Ready at Dawn has touched on the process of working on PlayStation 4 after cutting its teeth in the portable realm of development on titles such as Daxter and God of War.
Speaking with Develop, the studio’s Jan Dana and Garrett Foster, who serve as Game Director and Technology Director, respectively, commented on the challenges faced in transitioning from PSP to PS4 for its latest project, The Order: 1886.
Said Foster: "[The PS4] is actually 47 PSPs stacked on top of each other in that little box. No, but we compare it to, like, we used to make office buildings but now we’re making skyscrapers. We’re going from this smaller form factor to something much bigger, and the problems are usually a scaling problem. We have to do this much more, or that much more and you start running into hardware limitations where people’s desktop workstations can’t move that amount of data efficiently, so they can’t really do any work. The tech for everything is more complicated, the content is way, way, way more detailed than what the PSP could ever have. I always joke that if you take the eyeballs in [The Order: 1866] they’re bigger than the PSP, just the character’s eyeballs are bigger than the PSP.
That was one of the learning curves there — when we were first talking about budgets on the game, for example, I started telling people numbers and they weren’t really getting it, and then I told them in terms of PSPs and it immediately clicked, and they’d go ‘Wow, I’m asking for a ridiculous amount of resources.’ So it was fun to go through that as a team, and when I had that first meeting and everyone latched on to it, it was very cool."
Elsewhere, Jan touched on the game’s length, saying fans of the genre should have an idea of what to expect:
“To sum it up, I mean we didn’t make this amazing quality game that’s 30 minutes long, that’s absolutely not the truth. The truth is, if you’ve played other games that are in the same genre as ours, third person shooters you’re in for the same length of ride as those games, but possibly of a higher quality depending on what you’re looking for.”
The Order: 1886 is due out tomorrow exclusively for PS4. Read our review here.