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Dishonored's lead level designer labels PS4's 8GB RAM "a joy"

mocoworm

Member
Lock if old. I did search.

Dishonored's lead level designer labels PS4's 8GB RAM "a joy"

"When Sony stepped out in New York with the surprise revelation that PlayStation 4 had a whopping 8GB of very fast GDDR5, there were few people more pleased than Dishonored's lead level designer Christophe Carrier.

"We need memory, you know?" he shrugged, smiling knowingly at colleague Dinga Bakaba after winning Best Game at the BAFTA Game Awards on Tuesday night.

"As a level designer we are struggling against memory every day. We cut things, we remove things, we strip things, we split the levels, we remove NPCs from levels because there's not enough memory.

"So knowing that memory is something that is going to be improved in the next generation of consoles: to us, it's a joy. It's something that we were waiting for.


"We were PC gamers at the beginning. We love PC games, and we had to make games on consoles. But the main problem was memory. The processors are good, but the memory, for our games, is the most important. So it's great."

Bakaba, Dishonored game designer and associate producer, said Arkane was "pretty impressed" by the Gaikai-powered social features of the PlayStation 4 as well. PS4 lets you capture and share gameplay videos very easily, and allows you to spectate while friends play, too. "We are looking forward at how we can integrate all those things into our [next] game," he said.

But what game is that?

Dishonored, now a BAFTA Best Game winner, both scored well and sold well. It was vindication for the new IP and publisher Bethesda acknowledged "we clearly have a new franchise".

But the future of Dishonored was something Christophe Carrier couldn't elaborate on. "We are not allowed to talk about the future for this IP right now," he said.

"The main problem was memory. The processors are good, but the memory, for our games, is the most important."

The prospect of Dishonored 2 on newer, more powerful consoles is mouth watering, given the beautiful results Arkane achieved on PS3 and Xbox 360. But a sequel may not necessarily be what Arkane works on next.

A new generation affords the perfect opportunity to embark on a new IP, not that this stopped Dishonored from making its mark. But there's also the newly announced Thief 4 to keep in mind - a new game in the series that heavily inspired Dishonored.

Dishonored put Arkane on the map. Whatever its next game turns out to be I hope the weight of expectation that stardom brings doesn't squash the studio's quirky spirit. I admire that arty je ne sais quoi, that Frenchness. "Ha ha ha!" responded Carrier. "We can't hide it, sorry!

"We will try to stick to our culture, we will try to stick to our values, creating a fairly small team compared to the others in the industry, and keep all our values around fashion, game design, art," he said.

"That's the future of Arkane. We make games because we like games; we want to make games we want to play. We will always do that. We're not going to change our philosophy or the way we make games. I'm not saying we're going to - we're not going to make the same game over and over, but we're going to stick to our passion. That's something that kept us going so. I think that's our strength.""
 

DaBuddaDa

Member
Multiplatform games will have to be designed for the lowest common denominator though, wouldn't they? So if Durango only has 4GB, wouldn't they have to design around 4GB? I'd imagine it's much, much harder to scale a level design back than it is to simply not build it out in the first place.
 
Multiplatform games will have to be designed for the lowest common denominator though, wouldn't they? So if Durango only has 4GB, wouldn't they have to design around 4GB? I'd imagine it's much, much harder to scale a level design back than it is to simply not build it out in the first place.

Just make it PS4-exclusive. There's no market for hardcore games on Nextbox anyway, amirite?
 

Tratorn

Member
Multiplatform games will have to be designed for the lowest common denominator though, wouldn't they? So if Durango only has 4GB, wouldn't they have to design around 4GB?

But Durango doesn't have 4GB.

It has 8GB and even if the worst rumour (3GB for the system, 5 for games) is true, it has at least 5GB.
But some rumours said the 3GB is old/isn't true.
 

Derrick01

Banned
So maybe now we'll actually get levels that can rival deus ex and thief and all the other classics right Arkane?

Or will you just push graphics and finding new ways to rip people into pieces again?
 

acm2000

Member
he just called 8GB in general a "joy" nothing todo with the OMGMEGAJIZZGDDR5!!!!! nonsense, both consoles will have at least 8GB, as will pcs going forward
 
he just called 8GB in general a "joy" nothing todo with the OMGMEGAJIZZGDDR5!!!!! nonsense, both consoles will have at least 8GB, as will pcs going forward

I think he means in comparison to 512MB, not 4GB.

He would be saying the same exact thing if PS4 had only 4 GB of RAM.
 
So maybe now we'll actually get levels that can rival deus ex and thief and all the other classics right Arkane?

Or will you just push graphics and finding new ways to rip people into pieces again?

Dishonored had some of the coolest ways to kill people, man. Don't knock that.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
What the fuck is this shit?

I don't think it's a case of the level design being poor so much as it is being restrictive due to hardware restraints. For a game that was largely built upon the idea of player agency and freedom, the sandbox each mission gives you is rather small and limited. It's been quite a while since I've touched the Thief games of yesteryear but I'd happily wager even they had larger levels of at least equal geometric complexity.
 

SmokedMeat

Gamer™
Multiplatform games will have to be designed for the lowest common denominator though, wouldn't they? So if Durango only has 4GB, wouldn't they have to design around 4GB? I'd imagine it's much, much harder to scale a level design back than it is to simply not build it out in the first place.

