Far Cry 4 "Suffered from it's Cross-Generation Development" - According to Technical Lead at Ubisoft Montreal

With today's Due north American and tomorrows European release of the latest Far Cry 4 DLC Valley of the Yetis, it's rather plumbing fixtures that during this year'southward GDC the Technical Lead at Ubisoft Montreal, Stephen McAuley held a session discussing some of the development process and the challenges of creating the world of Far Cry 4.

Keeping the final-gen Far Cry 3 Engine intact "gave us a lot of constraints"

During Stephen'south session at GDC (titled Rendering The World Of Far Cry 4), he talked about how it was, building Far Weep 4 whilst nonetheless keeping the last-gen engine alive, and having to go back from fourth dimension to fourth dimension, to change things on the last-gen versions of the game after making improvements on the electric current-gen and PC versions.

"Our mandate every bit a graphics team was to atomic number 82 on electric current-gen, keeping the last-gen engine the same as what shipped Far Cry iii. That gave us a lot of constraints as we had to keep the terminal-gen working, which affected a lot of our decisions throughout the project. By the cease of the projection, as was probably inevitable, nosotros had to become back to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and shine those up, but information technology meant that we had a improve production than FC3 on all platforms."

What Stephen said about the constraints makes sense if you really have said constraints on you, you need to keep the last-gen stuff in mind. It'south not expert mind you as it limits the development team a chip equally Stephen pointed out, but nonetheless this was the case during the development of Far Cry four, due to the cross-platform nature.

Stephen went on to talk nearly some details of how the work done with the game'south Lightning was affected past these constraints.

"Increasing the resolution of the sky apoplexy was probably our priority over increasing the resolution of the indirect lighting, because information technology was less intrusive (important because of our cross-generation production) and it's also easier – nosotros knew information technology was doable."

If we look at the slides from Stephen'southward session nosotros can run across that Ubisoft was actually able to move some of the CPU work over to the GPU, this translates into better performance with today'southward game engines compared to the engines used for last-gen titles which were pretty heavily CPU-bound.

If you want to check out all of the slides from Stephen'south GDC session yous can notice them equally a PDF over here.

Well-nigh of u.s. would agree that final-gen is and has been outdated for quite "some time" now, and we can fifty-fifty see performance issues today on Electric current-gen. The most recent examples of this would be that Battlefield Hardline is merely going to run at 720P 60FPS (at least they prioritized 60FPS for a Shooter) on the Xbox Ane, and 900P 60FPS on the PlayStation 4. The other example would be that Uncharted 4 might end upward running at 1080P 30FPS after all, even afterward the developer stated that they were aiming for 60FPS.