Welcome to 87th edition of our Ready or Not Development Briefing, June 27th, 2025!
The clock is ticking on the RoNsole release for July 15th, and our console players are already stacking up. We remain locked in on delivering the best console release we can with the accompanying free Los Sueños Stories update for PC.
Speaking of which, there are a variety of animation changes that have been made for SWAT. These new animations will continue to be tweaked as time goes on considering the vast amount added. Also in this briefing we will outline some limited changes that have been made to the game for console certification standards.
Note: These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that the content in our development briefings may still be a work in progress and subject to change.
These new SWAT animation changes affecting both players and SWAT AI represents part of a large team undertaking by our Animation Department. First person animations for many SWAT actions like kicking doors and arrests have been modified. Third person animations for movement and item handling also received an overhaul, utilizing inverse kinematics and more motion capture data to modify our movement sets acrossed the board.
The videos below showcase some of the changes that have been made utilizing this new data, accompanied by some commentary by our Lead Technical Artist, Alex. The animations are shown from within our editor to allow the cleanest view of the animations themselves.
"We reworked all our animation graphs to utilize the latest technology available in UE5, initially everything was built with custom nodes and techniques during the UE4 era. We were happy to see that Epic heavily expanded the functionality and available tech such as distance matching to be available by default in the engine. We also benefited from reducing a ton of unecessary complexity by utilizing the anim node function binding where you can run your custom logic directly on the anim node, [in total we saw] a heavy reduction in clutter and big boost in performance"
Video below: First person perspective SWAT animation changes for door kicking and chemlight deployment.
"As for the more visual [rather than backend] changes, we integrated a system that randomizes the player locomotion. We recorded 5 different special forces actors in our last big mocap shoot, the goal was to introduce a more organic and natural look while trying to get away from the standard everyone looks and moves the same in video games. We completed the graph rework and we are now dedicated to polish and further improvements using latest cutting edge technology available."
Video below: Third person and first person angles of some of the arrest animation changes.
"Given our new motion variance system we also made sure to capture a unique set for every item the player can hold, especially where its worth emphasizing the nuances [like with the shield]. We now have entire motion sets dedicated to items, grenades, shield, pistols and rifles. All of them were shot on the mocap stage with the actor holding the actual item to allow for the most detailed animations possible."
Video below: Third person animation changes for SWAT shield bearers.
Our team paid special attention to the shield animation set to keep the players head covered, and as much of the body possible concealed, especially when crouched. Since these new movesets are modular and dedicated specifically to the shield they will be much more easily tweaked if or when necessary. The same modular nature goes for the rest of our equipment movesets!
Throughout this console port process we've done our utmost to only make changes when they are flagged as absolutely required by our first party partners, and any changes aim to remain faithful to the original tonality of the game, so there is no reason to be alarmed.
Our age rating as it stands for console is ESRB M-rating, PEGI 18, and USK 18 to give an idea. Still, there are other game content requirements that console platforms have in order to exist on their systems, and a portion of these changes will be visible on the PC version.
If a content change was just a texture swap, we were able to apply it to console only while keeping the PC version the same as before. However, if the change involved transforming an entire asset (like adding clothing to a character model) this was less feasible.
There are 2 main reasons that these limited asset changes may be visible on the PC version as well:
1) Maintaining multiple versions of the game with different assets and system mechanics increases the likelihood of bugs to occur in future updates, and subsequent challenges keeping the game updated across multiple versions. Think lighting or optimization issues, for example (or any number of unexpected bugs from maintaining different versions).
2) If the in-game assets were not the same it would make crossplay unusable; the game content must be equal or basically equal for multiplayer to work. Different versions of assets affects multiplayer replication, which is the ability for the server to understand what’s happening in-game and host players in the same lobby/server.
Player-induced dismemberment still has a large presence in the game, but is a little more limited as to when it occurs: when alive enemies are shot they can undergo dismemberment, however once they are dead no further dismemberment occurs. (Note: The level of dismemberment itself when it occurs was not actually toned down). Ultimately, we consider this an okay compromise considering our gameplay design already dissuades use of lethal force anyway.
Image below: A single image showing how the dismemberment currently looks in our development build and will look for all platforms of the game post-console release, none of which has been toned down. A shotgun headshot, horrifying as ever.
Lastly, some character art involving torture were tuned down slightly to be less over-the-top. For example, the tortured police informant on Narcos is still missing fingers, eyes, and covered in fresh wounds and blood, but a little bit less so.
Some instances of explicit nudity for a handful of civilians and one suspect (Gerard’s ghillie suit only scantily concealed himself) have been covered up a bit more.
Although we already make a substantial effort to present mistreatment against children in the game in a responsible way, we made slight thematic expansions of this philosophy in order to better meet certification standards. For example, the child on “Twisted Nerve” has had an animation change to be unconscious/sleeping, instead of the previously convulsive animation from before that had a violent appearance.
The changes with the console version are small enough that most people here wouldn't notice if we didn't say anything, but we want to be transparent. It's largely just evidence and nudity that's altered, and the texture changes don't affect the PC version.
The texture changes on console are just small things that make the evidence in levels more like hints that connect with other evidence in rather than something practically screaming 'this is illicit child stuff happening!' However, the player can easilly connect the dots based on the other evidence in the level.
This is probably one of the more extreme examples from the Streamer level, left side is PC version of the game (and will remain as such), right side is console version of the game. There is still a bunch of other evidence in the room that connects to show what's going on.
Image below: a texture example from the mission '23 Megabytes Per Second' showing how the evidence appears and will continue to appear on the PC version of the game (left) compared to the console version of the game (right)
We are looking forward to our console launch and relieved to be fully finished with all of our console launch certification processes. We were fortunate enough as a team to pass our certification for the launch on our first submission. Certifying in such a manner is relatively rare in the industry, let alone for a team who has not went through this process together before, and we extend a massive thanks to our entire VOID team and all of our partners who helped make completing this process possible.
We hope you will enjoy the new weapons, animations, difficulty system, levels, and all other great content that Los Sueños Stories/console launch will offer next month. We maintain our focus to bringing this gritty tactical experience to the wider gaming audience true to its spirit.
This concludes our 87th development briefing, thank you for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!
Follow Ready or Not on Steam here.
Our other links: Discord, X, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify.
Stack up and clear out.
VOID Interactive