiting through the west doorway, swim dash out of the water and bounce atop a bubble to reach the wall up above. Climb up to find a life cell fragment. In the next room over, swim dash out of the water and jump onto the ledge on the left to find the Energy Harvest Spirit Shard. On the right is a spirit trial you can complete for spirit light. Kwolok Boss FightFollow the path below west until you reach three blocks that fall fast underwater. Previously, you would’ve been crushed by these but thanks to your new swim dash ability, you can dash your way through to safety. advertisementDo so and follow the water path around to reach a new spirit well. Save here. Go left from this well, swim through the path there’s only one way forward and swim dash onto the land above. Walk right and you’ll encounter some Moki and Kwolok. Time for a fight. The Kwolok fight begins with a chase sequence. Run left and bash off the hanging lantern. Kwolok will bash the next area open and you need to quickly dash through it. Continue to run left until you reach water. Dive in and whenever structures fall on you, swim dash over them. Swim your way through the water and swim dash out the other end to reach the arena for the actual Kwolok fight. As far as moves go, Kwolok will do a few things they’ll fire projectiles at you always bash to redirect them towards towards Kwolok as they do a lot of damage to them, try to slap you with their tongue jump over it, summon weird hands out of the ground just avoid them or slam down onto you dash away. To attack Kwolok, you should focus on redirecting his projectiles and climbing the west wall so that you can glide over to them and attack them with the spirit edge. Keep in mind that the spirit arc hurts Kwolok as well. Once their HP is down, the fight will be over — no second arena or second phase like Mora back in the Mouldwood Depths. After the fight, swim dash out of the water and grab the hanging vine to the left. Climb up, jump to the other vine and climb up. Once on top, head right to talk to Kwolok. You’ll get the Strength of the Forest Wisp and complete The Lost Paradise main quest. advertisementKwolok's Wisdom Side Quest Post-Kwolok FightWith that done, head to the closest spirit well in the Luma Pools and warp to the other Luma Pools spirit well. Go to where our Ori is on the map below and talk to the Moki there. Tell them about Kwolok to update the Kwolok’s Wisdom side quest. To progress in that quest, you must take the amulet the Moki gives you to Kwolok’s Altar in Kwolok’s Hollow. This is where Kwolok resided for the first parts of the game. The map below shows you where to go to do that. Let’s do that now. Warp to the Kwolok’s Hollow spirit well. Head to Kwolok’s Altar east of here and place the amulet in the altar to complete the Kwolok’s Wisdom side quest. Head back to the previous spirit well and warp to the Wellspring Glades. advertisementInto the Darkness Side QuestWhile we’re here, you should have at least six Gorlek Ore if you’ve been following this guide. Have Grom fix the cave entrance so we can complete the Into the Darkness side quest. We’re going to knock out this quest now. Head to the cave entrance in The Wellspring Glades. Head inside and equip the Flash ability to one of your three buttons — you’ll need it to get through the cave. Head right and jump to the right wall. Then, jump and dash left to land on a small wooden platform. Jump and dash left to stick to the wall on the left. Climb down and then jump dash to the right and land in the water. Dive down, head right and go north when you can’t go right anymore. Up here, on the ledge to the left, grab the Heart-Shaped Acorn side quest item. advertisementJump back into the water and swim dash out of the water to reach the pole above. Swing jump from this pole to another pole that’s northeast. Then swing jump again to the pole that’s northwest. Then sling jump once more to reach the land above and head left. Jump down and you’re back at the cave entrance. Head out and give the Heart-Shaped Acorn item to the Moki here. You’ll receive a Large Spirit Light Container as a reward and complete the Into the Darkness side quest. With that out of the way, let’s head to Baur’s Reach. Post-Game CleanupWith the game's story behind us, let's find the rest of the hidden collectibles in the Luma Pools. Cleanup Gorlek OreadvertisementFrom the Luma Pools spirit well, head east until you see an alcove to the north of you that's very high. Launch up and stick to the walls. Climb up to find this Gorlek Ore. Cleanup Gorlek Ore 2From the Luma Pools spirit well, head east and then Launch up past some curved, spiky walls. At the top of this alcove is this Gorlek Ore. Cleanup Energy Cell FragmentHead to the giant spinning wheel of the Luma Pools. Head east from there and you'll be in water. Swim east until you can go north. At the fork, head left and continue up. You'll see this Energy Cell Fragment on your left. advertisementCleanup Life Cell FragmentFrom the Luma Pools spirit well, head northeast until you see a purple barrier wall. Jump across to the left and land in the water. You'll find a plant that shoots projectiles at you. Bait a projectile to you and then use Bash to redirect it across the gap at the purple barrier. This will destroy it and now you can grab the Life Cell Fragment behind it. Cleanup Gorlek Ore 3This Gorlek ore is significantly northwest of the first or central Luma Pools spirit well. You'll need to traverse through the path seen in the picture below. When you're south of the Gorlek Ore, Launch up and into the mini pool of water. Swim Dash out of that water and launch up to the Gorlek Ore. You can see our path to the ore below. Cleanup Energy Cell Fragment 2Head to where