How Ori and the Will of the Wisps improves one of the best-looking Xbox games ever

At the time he was a cinematic artist at Blizzard, working on blockbusters like StarCraft and Diablo, and he was struck by the Xbox One game’s art style in particular. Its lush, 2D world looked like “a painting that had come to life,” he says. Eventually, he was given the chance to contribute to that world when he joined Ori developer Moon Studios as art director on the game’s sequel. It was exciting but also daunting: how do you create a follow-up to one of the best-looking games ever made?

For the team at Moon, the desire to create a sequel wasn’t just about expanding Ori’s fantastical world and telling a new story. It was also about improving their craft. “I think that 2D games these days are a dying breed; there aren’t a lot of companies that really push production values for 2D games. We felt that was a shame,” explains studio co-founder Gennadiy Korol.

“As artists you always want to keep going. You’ve achieved something: how can you better it? ” Ori and the Will of the Wisps, which is out on Xbox One and PC today, is similar to the original game in most respects. You still play as a swift spirit named Ori, traversing a dangerous fantasy world in an experience that’s part 2D platformer, part Metroid-style action-adventure game.

There’s a greater focus on action in the sequel, as well as some other changes like new side quests and a revamped save system. But arguably the biggest change is how the game looks. It still has that same hand-painted look, but with a greater level of depth, detail, and movement. And that’s due in large part to new technology.

The starting point for Will of the Wisps, as with most games, was concept art. “At the beginning of the project we just let people go crazy,” says Gritton. “It’s almost like there’s this collection of fragmented ideas, we have all these cool things and we start to figure out how these things can be pieced together.

“It’s that interplay between design and art.”

” One of the unique things about the Ori series, though, is that because of the game’s painterly art style, concept art sometimes makes it directly into the game with only a few changes. A design for a character or creature will be split into pieces, rigged up so that it can be animated, and then added to the game as is. Gritton says that the team had a solid base to build from with the original Blind Forest, but there were some changes they wanted to make for the sequel. “When we started we had this wishlist,” he explains.