Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s early access period won’t include full ray tracing

Image: Bethesda Softworks

If you pay the premium to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle early on PC, the game won’t initially include full ray tracing. The game’s early access period for Premium Edition and Collector’s Edition buyers launches at 7PM ET today, but full ray tracing won’t be added until December 9th, when the game launches for everyone else.

“Following the release of the update, shadows, reflections, and global illumination will all be accurately rendered in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle using Full Ray Tracing, elevating image quality,” Nvidia says in a blog post. And DLSS Ray Reconstruction will be “coming soon,” according to an emailed media alert.

The belated addition of the graphics options could sting for early access buyers, especially given that early access isn’t cheap: the Premium Edition, for example, costs $99.99, a $30 increase over the game’s standard $69.99 price.

The game already has hefty PC specs, including that GPU hardware ray tracing is required even at minimum. Jim Kjellin, the CTO of Great Circle developer MachineGames, gave us a reason for as to why that’s the case:

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle uses a technique called global illumination to light the environment and characters. Our engine MOTOR, used by MachineGames, uses hardware raytracing to calculate this. While this isn’t what players may typically think of as “ray tracing,” the compatible hardware is required to do this is in a performant, high fidelity way.

Great Circle will also be available on Xbox Series X / S, and it’s coming to PS5 in spring 2025.