During my demo of “Far Cry 2″ last week, I asked the game’s creative director about a few things. I covered the exploding barrels part of the conversation. Later this week you’ll read how we talked about death.
But today I want to share our chat about making a PC game at a time that high-end first-person shooters aren’t selling the way people would expect.
The following exchange occurred as he demonstrated the game:
Multiplayer: What’s it like making a PC game these days in light of the sales figures for “Unreal Tournament III” and “Crysis”?
Clint Hocking, creative director, “Far Cry 2″: 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.”
Multiplayer: Respect the complexity of it’s PC heritage and all that…
Hocking 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.
Ed note: At this point Hocking talked about display resolutions and I got so confused I need to later get some e-mailed clarification. The upshot, straight from Ubisoft, is that Hocking was playing the game for me on a PC and a monitor displaying a 1920×1200 resolution. Console versions of the game will play at 720p, or 1280×720. Now back to Hocking, who said…
That means [the console versions] already have twice the liberty that we have, which is the main thing that allows them to run. Basically us running at 20 frames per second at 1920 resolution is about the equivalent of them running at 20 frames per second at [720p]. The games are exactly the same.
Ed note #2: Still perplexed? I was. He’s saying that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are less powerful than the PC Hocking uses to run the computer version of “Far Cry 2.” He is basically saying that the relatively weaker machines, the consoles, can run the game at the current, un-optimized 20 frames-per-second rate because they don’t have to render the game’s graphics in nearly as detailed a resolution as the computer version. Let’s go to the interview again, picking up after he and I talked about buffalo dung for a while…
Multiplayer: Back to the PC question for a second, when you saw the sales figures for “Crysis” did that have any affect on what you guys were going for?
Hocking: By the time we knew that 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.
Multiplayer: What’s the name of this engine?
Hocking: It’s called the Dunia engine. Dunia is the Swahili word for “world.”
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And then Hocking and I went on to talk about other stuff.
I just wanted to give you all a glimpse of the PC-developer mindset these days. You often hear doom and gloom about PC games. But Hocking sounds like Ubisoft has set “Far Cry 2″ up in a healthy way — built for PC and designed for good business even if, paradoxically, sales are bad.
Could it really be true? Is this the failsafe solution for high-end PC development? You port it to console and sell your engine to make money no matter what?