we are on the map below. You'll need to Launch and Dash off of the many bubbles floating upward. You'll find a lever where our Ori is on the map. advertisementThat will open up a door west of you. Head there and grab the Energy Cell Fragment. You can see our path from the lever to the Energy Cell Fragment below. Cleanup Gorlek Ore 4Go to the west spirit well of Luma Pools. Follow the path west of you to the left. To get to where our Ori is, you'll have to go west to past the Gorlek Ore. Head into the water and go southeast. You'll need to burrow into the sand here to touch the sea anemone plant. Quickly get out of the sand and swim east some more. You'll find the Gorlek Ore north after you can't swim east anymore. Up Next Baur's ReachWas this guide helpful?In This Wiki GuideOri and the Will of the WispsEmbark on an all new adventure to discover the mysteries beyond the forest of Nibel, uncover the hidden truths of those lost, and unravel Ori’s true destiny in Ori and the Will of the United AnnouncementTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Cowabunga Collection - Exclusive Release Date TrailerJoin Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Cowabunga Collection. 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The fluidity of Ori’s movement; his quickness and agility; the sense of his weight and presence in the world – he’s a product of both traditional animation and leading graphics technology which developer Moon Studios has built up over years to make a sequel that surpasses the already beautiful Ori And The Blind Forest. When creative director Thomas Mahler tells me he thinks it’ll be the reference for 2D platformer visuals for years to come, I think he’s could be right. It’s down to countless improvements, tiny and large, by Moon’s artists and its programmers across every aspect of the game, from fronds of foliage to hit reactions. And they started by transforming Ori’s nature. Namely, they tore out the way Ori is rendered. You probably never really noticed, but in Blind Forest he’s a 2D sprite that’s animated at 30 frames a second. The screen, meanwhile, updates at 60 frames a second, so if you look closely, Ori’s run cycles and springing leaps don’t quite move as smoothly as the rest of the scene. But that was only part of the problem. Fixed to the frames of animation his animators could produce and fit into memory, he can’t elegantly hang on to rotating platforms, fluently grapple onto things, or naturally stand on irregular surfaces and inclines. Being a sprite limited what Ori could do. So in Will Of The Wisps, he’s 3D. It was an immediate challenge for his animators, since many came from the likes of Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks and were used to working at movie framerates of 24 FPS. “We went for 60, which is nuts,” says Mahler. Aside from its smooth framerate, being 3D also opened up a new sense of fluidity because Ori can now blend animations between states. Take the vertical poles Ori leaps on to, his momentum spinning him around before he comes to a stop, or simply jumping and landing. “A lot of people don’t realise how much different Ori 2 feels because there are no jerky transitions between movements,” says lead programmer Gennadiy Korol. “The worst thing that can happen is jerky animations and transitions, where your controller goes from one pose to the other, and bam, it breaks the feel of the game.” And just to further smooth out his naturalistic movement, a layer of physics animates his ears and tail separately, so they dynamically follow through from his body’s momentum. “You could never do that with sprites, because they’re pre-baked,” says Mahler. But while blending and physics is all dynamically driven, Ori is still fundamentally the product of traditional animation principles. Mahler is a huge proponent of squash and stretch, the animation technique which emphasises an object’s strong or sudden movement by momentarily but massively distorting its shape. “Actually it’s very difficult to do squash and stretch with a 3D pipeline in games,” says Korol. “To put it into perspective, I don’t even think Nintendo is doing it,” says Mahler. “But it adds such nice fluidity. If Ori hits and you extend the arm to 150% its normal length, and then like a spring you pull it back in, it creates this feeling of punch you’d otherwise never get from a mocap game. We tried so many things. If you’re familiar with hit-stop, we even tried that.” The problem is that it’s very difficult to scale joints in a 3D model. For Moon, it meant building rigs that allow traditional animators to follow Disney’s century-old conventions by stretching every joint, and then to build software that can translate them into a format that Ori’s engine, Unity, can understand and work with. “I love the idea that we’re a studio who keeps the quality of keyframe animation up,” says Mahler. “If I show you two animations, one mocapped, I’m sure 99% of people out there will prefer the keyframe animation. “It’s a weird thing to me that the industry at large said that keyframe animation is expensive so let’s not do it any more. Mocap is really cheap because you can hire a couple of actors and they make their funny little dances and then, hey that’s it. While mocap has to be cleaned up, honestly, if you’re an animator in the game industry and all you’re doing is cleaning up mocap, the art behind animation really gets lost.” But some animation needs an extra dynamic nudge to really land, such as Ori’s attacks, which in Will Of The Wisps are a lot more direct than the short-range energy bolts that comprised Blind Forest’s combat. Each weapon hits with palpable impact, courtesy of layers of additive animations that depend on the situation. If