Game Development Giant

In fact, Jester had a deeper reason for doing this.

That is, the American RPG game type has been perfected by countless designers like Richard Garrett over the past ten years. This type of game has actually been in the minds of many players. A formula has been formed.

Just like that, when it comes to this type of game.

Players' minds will instantly think of Witchcraft and games like Genesis. This is like a template. No matter how outstanding the games made by subsequent people are, new games and games of this type will come out. Afterwards, they are always eager to put it into this model for comparison.

It seems that games like Witchcraft and Genesis are the standard answers for American RPGs.

No other types are allowed.

This kind of thinking will not only be very common in the future, but even in modern times, there will be countless people who believe that they are stubborn and ineffective.

The development and creation of games is actually a very subjective matter. Designers can think wildly, and what they come up with must be realized by art or programs. When art or programs say that this is too difficult, , it is simply impossible to complete, and the planning will be compromised, which will speed up the development.

And what if the planning doesn’t compromise?

Then the development will continue, and eventually evolve into two results. One result is that this team has developed a very amazing game, which can be described with exaggerated words such as great and shocking.

The other is that the project dies and the team disbands.

Such examples will not be uncommon even in the future. Some people follow reality, while others pursue their dreams. Some people succeed and some people fail.

For example, CDPR's The Witcher 3 is the reason why a small Polish factory can make such a great RPG game.

They have the spirit of success or failure.

In addition to The Witcher 3 produced by cdpr, a small Polish factory, and called the Polish national treasure by the Polish Prime Minister, there is another work that has the characteristics of success or failure, and that is Blizzard's Warcraft world.

You know, when Blizzard originally launched the World of Warcraft project, around 2000, Blizzard at this time was, at best, just a large game studio with a moderate reputation. It is still far behind the industry giant that it later became due to the incredible success of World of Warcraft.

How seriously did Blizzard pay attention to this project at that time?

There is a very simple example to illustrate. After the establishment of the World of Warcraft project, Blizzard poached many people from the Everquest development team. When these Everquest designers came to Everquest After joining the development team of World of Warcraft, I was directly stunned by the size of the development team of World of Warcraft at that time.

You know, at that time, the eq development team only had more than thirty people, and the number of people in the World of Warcraft development team was three times that of the eq development team.

It can be imagined that when Blizzard decided to make World of Warcraft. How much mental pressure he was under.

Of course, we must also thank Vivendi for allowing Blizzard to embark on such a project that would be a success or failure, a project that would make the most of it. And it lasted five years, which is rare among any investor.

Of course, this doesn't mean that The Witcher 3 is perfect. In fact, this game still has quite a few shortcomings, and the biggest reason is this. It is still because of small factories. Due to the gap in technical capabilities, it is difficult for small factories to be on par with those top game developers in terms of technology when producing such AAA-level masterpieces that shock the industry.

For example, after Ubisoft released Call of Duty: Unity, it caused a lot of criticism due to bugs and optimization issues, especially the frame rate problem on console platforms such as PS4, which made console players extremely dissatisfied. You know, even in the era when Jester was around.

Consoles are still the main sales channel for such large-scale games.

As someone from cdpr said, although the success of the Witcher series began on the PC, there would be no Witcher 3 without consoles. The meaning of this sentence is obvious. It is impossible to support the development of a 3A masterpiece by relying solely on the profits brought by the sales of genuine PC versions.

Therefore, Ubisoft attaches great importance to the feedback of console players in the game. After several patches, it finally made the game Assassin's Creed: Unity perform less poorly on the console, although there is still a frame rate difference. class of questions.

But this can only be said to be a limitation of the ps4's capabilities, or it could be said that Ubisoft's technology has not fully understood the capabilities of the ps4.

However, this possibility is unlikely. The ps4 is different from the ps3. When the ps4 was released, according to Naughty Dog, it had not fully understood the functions of the functional ps3, and Naughty Dog was also the most qualified to say this. This is a game company that talks about it, because they have specialized in research, and because their Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us, also known as The Last of Us, are the benchmark among the PS3 games released.

The reason for this is that ps3 uses a dual-core cell architecture. This architecture is powerful. For a piece of hardware, powerful functions are naturally a good thing. However, you have to look at the two sides of the problem. If it is just one If it is a simple piece of hardware, then there is nothing wrong with it.

However, the ps3 is not a piece of hardware that is simply used.

It is also a development tool. Game developers need to develop games on PS3. In other words, it is a good thing that your own hardware is powerful, but your hardware architecture must also be easy to use for game developers. However, The dual-core cell architecture is very unfavorable for developers.

This is also the reason why ps3 failed when it first launched.

That is because developers cannot understand the architecture of the ps3, so it will naturally be very slow to develop games. Even if they can be developed, because they cannot understand the functions of the ps3, the games they make are all crooked and unsatisfactory. Not to mention the high price of ps3.

But ps4 is different, it is based on x86 architecture.

Just like our computer CPU, the hardware system of this architecture can be said to be the most convenient for game developers to work. This is also an improvement made by Sony after absorbing some things from the ps3.

Because of this, is there any possibility of not being able to fully understand the performance of the ps4 that uses the x86 architecture?

That definitely exists.

But if you want to say that the ultimate performance of ps4 is much worse than what you have already understood, that is obviously unrealistic, because the fact is here, ps4 is an x86 architecture.

And if the technology is insufficient, small Polish factories like cdpr, although they have great ambitions, have indeed developed landmark works like The Witcher 3, which can even compete for GDC's best game of the year, but His subsequent processing was far less swift and powerful than Ubisoft's.

For example, The Witcher 3 also had bugs and low frame rates after its release, which also caused dissatisfaction among many console players. As the main consumer of this game, CDPR is far from able to Kudos to Ubisoft for how quickly they dealt with these bugs.

It was not until more than a week after the game was released that the patch on the first console was updated and some bugs were fixed.

But here comes the most critical issue. After this patch, although part of the bug has been fixed, the number of frames has once again dropped significantly. On the console, there is a very simple way to judge whether the number of frames in a game has dropped. The method is that when the frame rate drops, you will feel screen dizziness.

And The Witcher 3 had such a problem after the first update.

Of course, some people must ask why these problems occur on PS4 but less on Xbox? Moreover, the frame rate of the same game on Xbox is much higher than that on PS4. For example, in the game The Witcher 3, the stable frame rate of Xbox may reach 334 frames, while on PS4 Above, it can only be stabilized at 20** frames.

First, you need to understand the concept of frame number.

Generally speaking, when playing some console games, such as RPGs, the game may be stable at 30 frames and the game can be smooth. For ordinary players, it will not be a big surprise, but if it can be stable At sixty frames, you can certainly feel that the smoothness of the game will improve geometrically.

If it is lower than 30 frames, it may not feel smooth.

After all, the reason why the human eye can automatically convert pictures into movable pictures is that the human eye cannot distinguish a single image of more than twenty-four frames. In other words, when a batch of images is divided into two When a speed of more than fourteen frames flashes in front of human eyes, the human eye will automatically convert these pictures into continuous moving pictures.

This is also the principle of the earliest animation.

Later, when some people talked about the difference between domestic animation and Japanese animation, they often mentioned the issue of frame number, especially cartoons such as Dragon Ball where fighting scenes occupies the main content. Why are Japanese cartoons better than domestic ones? Good looking. (To be continued...)