Capcom: Next-Gen Development "Eight to Ten Times" More Work

[Cognimancer]

Capcom: Next-Gen Development "Eight to Ten Times" More Work

The PS4 and Xbox One have some nice hardware, but with great power comes a great learning curve.

When you get down to it, both the PS4 and Xbox One are basically PCs under the hood. Their x86 architecture has earned quite a few points with developers, who have said that the new generation's similarity to PCs make it easier to develop for consoles. Capcom begs to differ, though: while it's gotten easier to do little things, it's far more difficult to make a game that lives up to players' expectations. About ten times more difficult, in fact.

Capcom has crafted a new engine (Panta Rhei) to use as a baseline for their development going forward. The old one was working fine, but evidently it couldn't scale up to max out the new consoles. "Next-gen consoles have drastically redefined the way games are rendered," says Capcom senior manager Masaru Ijuin. "Conventional theories no longer work."

Ijuin believes that the Panta Rhei engine is capable of "unlocking the full potential" of the new consoles. It'll take some getting used to, but he says that the change is necessary. "If we create games the same way as before, we won't be able to give our fans what they want, and that's games unlike any they have ever played ... but it's clear that heightened game quality leads to a rise in the number of man hours. The amount of work involved in making games for next-gen consoles is eight to ten times greater than what is required for the current generation of consoles."

It's easy to see where that work is going - there's new physics to be implemented, new lighting effects to program, and much more detail for art teams to create. It all points back to the big question of the new generation's value: if these games will take eight times longer to create, will they be eight times better than last gen games?

Source: OXM [http://www.oxm.co.uk/69150/capcom-xbox-one-and-ps4-games-are-eight-to-ten-times-more-work-than-current-gen/]

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[Sight Unseen]

More PR bullshit. If devs can make them for PC it should be easy enough to scale it down for the consoles.

To use an analogy, the new console generation is like going from a small car to a slightly larger car. Sure there's some slight adaptation to be made but surely it's not like they're going from a moped to a dump truck in one go.

 

[synobal]

More PR bullshit. If devs can make them for PC it should be easy enough to scale it down for the consoles.

To use an analogy, the new console generation is like going from a small car to a slightly larger car. Sure there's some slight adaptation to be made but surely it's not like they're going from a moped to a dump truck in one go.

I can see some problem trying to implement each consoles unique features, kinect for microsoft and uh what ever it is the PS4 does, the control motion sensor thingy I think?

Beyond that I'm not certain what the problems would be beyond devs not knowing each systems unique quirks yet. As far as the actual quotes ya it seems mostly PR bull. The software isn't groundbreaking at all. Making it work with in each consoles limitations can be a problem but they act like the software is suddenly so much more revolutionary and zomg they've never worked with such power....

 

[Rad Party God]

For the love of God... FUCKING NO!. Why do these devs have to come up with that same bullshit!?, NO!, you don't have to exploit the damned thing at it's fullest!, their previous engine was already good enough!, they could've just ramped up the resolution and make things run at 60 fps, you know, like Capcom's own games on a PC.

But no, please do give us mediocre games with pretty graphics and then blame your own customers for being "too old" to buy your games.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Now if only they'd put that eight to ten times effort into making the games playable and enjoyable, instead of just prettied-up retreads of old, bad ideas.

Does anyone else get to thinking that Capcom's obsession with QTEs is a desire to keep players from missing those whiz-bang next-gen-graphics setpieces?

 

[misg]

I've worked in the gaming industry and it's brutal on developers when they have to work on a new gen of consoles. It's a sharp learning curve and a great deal of time to get used to it working. PC companies have the luxury of choosing where they want their game to fix into the mix, lowered end graphics and focus on gameplay/story or try and be groundbreaking. If their game is six or a year months behind the current graphics/hardware, if it's good, it will still sell.

Where on the console there is always a need to be pushed especially with games to be released in the first year, here is the thing it's kind of like expansion time for your favourite MMO you may be awesome with maxed out gear and know all the current raids and so on. But the day that expansion comes out all that you know and done counts for nothing. This is what Devs go through every time consoles move up a gen.

