14 DAY TRIAL // An interview with Senior Manager of Technology Management, Technology Development, Consumer Games Development Masaru Ijuin reveals some of the particularities of working on next-gen titles.
The interview, posted on Capcom's website, also details the company's new Panta Rhei engine, to be used by all next-gen projects.
He stated that the new engine is being currently used to develop Capcom's upcoming dungeon crawler Deep Down, and that it is going to replace the company's current MT Framework engine, used by Capcom to create all of its PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games.
“The amount of work involved in making games for next-gen consoles is eight to ten times greater than what is required for the current generation of consoles,” Masaru Ijuin stated regarding the development cycles of upcoming projects.
He said that the increasingly complex hardware capabilities called for a complete overhaul of the development environment, hence the creation of the Panta Rhei engine.
He continued that if the company had decided to just improve the previously used MT Framework engine, the work times could have been reduced by maybe half, but that his goal was to reach an improvement factor of ten, as required by next-gen console games.
He also mentioned that the transition to the new engine would be difficult in the beginning, and that game creators will have to start back at square one and work from the ground up.
“Next-gen consoles have drastically redefined the way games are rendered. Conventional theories no longer work. If we create games the same way as before, we won't be able to give our fans what they want, and that's games unlike any they have ever played,” he shared.
Capcom intends to utilize the new Panta Rhei engine for all of its Xbox One and PlayStation 4 titles, but to also keep employing the MT Framework engine when developing for the Wii U, and its Mobile version for PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS and other handheld devices.