Titanic – Honor & Glory lets you explore the legendary ship and even offers ray tracing. We ventured on deck and are thrilled.
Ships – I admit, I’ve always had a soft spot for these floating monsters. This is mainly due to summer holidays in Sweden, which came up almost every year during my childhood. We could only reach the land of Köttbullar and Mjölk by car ferry, and it was gigantic, not only by my childhood standards.
You had almost endless freedom of movement (apart from the ocean), you could explore the decks, there was just so much to discover – from restaurants to small shops for shopping to leisure activities. Very different from cramped planes, which to this day no ten moose can get me on.
Why am I telling you this? Well, so that you can hopefully understand why I grew up beaming with joy in front of the screen shortly after the start of the interactive Unreal Engine 4 demo Titanic – Honor & Glory and why no iceberg in the world could have driven me away.
You can get first impressions of the planned game in this somewhat older trailer. The current demo looks even better graphically:
What is Titanic – Honor & Glory all about?
Titanic – Honor & Glory, that’s a long name for a graphic demo! If this thought crossed your mind when you read the name, you’re not far wrong. Because if you read through the vision (on the official website) it becomes clear that the project is supposed to become a real video game one day – a very reading-heavy adventure game, to be exact.
In it, you will be able to explore the legendary passenger ship and find documents containing a wealth of information about the construction of the Titanic, the crew, the passengers and, of course, the infamous disaster of 15 April 1912. The vision is thus a kind of interactive museum, with a special highlight: even the sinking process is to be simulated in real time.
So far, however, nothing of all this is to be seen. Your only pastime at the moment is to explore the approximately 30 completed percent of the legendary cruise ship. This impressive replica is the work of a team of volunteers who, according to their own statements, strictly adhere to historical sources – i.e. pictures, documentation and verified research results.
Sounds boring? I had this fear at first too, despite my childish enthusiasm. When I start a graphics demo – and Honor & Glory is nothing else in its current state – I expect to spend ten nice minutes with it. Twenty, maybe, if there’s a really cool idea behind it, like being able to fly through the desert on a dragon:
With mouth open from the dining room to the engine room
In the end, however, I spent three wonderful hours with Honor & Glory – and took more photos along the way than on last year’s holiday at Lake Constance. At the same time, you can’t even do anything on the ship at this point. What is so fascinating about the demo?
It’s difficult to put the feeling of the game into words. Because a large part of the fascination results from an unpredictability that arouses curiosity, and I don’t want to spoil that for you with too many spoilers. Where does this passage lead? What rooms are there to discover? Wait, have I been here before? Where the hell am I anyway?!
Especially the last thought will often run through your head, because the journey through the corridors and cabins of the Titanic is so confusing and at times almost claustrophobic that from time to time there is even a hint of creepiness. If the developers put a few monsters in the galley, the setting would be ideal for a horror game.
Oh, now that we’ve finally arrived at the subject of scenery: Honor & Glory looks breathtaking in places! This is due on the one hand to the locations, which are sometimes bursting with details, such as the various dining halls or the Turkish bath, and on the other hand to the graphic features of the Unreal Engine 4.
Instead of words, I’ll let pictures speak for once and open my holiday album of the RMS Titanic for you:
Provided you have a powerful graphics card, you can even activate ray tracing, which takes care of reflections and ambient occlusion in addition to lighting. If your PC is getting on its knees, you can also activate Nvidia’s DLSS, which, however, makes the picture look somewhat blurrier even at the highest quality level.
The graphics are turned up, the sailor’s yarn is in place – now what? My simple advice: Just open the first door you see and follow your gut feeling. To really discover every room and look at the many details, you should plan one or two hours. From time to time, you will even hear sound effects that match the scenery, which will help you to imagine life on the ship at that time in your mind’s eye.
Finally, I’ll give you a little challenge: How long will it take you to find the imposing engine room? After all, the 46,329 tonnes did not move by magic. Have fun!
Who is Honor & Glory interesting for?
With all this praise, of course, I don’t forget that interactive deck viewing is still not for everyone. For those who are not at all interested in shipping, in the interior of the early 20th century or at least in a ship that will soon sink into the icy waters of the ocean will only yawn half-heartedly despite all the graphic splendour.
But if you’ve always wanted to know how a passenger on the legendary Titanic might have felt, and like to go exploring without a clear destination, you should start the 11 GB download as soon as possible, put on a sailor’s or, if you like, captain’s cap and insert a new film into your camera.
*(Click here to download the demo of Titanic – Honor & Glory)*
What do we like? What don’t?
Strengths of Titanic – Honor & Glory
- Stunning graphics in places
- Dense atmosphere
- A few special places to discover
Weaknesses of Titanic – Honor & Glory
- There’s nothing to do
- Your hardware is challenged (especially with ray tracing enabled)
- Sometimes graphics bugs, especially with level streaming
Editorial conclusion
If someone had told me before starting Titanic – Honor & Glory that I was about to spend three hours enthusiastically hammering the screenshot button at the sight of a staircase banister or a wicker chair – I would have single-handedly banished that landlubber to the galley to peel potatoes!
But it’s true, I had a tremendously great time on the Titanic, even though nothing happened at all. Just the feeling of being given a credible impression of how a passenger on this colossus must have felt is impressive. Every corner on the ship seems almost as if it would become real at any moment.
I am still sceptical, however, whether this impressive graphic demo will actually become a game one day. After all, this project has been in the making for over 6 years now and so far it doesn’t seem as if it’s only a matter of months until players finally get something to do. It’s a shame really, because after this successful appetiser I would book a ticket for a longer stay on the Titanic without hesitation.
