Gamasutra- "Creating a breathing, living city is one of the toughest challenges facing developers of open world games today: get it wrong, and your player feels like she's walking through a lifeless television set with cheap props and false fronts for buildings. Get it right, and she'll be absorbed enough in your world to momentarily forget she's playing a game at all.
Ubisoft Montreal is among the best in the business at creating believable cities thanks to its Assassin's Creed series. We sat down with Alex Hutchinson, creative director of the upcoming Assassin's Creed III, for his tips on making a city feel alive. He tells us it's "one of the hardest things you could possibly do," but managed to offer the following."
Check out our exclusive Alex Hutchinson interview discussing the success of Revenge Of The Savage Planet, the effects of Game Pass and what’s next
Alex Hutchinson talks about Google Stadia, how Xbox compares, and what cloud gaming needs to move forward.
Cloud gaming still has too many flaws. Fast stable internet, extra costs/subscription services, not ideal for mobile data and why play over cloud via wifi when you have a console/pc that has no input delay and other issues, why buy a game on a cloud service (will always need online even if it's a single player game) when you can actually own it on console/pc...at the same price. Cloud gaming should only ever stay as an option to gaming and playing your games that you already own. Never as the only option.
I disagree, in the sense that the flaws are and have been these same known quantities for some time. You know you need fast and stable internet for the best experience. You know it isn't just free beyond Remote Play. Ownership - you know what ecosystem you're in.
Cloud Gaming is awesome when it's there as the most viable option at the time and works. For me, it was like this morning on my laptop playing Pentiment waiting for my car service to finish. For others it's to quick demo a new game before thinking of hard drive space. Maybe Mac users with gigabit internet want to play GeForce Now and buy a game off Steam only to play it that way.
As long as latency exists, cloud gaming will never thrive no matter how much they advertise that there's low latency or no latency that always ends up being a load of crap
I quite enjoy cloud streaming now. I find it the quickest way to testing if a game is worth committing download time or even $ to buy it. And using dedicated devices like the portal and gcloud makes it all the better.
But like Goodguy says... it's an option, and not the only one. If people understand that, they may start to appreciate this convenience.
I think Xbox is doing Cloud Streaming right, even if I think its only because they're doing hardware wrong.
By enabling xCloud on The Xbox One and Series S they enable players to buy the cheaper console but play games in better resolutions through xCould.
Take the recent Oblivion release for instance. If you play it locally on a Series S it's rendered at 630P and upscaled using FSR to 1260P with a 30FPS cap.
But if you play it on xCloud on the Series S, it's at 1080P native 60 FPS.
So you can get better performance using xCloud then playing local (on the Series S and Xbox One).
It shouldn’t have required a subscription service. Like do the Steam model and just take the % on software sales or have a sub tier where you pay monthly or annually and get perks.
I’m not opposed to the idea of being able to stream games in the highest quality, but Stadia was so poorly handled it turned into a massive sh*t show.
"It shouldn’t have required a subscription service."
It didn't
"Like do the Steam model and just take the % on software sales or have a sub tier where you pay monthly or annually and get perks."
That's literally what it was. Stadia pro gave 2 free games a month (similar to PS+), 4K visuals, and 5.1 Surround Sound. But if you didn't want to pay you could simply buy the games and play them in 1080P. The core service was free.
But google massively screwed up the marketing which led to people thinking it needed a sub to use.
Google Stadia failed largely in part because of the massive campaign Microsoft launch against it. It didn't have the massive support of PlayStation, Nintendo, or even Apple to withstand the negativity campaign Microsoft launch against it.
Former Assassin's Creed and Far Cry lead Alex Hutchinson explains that Nintendo will get away with their awful Game Key Cards.
people here forget that Sony sells Collector's Editions of games (God of War, Horizon, etc) that give you a steelbook with no disc. Just a code on a piece of paper. But because some 3rd party devs are choosing this route it's all Nintendo's fault.
If the option was a physical cartridge or a game key card then that would be the best possible situation. However it’s looking increasingly like game key cards will totally phase out physical media and that is really disappointing. I have a huge physical Switch libary and was looking forward to doing the same for the Switch 2.
@Neonridr
But it was Nintendo, who introduced this game key thingy. So it's 100% their fault.
@staticall - they gave devs the option I guess, yes. But I haven't seen a single first party Nintendo game opt for this route.
yes.. they could pay full price to put their games on a cartridge, or pay less and provide a digital code and save money.
Which do you think devs would opt for?
It wasn’t about distribution… 🤦♂️
The irony being him criticizing what creates of the loss of making gaming feel “special.” You know, annual releases with a paint-by-number blue print, monetization, and in general just Ubisoft practices for the last decade.
Sorry that one went over your head.
Then maybe you should do a better job of making your point instead of readers assuming what you’re trying to say.
Yet most games these days on Blu-ray's don’t even contain the full game or the game at all. But he wasn’t complaining when he was at Ubisoft tho.
Kind of normal to not want to get fired for public complaints about your company, though.
Buying a physical box, just to open it for a glorified QR code is a shitty practice but I can absolutely see it becoming the norm sadly.
The enjoyment of owning something physically is going away, now its just a paid trial of services you never really "own".
except this is still a physical cartridge that you have to put in your console. You just have to download the entire game. But instead of it just being a code in a box (which is a one time use), you could still sell this or lend it to your friend.
It's not great no, but it's nothing like what we had with some Switch games.
Fair, its better than a one time use code but it I agree with the point in the article. It still takes away from the overall experience (especially from a nostalgia perspective).
@Duke19 - I mean we have digital edition only consoles now from MS and Sony. That's ok?
Seems like this is just a physical vs digital conversation, you can't exactly single out Nintendo here as everyone seems to be doing it.
thisnis definitely gonna bite nintendo in the arse in some way.
kids mostly use the consoles and not all parents know what to do with it.
also, what if u dont or cant use wifi ? lol
I think R* make the best and most believable open world cities.
it's all down to the AI and the interaction and the stuff going on while you play.
I will never forget playing gta4 and coming out of my appartment I opened the door, just as it opened it tripped up some guy who was running. he did a few rolls and then slowly got up and as he did a fat looking cop came running up to him and arrested him.
it was one of those moments you could not help but wonder if the game and just spawned him outside the door the second I had started to open it, or if whatever he had done had been done in the game world while I was doing my thing and everything had just led up to that moment.
it makes the world so much more believe able compared to most games that just have random people walking in groups doing nothing at all.
It's to bad they can't make it more real than it is. I always wished I could go into all the offices in the skyscrapers and seen NPC's working. I have followed NPC's in GTA IV just to see where they are going, like after a cop arrests someone. All they do is just drive around though, would of been cool to see them go to the police station.
There still seems to be this disconnection between the AI populating the game and the buildings themselves though. You never see someone going inside or a face behind a window to make you think people are living their lives normally you just get the impression everyone is always outside in a kinda endless groundhog day limbo. And people who you can interact with just stand there all day and all night waiting for your character to talk to them. In assassins creed revelations a random would come out from the crowds and attack you, why not use this mechanic to open up side quests with the random coming out from the crowds to tap you on the shoulder and ask for your help rather than attack you and lose the guy always stood by a building waiting for you to interact with them.
Also give the player the moral choice and include children and animals in these sprawling cities,
There was something that I noticed in LoZ:TP-
Yes, Zelda is text and worse the area that I am referring to did not occur in a city.
The fishing shop dynamic in LoZ:TP was nice because the NPC would comment on whatever Link happened to be staring at through the "Look Mode".
Also, NPCs should have more than one thing to say- at the very least they should have several variations of the same script.