RITM, the makers of IA, are competitive FPS players who are unsatisfied with the current offerings in the FPS market. We feel the market has stagnated. There are some good old games, but most of the recent offerings have focused on marketability and profitability over pushing boundaries and extending the art.
If we look back, the FPS games that have stood the test of time and are hailed to this day as great games generally have simple elements that are accessible, but expose depth that takes years to master.
Here at RITM, we have mastered FPS games as players, and we understand the great joy that comes from years of practicing to achieve that mastery. However, lets focus on the idea of accessibility of those game designs for the purposes of this article.
While you can focus on game design for accessibility, we believe one of the most lacking accessibility features in modern games is performance. Performance is the factor that enables the player to shoot more accurately, and in general to translate the decisions of a player into game actions more quickly and precisely.
Any competitive player knows how much raw advantage can be obtained through higher framerates in a game. This is why competitive players justify buying expensive graphics cards, CPUs, and monitors. But consider for a moment, if this advantage is so crucial to justify $2,000 graphics cards, and graphics cards have 3,000 times more transistors than in the era of quake, why are we pushing only similar framerates to that era?
The answer is the marketability of graphics fidelity. New Triple-A games are forced to push the fidelity of their games to remain competitive to mainstream audiences, even though the niche market of competitive players is content playing 10 and 20 year old games.
Thus, you may be able to see now why IA exists: IA is a niche game designed for competitive players, with no compromises for the sake of mainstream marketability.
Early on we decided that existing engines have fundamental design features that significantly inhibit their performance for the sake of fidelity, so we decided to create our own engine: Apocalypse Engine.
Apocalypse Engine was engineered from the ground up to increase accessibility to world-class performance.
In Inferno Arena, Apocalypse Engine enables a global game rules tick rate of 1,000 TPS and multi-thousand graphics frames per second. This extremely high performance has been carefully coordinated to bring your inputs to the game, process their effects, and display them to you as quickly as possible. We believe Inferno Arena has the lowest input latency of any multiplayer FPS game ever: as low as 3 milliseconds.
How does this compare to other modern FPS games? The lowest latency popular FPS is CSGO with as low as 12 ms input latency. Other modern FPS games don't fare nearly as well.
With Inferno Arena, you can look forward to the absolute most incredible input-to-game connection of any game ever. That connection will enable you to have faster reaction times and more accurate tracking. Inferno Arena is a game you will be able to count on for not allowing technology to be in your way as you master it.
In the future we will reveal some proprietary technologies that have enabled the design of our world class performance in Apocalypse Engine. Stay tuned for more announcements!