PC |
by Dan Nicolae Alexa |
24th January 2008 |
Far Cry 2 |
During an interview with Clint Hocking, creative director for Far
Cry 2, it has been revealed that the porting of the highly-anticipated
sequel onto consoles was determined by profitability reasons.
We
all know that console games tend to be more profitable than PC games
because of the increased copy-protection (we have Ubisoft's case,
whose revenues came largely from sales of console titles).
Despite having a reduced install base compared to PCs, consoles are the
Holy Grail for devs because console owners pirate games less
frequently. It doesn't mean that there's no piracy on consoles (the
latter can be modded to allow for pirated-DVDs playback), it's just
that the proportion of pirated games is inferior when you compare it
with PC piracy.
This is what Far Cry 2 developers have taken in consideration when they
decided to make their game a multi-platform title. Clint Hocking,
speaking to Stephen Totilo, from MTV Multiplayer, said that while the game was ab initio designed
to be a worthy PC sequel for the award-winning 2004 FPS, the cost of
building a new game with a new engine from scratch was too high.
"I don’t know if you’re aware, but we originally planned to make it as a
PC game. We really wanted to tell the PC gaming crowd that “Far Cry” is
a PC title and we’re not going to screw up the whole brand by making a
crappy console game. We want to make a PC title that is worthy of being
called “Far Cry 2.
But at the same time, you’re right. We need to be profitable. We
built the game we built it from scratch. And we built the engine from
scratch as well. The engine team, their job was to port the engine over
[to consoles.] Because they didn’t have any data with which to figure
out how to do it, they used our [”Far Cry 2″ game] data. We didn’t ever
expect them to be able to put this thing on console.
The engine team got a console engine running using our data. We
came
back from Leipzig [Games Convention in August] after telling the world
we were going to be PC exclusive. They said, 'Look what we did.' We
said, 'Holy f—, we just lied to a whole bunch of people by accident.'
It turned out that they had the same game running on console."
Hocking was also relaxed with seeing the mighty Crysis or Epic's Unreal Tournament III apparently failing to catch gamers' attention. "By the time we knew that [Crysis and UT3 have disappointing sales] was happening we already knew we were doing a
console version and were actually quite pleased about it. We knew we
were going to be covered in terms of profitability for the engine. It
wasn’t super-important that the actual title was going to be
super-profitable. Because we were making a big investment in technology."
During the video demonstration for the console version of Far Cry, it emerged that the game currently runs at 20fps on a 720p (1280X720) resolution, even with an unoptimized code. The PC version ran at same frame-rate but on a 1920X1200 resolution.
| Your Rating: |
Overall Rating: |
|
|
|
Related News:
Tags:
