When Ubisoft Montreal first set out to bring Far Cry 2 to the PS3, they braced themselves for the worst. After all, they too had heard the rumblings from other developers that the console was a headache to develop for. However, once they dug a little deeper into the mysterious black box, they soon found that, just maybe, the PS3 was literally made for a game like this.
“As we started R&D on PS3, was that the hardware architecture had a very nice fit with some of our technical design decisions. We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems. So while it did require quite a bit of R&D to understand how to use the system correctly, once we started having results we saw that it was a very capable console and that FC2 could run on it.”
But the praise by Tech Director Dominic Guay didn’t stop there, and wouldn’t you know it — he even mustered praise for Sony’s decision to use the high capacity Blu-ray format. More on this, after the jump.
“The hard drive and Blu-ray are making our life easy considering FC2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player. That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated. So, in terms of AI, 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.”
Match made in heaven or not, Dominic still feels that a top-end PC is still going to offer the best Far Cry 2 experience. Nonetheless, isn’t it great to know that developers are increasingly coming to terms with the PS3’s architecture? The days of rationalizing that expensive hit to your checkbook are pretty much over now.
[Via CVG]
