![]() MR: We design, develop, test, and incorporate feedback together. It’s a real beast to make these settings achieve the goals of the artists and content developers, the performance engineers, and be exposed and intuitive to players. So, we have this confluence of design needs to support many different performance profiles over multiple generations of hardware and many different quality settings to scale to the different performance targets on those platforms, and we want to expose all of that to the PC player to tweak for their personal machine. But also, Infinite is supporting consoles with different performance profiles. Console games don’t generally have “advanced graphics settings” and of course that’s expected for PC. Also going the extra mile for customizability like with advanced graphics options, accessibility settings, and the ability to scale quality to maintain performance across many generations of hardware. Jeff is an excellent hype man, and I think this absolutely paid off. Like for that ultrawide work, we literally wanted to get people excited about the potential of that experience so we got a bunch of ultrawide monitors and gave them to the team for their dev machines so they’d work and test with them daily. MR: Definitely generating excitement around the capabilities of PC, shining light into the dark corners where we make assumptions that work for console but might need to be more robust for PC. The Infinite PC team has a huge opportunity to learn from the challenges and wins MCC has faced and we’re paying close attention. It’s important to call out that the MCC team has done fantastic work pioneering Halo on PC. Fortunately, 343 knows how to make a great Halo game. The problem with preventative problem solving though is you never see the crisis averted. Things like making sure our game plays nice with specific families of hardware or fighting hard to ensure we don’t add intrusive DRM to our game. There’s also a TON of preventative problem solving. As an example, I might need to convince someone that even though 21:9 ultrawide doesn’t exist on console, it’s a very important thing to PC players and we should design our content natively for it. This job is at times equal parts educator and PC hype man. JG: Building a native, first-class PC experience for Infinite meant convincing some brilliant console developers that these quirky features they’ve never cared about are hugely important to PC players. You can also run the game in 4:3 and at lower minimum resolutions than you would get on a TV and the UI still needs to be legible. ![]() And think of Chief’s helmet display you want the helmet wires to be seamless regardless of aspect ratio, so we design with that in mind. Then you’ve got your HUD which has to anchor to the edges of the screen. The 3D scene has to support arbitrary window sizes – that’s probably the easiest part. This is harder on performance but provides a more immersive experience. To start with there are design considerations – I explicitly wanted wider aspect ratios to allow you to see more horizontally instead of seeing less vertically. This is something that really takes the whole studio to do right, because there is so much content that has to be created with this in mind for this from the start. To go through a specific example, let’s talk about ultrawide support. ![]() It does an incredible job of putting away some of the fumbles of past, and setting the stage for something really incredible.MR: I think as lifelong PC gamers we have a great feel for the expectations of how a PC game should look, feel, and operate – we want a great set of options without getting in your way, rich feature support with a streamlined experience, and the confidence that the game will run on your hardware. I wanted to kill baddies in more than the confined Sci Fi walls that was offered.Īll in all, this game is remarkable. Even though it left me crying in the last scene, I was left wanting more. The spectacle was relatively low, and that's not something that I associate with this franchise. The only dissapointment I have in this amazing package is the lack of diversity and grand setpieces in the combat/endgame scenarios that Halo is known for. The graphics blew me away (I'm playing a year and a half after release) The story and characters took a while to cook, but when it all came to a boil it hit me perfectly. What can I say about this game that wouldn't be reductive? Hyperbolic? Exaggerative?Ĭarrying the weight of this franchise's successes and failures, Infinite does an amazing job at setting the stage for what's left to come, while cleaning the table of the food that was undercooked. With the sum of all it's parts, to me this is the best version of what we've seen a Halo game could be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |