It seems the developmental jury is still out when it comes to the PlayStation 3, with some creative teams suggesting that Sony’s powerhouse console is difficult to work with, others insisting the end result is well worth any related challenge, and some reporting no problems whatsoever in developing their software.
Ubisoft was initially worried about developing Far Cry 2 on the PS3... but not any more. Credit: Ubisoft.
Today, prominent third-party publisher and developer Ubisoft has positioned itself in the latter two camps of creative reaction by offering up its two cents (Canadian) regarding the PlayStation 3 port of renowned PC shooter Far Cry 2.
Speaking in a CVG report , Ubisoft Montreal’s technical director, Dominic Guay, commented that the team working on Far Cry 2 quickly realised the PS3’s “hardware architecture had a very nice fit” with some of the studio’s technical design decisions. He also went on to enthuse about “how efficient the SPU [Cell processing units] were” in relation to Far Cry 2’s animations, physics systems and vegetation simulations.
A bigger gun might be an advantage at this juncture, no? Credit: Ubisoft.
“The hard drive and Blu-ray are making our life easy considering FC2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player,” added Guay. “That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated. So, in terms of A.I., game structure, physics, dynamic time of day, open world gameplay, dynamic weather system, destructible vegetation, all of those things where we had really pushed the envelope technically, they run well on PS3.”
While conceding that Ubisoft was initially “somewhat worried” and “didn’t know what to expect” following reports of severe complexity in relationship to developing on the PlayStation 3, Guay outlined that once the studio had invested enough R&D to understand the system correctly, positive results were forthcoming and the PS3 revealed itself as “a very capable console and that FC2 could run on it.”
Far Cry 2 will be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 in the third quarter of 2008.
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