Depends on how well it sells. If PS4 is the top selling console it will most likely be the lead platform for development, much like PSone was versus Saturn.
 
Now he can make even longer corridors, yay

I dont remember the last tine I played a game being held so back by poor lvl design

Nonsense. There were a variety of things in the game to complain about, but "corridors?" You've got to be thinking of a different game. That or trolling.
 

Derrick01

Banned
What the fuck is this shit?

While the level design wasn't exactly what I would call corridors, in most places anyway, it was more like Deus Ex HR than Thief 2 and Deus Ex, the games Dishonored was trying to emulate the most. In other words it was disappointingly small and held back by consoles.
 

Orayn

Member
Now he can make even longer corridors, yay

I dont remember the last tine I played a game being held so back by poor lvl design

Of all the developers to rag on for corridors, Arkane isn't one of them. They're from the Ultima Underworld/System Shock/Deus Ex school of level design, and they're damn good at it.
 

erick

Banned
Personally I've felt that level design has lost a great deal due to the measly 512MB RAM of this gen consoles.

Like someone said at the beginning of the thread - corridors!

Corridor-based design was born out of necessity back in the days of Wolfenstein 3D (and even before that) where you had to limit what was visible due to lack of resources, and RAM.

8GB of RAM would allow developers to create these huge luscious levels full of unique NPCs and critters, while not compromising on image quality (like Skyrim has, for example). The view ranges could be incredible, as well as the distance at which the game world starts to live around the player (animals and NPCs interact between themselves and in general life goes on without the player there to prod things along with triggering some canned&scripted sequences).

As a well-executed example of what I mean one just has to look at STALKER, the fps series. Compared to Call of Duty or Battlefield, these games have incredible, open, living levels where critters, bandits, stalkers and the military fight amongst themselves even without your presence - as a result the game can provide deep immersion.

Stalker, never made for console, had 2GB RAM to play around with and it f*cking shows. :)
 
Of all the developers to rag on for corridors, Arkane isn't one of them. They're from the Ultima Underworld/System Shock/Deus Ex school of level design, and they're damn good at it.
I havent played underworld, but I dont remember running through corridors for two hours straight on others.

Though maybe it's like TES games where there is an introduction dungeon, but those games are hundred hours long, AND their dungeons remain linear.


Even if the rest of the game is not linear, these initial parts hDO have horrible linear lvl design
 
well said erick. i agree 100% this gen most devs went for detailed narrow environments over open levels. ps3 especially couldnt handle open world games at all
 

Zia

Member
I don't think it's a case of the level design being poor so much as it is being restrictive due to hardware restraints. For a game that was largely built upon the idea of player agency and freedom, the sandbox each mission gives you is rather small and limited. It's been quite a while since I've touched the Thief games of yesteryear but I'd happily wager even they had larger levels of at least equal geometric complexity.

I recently replayed Thief II and while they're certainly grander, I wouldn't say they're more complex. There's a lot less minutiae sure, but I also found Thief II's use of scale less meaningful. I think Dishonored's on par with Thief II, and considerably better than the level design in Deus Ex.
 

BajiBoxer

Banned
Multiplatform games will have to be designed for the lowest common denominator though, wouldn't they? So if Durango only has 4GB, wouldn't they have to design around 4GB? I'd imagine it's much, much harder to scale a level design back than it is to simply not build it out in the first place.

Not necessarily. Just leaving out some graphical features or locking in a lower 30fps framerate can often be enough to cram a game onto the lower end system. A common example is using lower quality textures or shadows. It's how some current gen games look so much better on our PCs with our 4-16 GB of RAM compared to the 360's 512 MB.

Also, I doubt the PS4 will have twice as much RAM. Odds are Microsoft sticks 8GB of RAM in that thing regardless of the original design specs, similar to how they doubled the 360's RAM before production when Epic asked for it. If it takes 8GB to get the developers excited, then I think that's what Microsoft is going to do. Though they could possibly get away with less if they don't have the constant recording feature that PS4 is supposed to have. A lot depends on what they need for their operating system and what background features they will provide in Durango.
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Maybe it changes later in the game? But just reached the boat last week and was so burned by the corridors, ALL WAS only corridors so far.

The boat? What do you mean the boat? As in, you went through the prison, and then the sewers, to meet the dude with the boat?

Because that's literally a tutorial mission.
 

BajiBoxer

Banned
While the level design wasn't exactly what I would call corridors, in most places anyway, it was more like Deus Ex HR than Thief 2 and Deus Ex, the games Dishonored was trying to emulate the most. In other words it was disappointingly small and held back by consoles.

Honestly, it didn't feel disappointingly small to me, maybe because I didn't play Thief 2. I agree that in this case you could tell it was held back some by console development. It felt like the original idea was to have a big open living city, but they had to chop it up and deliver it in chunks to get the right graphical fidelity and have more complex AI than current gen open world games generally have.

Still, talking about it as a corridor shooter was pretty ridiculous, and even more so thinking that corridors and small levels would be their design philosophy going forward with more resources.
 

BajiBoxer

Banned
infamous 1 & 2 had horrendus frame rate problems


i recall the shanty town in infamous 2 running at 10-15 fps


the vampire dlc was even worse

Yeah, I love those games, but it would seriously struggle at times. Especially when trying to fight numerous enemies with civilians running around and trying to swing the camera. Brought back memories of SNES slowdown.
 
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