The development status of Project Awakening, an action RPG first unveiled by Cygames in 2018, has been partially revealed through an interview with the Japanese media outlet CGWORLD.

According to the interview, Project Awakening is currently in the stage of finalizing its core gameplay elements. Project Awakening is a AAA title being developed by Cygames; news of its development first surfaced in 2016, followed by the release of gameplay footage in 2018.

As a major project co-developed by the Tokyo and Osaka studios, development is expected to accelerate significantly. The team now includes both original developers who have been with the project since its inception and staff who joined after completing Granblue Fantasy: Relink.

The game’s visual concept is 'hyper-photorealistic.' The goal goes beyond simply achieving beautiful photorealistic graphics; it aims to capture the vividness, lived-in feel, and gritty atmosphere of the world. While character creation is based on scan data, the team is manually refining the models to further emphasize character design.

The characters underwent a complete overhaul. Following an upgrade to Cygames' internal 3D scanning equipment in 2019, the team gained access to high-precision data and re-scanned every character to eliminate resolution discrepancies with the older data.

The motion team includes staff who worked on action sequences for Granblue Fantasy: Relink. However, because Project Awakening depicts a realistic world, the action tempo has been adjusted to be slower than that of Relink. The team lowered the tempo to allow players to enjoy the process of reading and reacting to enemy attacks—whether by dodging or blocking—while maintaining responsive controls and aiming for a sense of weight and momentum in the movements.

To achieve more lifelike movement, the team is also expanding motion variations. Even when repeating the same combo, the character's movement will change depending on the terrain, such as when there is a height difference. Furthermore, when an enemy is downed, they will not simply fall in a fixed animation; instead, they will attempt to attack the player even while prone, aiming to convey a sense of biological realism in the monsters. Motion capture is being conducted at Cygames' Osaka studio.

A key aspect of creating the open world fields is integrating the real world into the game. The terrain is based on 13rd-century Europe, with vegetation and geology recreated according to consistent rules based on the environment. This is being developed by specialized vegetation artists in collaboration with geologists.

The team is also working with various specialists to build the open world fields while adhering as closely as possible to real-world geological and botanical logic. The developers stated that their goal is to create landscapes that will feel authentic, especially to those who have traveled through Europe.

The project is being developed using Unreal Engine 5. The team is utilizing tools such as Maya and Houdini, and is actively incorporating the latest technologies. They are currently in the phase of establishing quality benchmarks and plan to continue experimenting to further refine the game's overall quality.