14 DAY TRIAL // United Front Games, the studio behind the recent Sleeping Dogs title, has revealed that one of the most challenging genres in which to make a game is the open world one, as minute changes can throw off a variety of other mechanics.
Sleeping Dogs came out earlier this month and impressed a lot of people with its polished gameplay, top-notch combat, and solid driving mechanics, not to mention the expansive open world of Hong Kong.
Now, producer Dan Sochan has talked with CVG about the challenges inherent to making an open world game and revealed that a lot of problems can easily appear, given how intertwined all of its systems are.
“It's definitely a challenge, open world is by far the most challenging genre I've ever worked on in my career and this game has been the toughest game I've ever worked on, but also probably the most satisfying.”
One such challenge appeared when a few frames were added to a run animation, which threw off all of the characters in the game, as they could no longer move.
“It's tough because all the systems are intertwined, sometimes we found adding just one or two more frames in a basic run animation would blow our animation across the entire game. Characters would T-pose, standing there stock still with their arms out. You see that happening and you ask, 'what happened?' and you find out someone added a couple of frames to a facial animation and now all of a sudden some combat moves are no longer working.”
Thankfully, according to Sochan, many people from UFG worked on open world games in the past and knew how to be sure that such surprises were kept to a minimum.
“You're constantly battling resource management, how many pedestrians you have on screen versus how many cars and they all need to work seamlessly together. It's technical art, how to get them looking the best they can while still working together. Fortunately a lot of the team had worked in the open world genre so knew how to do this, but there was still a lot of learning. It was a challenge but a lot of fun to do at the same time.”
What did you think of the open world in Sleeping Dogs? Does it deliver a great experience or did you uncover issues or glitches?