In an interview with Reboot magazine, Croteam revealed some new information about the fourth upcoming part of the Serious Sam series. According to Damjan Mravunac, the Serious Engine has been upgraded and Serious Sam 4 will take advantage of photogrammetry and motion capture.

Serious Sam 4 will be set before Serious Sam 3 and as Alen Ladavac noted, the game – thanks to the success of The Talos Principle – will pack some new features no one is expecting and no one has ever seen before.

Oh, and remember that “immortal scorpion” copy-protection from Serious Sam 3. Croteam hinted that a similar copy-protection system will be present in Serious Sam 4. After all, a similar feature was used in The Talos Principle as those that were playing the pirated version were getting stuck in an elevator.

Croteam also claimed that in Serious Sam 4 it will try to pump up all the best characteristics of the previous games to the extreme. Therefore, Croteam aims to go over the top with the number of enemies that will be present on screen, as well as with the game’s open world environments.

Last but not least, Croteam aims to get away from the dark and monotonous aesthetics of Serious Sam 3. The team wants to make the game look more realistic, but at the same time make it easy on the eyes with lots of pretty colours and high quality image fidelity.

In related news, Croteam has also confirmed that Serious Sam 4 will support the Vulkan API, and that it will be powered by a much improved version of the Serious Engine.

As Croteam’s Alen Ladavac wrote on Steam:

“We will support Vulkan. But we probably won’t be removing support for other APIs soon.” “SS4 certainly will not use the same version of engine as Talos does. It will use a _much_ improved version. Exact details will be revealed when SS4 is officially presented.”