Crytek and Microsoft have posted up an extensive developer blog along with a new developer diary style trailer for Ryse: Son of Rome, the forthcoming XBox One exclusive launch title that puts players in the boots of an ancient Roman soldier.

The blog serves as a rather comprehensive introduction to the game, explaining the process that saw the game transform from it's original plans as an XBox 360 Kinect game to the third person Xbox One title it is now, and describing some of the intricacies in the game's combat mechanics.

Ryse" combat is to be deadly, life and death, it’s intense and emotional, personal, powerful and brutal. Through the use of camera work and realistic facial animations we wanted to push for the realism of a life and death combat situation, to capture the emotion of the player and his opponents. The cameras had to feel dynamic; they had to frame every single shot like a cinematographer would have done, frame the faces and action while seamlessly moving from enemy to enemy without cuts. This had to harmoniously work without compromising gameplay, and if done successfully would actually enhance the player experience.

These ideas culminate in our execution moves. It’s during these executions when the face of your enemy shows the true emotion of what you are about to inflict on them. When the camera frames the movement of the sword, shows the shock and anticipation on your enemy’s s face, then moves through for the kill blow it creates a truly brutal, realistic experience. We put a tremendous amount of development time into the facial animations, writing all the code from scratch, and pushing the rigs and pipeline further than we ever had. "Ryse" has facial fidelity with full performance capture running real-time during combat. Meaning the faces you see in the cinematics are the same rigs running real-time in-game. This gives us the ability and edge to create believable enemies that portray emotions during executions.

Read more in the dev blog, and watch the video below.

Ryse is due along with the Xbox One console in November 2013.