you’re hitting an enemy from the front with the Spirit Edge, the game might add 30% of a hit reaction to whatever the enemy is already doing. Hit one with the Spirit Smash from behind, and it’ll get up to 150% of the hit animation to really communicate the power of the attack. “You get this really satisfying reactive impact on enemies that we couldn’t do before,” says Korol. “That’s especially true for big bosses.” Now, if you hit a specific body part, it’ll react to the blow. “It’s small things, not something you necessarily think about, but it’s important it’s there.” And it led to something of a schism in the studio. Delivering hit reactions is an old discipline; over the generations, games have used various effects to show you’ve hit an enemy damage values, splatters of blood, and hit-flash, where the whole enemy becomes momentarily white. Anxious it was preventing the game’s new hit reactions from being as visible as they could be, Mahler decided to take hit-flash out. “There was a huge debate about it in the team!” says Korol. But, Mahler figured, why keep to a convention that was designed to overcome ancient memory limitations by flashing a sprite white instead of having to hold in memory one to show its reaction? “When you’re faced with something not feeling as punchy as it could be, there are a million things that you can’t think about yet,” says Mahler. “But then, when you’re really in the trenches and a milestone is coming up and we’re telling Microsoft that, Hey, the combat will be really good in this milestone,’ that’s when you have to sit down and figure it out. Even Microsoft doesn’t know a bunch of the shit we tried.” Another category of that shit is the way Ori can affect the world in Will Of The Wisps. Every single piece of scenery is rigged so it can move and respond to Ori’s weight, or the swing of his Spirit Slash. Like so much about the animation in the game, it’s a small detail, but you definitely feel it. “If you look at the first five minutes of Blind Forest, and then at Will Of The Wisps, look at how when Ori jumps on platforms, everything was static in Blind Forest, and in Will Of The Wisps everything moves. “Every single mushroom, grass blade and flower, every art piece in the foreground, central layer and background, when you smash your hammer, the entire environment shakes and moves,” says Korol. Korol did, in fact, build a prototype for this system in Blind Forest, and some platforms use it to move, but he couldn’t possibly scale it to the entire game on his own. So Moon hired Alexey Intrusion’ Abramenko, who has pretty strong expertise in platformer physics. “He’s a crazy physics guy,” says Korol. “The first thing we did was to take my prototype and build something that’s in-engine. The artists do their pass on a scene, and then you just go and place joints and the framework automatically skins everything. We’re big on the idea of making a fantasy world you can believe exists; tactile and realistic so you can forget you’re playing a videogame.” And for Moon, apart from giving Ori more of a presence in the world, it also forced the artists to give thematic meaning to the abstract spaces that Mahler originally blocked out to give each level a flow for Ori to run and jump through – “instead of stupid floating platforms that make no sense and have no physical explanation in the world,” as Korol puts it. So, along with layers of visual effects to accent every hit and jump “I love the effects to be juicy, painterly; I want the game to have the best visual effects you’ve seen,” says Korol, there’s always a lot going on in Ori And The Will Of The Wisps. And that presented a problem. It was hard to see where Ori is, what he’s doing, and what’s happening to him. “OK, we have bright backgrounds, glowing enemies, glowing Ori, and now you layer on top a Spirit Sword or other spells, which are glowing bursts of light,” says Korol. “How do you make all of that visually balanced and readable?” So – and you won’t have noticed this – the game dynamically creates subtle shadows behind certain objects so their bright silhouettes stand out, whether an explosion or a slash. “We have to build tech for this stuff because there are no off-the-shelf solutions,” says Korol. “We’ve got to be creative. There’s no book for how to make visual effects readable for 2D combat games.” And that’s because what’s perceived as the state of the art in games moved on from 2D games long, long ago. Mahler says that Moon is one of the last studios that has invested heavily in 2D graphics. “Will Of The Wisps will probably become the reference for what a 2D game will look like for probably the next decade or two,” he says. And while that might sound like a brash statement if Rayman’s team is working on something new, perhaps they’d have something to say about it, he could be right – and he’s a little sad about it. “Look at the business of it, it doesn’t make a tonne of sense for other studios. Even Nintendo.” Indeed, Mahler feels Moon got lucky with Ori And The Blind Forest’s success, and that it’s unlikely a new IP with the budget of Will Of The Wisps would turn a profit. “And what people don’t realise is that there’s an art to making 2D games that look like this,” says Korol. “And on top of that, it goes against every single idea that powers current generation hardware.” Modern GPUs simply aren’t designed to efficiently render the hundreds of transparent layers that go into any one of Will Of The Wisps’ scenes. “We’re already working on our next game, which is an ARPG,” says Mahler. ”It’s not 2D. It’s a 3D game, and we’re constantly finding, oh my God, the engine does that? You get this for free! With Ori it was just painful.”

solution ori and the will of the wisps