New Details About Ryse: Son of Rome Emerge Now, 13 Years After Launch

It's hard to believe, but we're now 13 years removed from the launch of the previous generation that brought us the PS4 and Xbox One. And while news about the next generation from both companies is starting to arrive, we're now getting some rather surprising information about one of the previous generation's launch titles: Ryse: Son of Rome. As befitting a console launch game, Ryse was half game and half impressive tech demo showcasing the Xbox One's capabilities, with a runtime that clocked in at around 6 hours.

A new report now reveals that the plan for the game was to be longer than six hours, and that Xbox intended it to be "their Assassin's Creed." It also emerges that the game's development team was forced to cut around 66% of the content planned for it in order to meet the console launch deadline, which resulted in the game's short length. Despite the cuts, the team believed in the game when it was supposed to be the first in an emerging new series, with plans for other time periods like feudal Japan and the Viking era (periods that Assassin's Creed has reached in recent years), moving beyond the linear structure that characterized Son of Rome to a more open-world format, and adding vehicles and PvP modes based on military tactics fitting the period.

So the obvious question is: what happened, and why didn't we get more Ryse games? According to what's known, Microsoft did like Crytek's vision for the series, and development wasn't canceled by them. The reason lies in the fact that the first game didn't meet commercial expectations, and work on the series simply stopped. From there, the story becomes more complicated, as Microsoft wouldn't agree to fund the sequels without owning the IP rights, which are held by Crytek, who refuses to sell them. Meanwhile, Crytek simply moved on to other projects unrelated to Ryse, which somehow fell through the cracks.