Update: In 2017, Liquid Dragon Studios was charged with porting Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor's graphics pipeline to the PS4 Pro. Reviewers were unanimously positive with the results. Liquid Dragon was charged with analyzing and improving performance on the game. The focus was on improving performance for Current Gen platforms but all the systems we ended up working on impacted both Current and Next Gen performance. Specific tasks included: Profiling key systems, analyzing and identifying candidates for performance improvements. Improving the Havok physics integration to take better advantage of new features and data structures as well as porting former in house detection code to Havok. This also involved toolside work to allow new assets to be created with the new data structure. Optimizing particle systems. Re-architecting large parts of the ground cover / vegetation system to improve both performance and memory footprint. Implementing a new highly efficient sweep and prune gather system. The system was originally intended to be used for the ground cover only but ended up replacing the generic in-engine proximity gather system used among other things by the sounds engine.