For those who say "just up the old engine" is a simple answer and would be short sighted. Sadly Graphics do sell, people by pretty things, it makes them feel it has value. I'm not saying every gamer feels this way I certainly don't but it still sells games and consoles. I'm hoping this is the generation that will have a change away from that but it's hard to say. But until that changes game devs will feel the whip from their masters who will most likely only be able to tell how good a game is by the graphics. So I do feel a a bit for the guys working 12+ hours a day fixing memory leaks and going through line after line of code just trying to make the system come alive. In time they will have lots of code written that can be used and the know how of what is needed to make these consoles purr but for now I feel their pain, and regardless if you hate them or not, lots of people are missing time with family and friends so you get a shiny new game so please show a bit of respect to those people.

 

[ShirowShirow]

"Next gen will be even easier!"

"Next gen will be just as hard."

"Next gen will be marginally more difficult."

"TEN TIMES MORE."

Make up your mind, gaming industry.

 

[Cybylt]

Does anyone else get to thinking that Capcom's obsession with QTEs is a desire to keep players from missing those whiz-bang next-gen-graphics setpieces?

Obsession with QTEs? They have four IPs (Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Asura's Wrath, Lost Planet) out of dozens that have any at all, Asura's Wrath was developed by CyberConnect2 and two of those didn't even have QTEs til they were outsourced to western devs.

For the love of God... FUCKING NO!. Why do these devs have to come up with that same bullshit!?, NO!, you don't have to exploit the damned thing at it's fullest!, their previous engine was already good enough!, they could've just ramped up the resolution and make things run at 60 fps, you know, like Capcom's own games on a PC.

So... keep building the games for 360 and PS3, port it and up-res it? That actually sounds like more work and forgets that they might want to phase out the old stuff to advance their options in development. Yeah they've ported to pc before but it doesn't make sense to port up to new consoles when the explicitly stated goal is to start using those new consoles as a baseline. Wouldn't be surprised if this Panta Rhei was based off of MT Frameworks anyway.

Plus all of the complaints kind of ignore that at the end of the day it's still new architecture for them to work with. The article itself seems to be ignoring the entire existence of GPUs.

 

[seditary]

Don't worry Capcom, you don't need to put in 8 to 10 times more work to match up to my expectations, I already expect very little.

"Next-gen consoles have drastically redefined the way games are rendered," says Capcom senior manager Masaru Ijuin.

Oh god I'm going to burst my spleen from overwhelming laughter if he continues.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

The resolution is capped at 720. Does changing how a game is rendered make it any different to what the previous generation looked like?

 

[Zetatrain]

Umm isn't this the case with every new console generation? New consoles mean new technology and with it the learning curve required to fully understand and utilize said technology.

 

[Icehearted]

So does this mean they need to make eight to ten times more money or their games will be failures? This is Capcom, so eight to ten times more DLC?

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Maybe if they'd put in 8 to 10 times more effort in the last gen they might have made a few good games.

 

[KDR_11k]

"If we create games the same way as before, we won't be able to give our fans what they want, and that's games unlike any they have ever played

The games I played that were unlike anything before were rarely needing cutting edge processing power.

 

[iseko]

Better graphics = better games?

Dev: look how realistic our titan looks!
player: your titan seems to be stuck in a wall.
Dev: Yes but is doing so fabulously!
Player: what is a titan doing in this game anyway? I thought it was about marines fighting off foreign invaders. How does it fit in the story?
Dev: Look how the light reflects of its armor! Look!!!

 

[Hagi]

By the way he's talking you'd figure these next-gen consoles were freaking Quantum Computers.

Not completely normal computers using an instruction set literally decades old and a CPU/GPU solution that's existed for years. Conventional Theories still work. This thing's still using them. Nothing has been redefined. Games are still rendered exactly the same, shit loads of floating point operations.

 

[Scars Unseen]

I'm not sure if I count as a fan, but here is a summary of what I want from you, Capcom:

1) A refined sequel to Dragon's Dogma

2) Megaman Legends 3

3) A proper Breath of Fire game(not an "Easy touch type online RPG")

That's pretty much it. Please get on that ASAP.

 

[james.sponge]

Can't they just use UE4 which is supposed to be much simpler and quicker as far as game building goes?

 

[AndrewC]

It's not like they put in any effort to their games anyway.

 

[BrotherRool]

8 to 10 is absolute BS. If games cost 10-30 million last gen, there is no way that Capcom is spending 100-300 million on them now. Even the craziest developer would sit down and say 'maybe we don't need the maximum graphical power[/i]