Esports production value

I’ve just been catching a bit of the ESL CS:GO Majour Tournament in Rio, IEM RIO 2022, it’s actually quite impressive the quality of the production. I don’t think I’ve truly managed to appreciate it fully, but here’s a couple of things that caught by attention!

Camera angles

It looks like for the maps there are preset cameras which move in preset paths.

They also have custom camera paths on objects / players such as when a weapon is dropped, they can focus the spectator camera on it and move it in quite an interesting way.

During the start of the round there is a cool vertigo affect on the team as well, quite creative both cinematically and technically.

Storytelling

I’m not going to lie, I’m mainly watching it without audio. But you can really notice that they are portraying a narrative. Quite similar to broadcast sports I suppose! With the many reaction shots invoking the emotion!

HUD

The design is quite familiar to someone who has played the game before, but it’s very much spectative first in the content it delivers and it contains an incredible amount of information with the space it’s served in.

It’s also suprisingly good for new players as well. Such as when it is a 1 v >1 amount of other players, it will say it is a clutch situation.

When spectating a player as well it will show a camera of them in-person.

Technical video quality

I’m not particuarly impressed with this, it is only being distributed on Twitch where the quality maxes out at 1080p60 @ 6Mbps. It doesn’t look great especially with the in-game effects and the in-person shots as the low bitrate becomes really obvious. Sure distribute to Twitch, but if you have a website where people can watch, don’t embed get a custom player!

In-person elements

I quite like how integrated it is with the game such as with the C4, there is a flashing white light then when it goes off they fill the stadium with a red fill.

I wish there was more angles though! Although this might be because I only watched it mid-game so just used crowd reaction shots.