Ryse: Son of Rome arrived in 2014 as a gleaming, cinematic showcase for the Xbox One, but the game's six-hour campaign concealed an uncomfortable truth: two-thirds of the planned content had been cut to make the launch deadline. Behind the scenes, however, Crytek's developers were already thinking bigger. They had designs for an entire franchise that would extend far beyond ancient Rome.
Once the original game wrapped, a core team of artists, researchers, and leadership convened to chart the future. Patrick Hanenberger, a production designer who had previously worked at DreamWorks and joined Ryse as a visual consultant to make it feel like a "playable movie," was brought on as the franchise's art director. Todd Papy, who had directed God of War: Ascension at Sony's Santa Monica Studio, joined Crytek in late 2013 for what was publicly billed as an unannounced project but was actually focused on adapting his ancient-world expertise to Rome.
The ambitious scope of what came next reveals how seriously the studio took the IP's potential. The team debated fundamental questions about the franchise's identity. Did the appeal lie specifically in Roman history, or in history itself? Could they venture beyond Rome to other empires without losing the thread?
Peter Gornstein, Ryse's art director and director of cinematics, championed a Vikings game. The setting was historically untapped at the time, offering raids across the English and French coasts, expeditions to Newfoundland, and even service as bodyguards in Constantinople. "It would have been great to explore a part of history that a lot of people didn't yet know about," Gornstein recalls. The History Channel's Vikings series was barely underway, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla was still nine years away.
Hanenberger floated feudal Japan, intrigued by the Mongol invasions of Kublai Khan, the arrival of European traders, and the Sengoku period's civil wars. The Ottoman Empire, which conquered Constantinople in 1453, was another contender. Not everyone embraced these departures. Some felt the studio had just established the Rome foundation and was already straying too far. As Yannick Boucher, one of the original game's project managers, noted: "That's not like going from Rome to Greece. It would have been a big departure."
Hanenberger conceived thematic connectors that could tie installments together. The overarching question driving each game could be how and why empires rise and fall. Narratively, characters and events could link across titles like dominoes, each story setting in motion the next, or even reflecting history's own patterns.
The sequels would have abandoned Ryse's corridors for something closer to God of War 2018, neither fully open-world nor completely linear. The team wanted to introduce mechanics stripped from the original due to time pressure, including vehicle navigation and PVP multiplayer. Single-player combat would have been more fluid, allowing soldiers to leave and reenter shield formations at will rather than being locked into automated sequences. The developers envisioned deploying historical tactics like the Parthian shot, where cavalry feign retreat before wheeling around to fire, or the Sengoku-era Kakuyoku formation that transforms a defensive line into a flanking pincer.
Aesthetically, the sequels would remain faithful to Ryse's emotional rather than literal approach to history. As Gornstein explains, they weren't depicting Rome as it actually was, but as it might have seemed to someone from a distant village visiting the city for the first time, when everything would feel overwhelming. The supernatural element that subtly shaped the original, with the hidden gods Aquilo and Aestas, would have woven through other mythologies and religions in future installments.
When Hanenberger and Gornstein presented the franchise pitch to Microsoft, the response was unequivocal. "They told us it was 'the most cohesive and well-thought IP pitch they had ever seen,'" Hanenberger recalls. "It all seemed to go very well."
Until it didn't. Ryse never sold out at launch. The game landed with a Metacritic score of 60, a jarring blow after Boucher's final month of development spent working thirty days straight. Work on sequels halted not because of a formal cancellation, but because the franchise became economically unviable. Microsoft wanted to own the IP to justify continued investment. Crytek, remaining privately held, refused to relinquish control. With neither side willing to compromise, the two parted ways. Crytek moved on to other projects, and the empire Ryse was meant to build never materialized.
The game did eventually find its audience. It sold over a million copies and cultivated a devoted cult following that cherishes what the developers executed well. Boucher, Gornstein, and others carried lessons from the experience forward to later work on Hitman, Battlefield 1, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. As for Ryse itself, it remains a stunning monument to ambition thwarted by circumstance and licensing disputes.
Author Emily Chen: "Ryse's story is the most frustrating kind of video game tragedy: not a creative failure, but a business one that killed something genuinely visionary before it had a chance to breathe."
Comments