Guerrilla Games is currently working on a PS4 exclusive, heavily rumored to be an open world RPG, and good top-notch animation is pretty essential for that kind of game, especially in order to support the narrative. Looks like the studio is looking into improving its animation tech, as revealed by a career opportunity ad seeking an Animation Systems Programmer.

Guerrilla is looking for an Animation Systems Programmer to improve and extend the animation technology used in our upcoming titles. As the successful candidate, you will work together with other programmers, animators, riggers and designers to enhance our titles in areas like character movement, character interaction with the environment, hit responses, facial animation, procedural animation and in-game cut scenes. In addition, you will be responsible for optimizing the performance of our animation technology.

First of all, it's interesting to see a plural "upcoming titles." While if it might be a generic definition, it's certainly possible that Guerrilla may be working on more than one game, considering that the studio employs over 200 developers. Unfortunately we have no way to know for now.

Improvements in character animations will definitely be welcome, considering that what we saw in Killzone: Shadow Fall was quite good, but there was definitely room for further evolution, especially if we consider narrative-driven games.

If you're unfamiliar with procedural animation, it involves the use of real-time automatically generated animation sequences that allow for a more diverse set of movements. It’s often used for cloth and hair, but also for other parts of a character.

The importance of animation for storytelling for future Guerrilla games is underlined in a second ad, seeking a Technical Narrative Animator:

Guerrilla is looking for a driven Technical Narrative Animator with a keen eye for quality to assist our Narrative Animation Team in the conception and implementation of in-game narratives. As the successful candidate you will create and implement cinematics and in-game sequences, and work with other departments to maximize the quality and impact of in-game narratives. Additional responsibilities include creating briefs and checking deliveries against these briefs, and helping out with the actual integration by means of networks, scripting and adjusting animations.

Interestingly, the ads also mention that the candidates will work with Maya, MotionBuilder and NaturalMotion Morpheme.

It'll be interesting to see just how far the acclaimed first party studio will manage to push animation in its future games. Hopefully we'll hear about this mysterious RPG soon. Gamescom is just a little more than a month away. Will Guerrilla be ready?