In our interview with Gunfire Games' senior technical combat designer Taylor Denison this week, we asked him what he thinks next-gen technology will mean for developers, specifically boss fight designers like him. Taylor most recently worked on ' final DLC expansion, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Subject 2923, designing almost all of the boss fights. Taylor designed many of the game's most iconic boss encounters, including the bridge fight Ixillis, the body-splitting root monster Riphide, and the optional super boss Iskal Queen. Taylor went into great detail about one of his Subject 2923 bosses, Ikro, The Ice Conjurer, which you can read m🍃ore about .
The Limiting Factors Of Current Generation Consoles
Taylor and his team ran into more than 1 limiting factor that forced them to find solutions that would be less deman☂di❀ng on consoles and low-end PCs:
"Inꦰ this DLC I hit 2 different cases where we couldn't do something we wanted because of console. That said, we were able to work around them, or at least get almost negligible losses. We could still get the kinda the same gameplay we wanted.
An example of having problems on console is on Ikro the Storm Conjurer. Ikro has those storms that go around him that are just dropping all these projectiles. The number of projectiles he was dropping, the rate at which they drop, how large their AOEs were, all that stuff was very constrained by consoles. It was a real performance problem. In fact, in our next patch we're modifying that move to no longer even use projectiles and we changed up the VFX and stuff because at the꧋ end of the day...we can f🤪ix performance on low-end PCs, and [consoles like] base PS4, for example."
Current gen hardware is simply unable to handle the load of all the individual projecti🌳les that would have be🧸en needed to accurately create the storm effect Taylor wanted, so he was forced to find a different solution:
"That's kind of a case where gameplay is impacted. I would have loved to do a lot of raw projectil💞es, maybe on next gen we'd be♍ able to do something like that. Generally speaking, Designers like myself can come up with different ways of saying "at the end of the day the gameplay I want is for you not to be under the storm, so we end up doing thing like what I ended up doing, which is just turning it into a damage volume. If you're under the storm you're just taking damage every .25 seconds instead of [the damage] coming from projectiles."
Taylor doesn't necessarily see these limiting factors as c♚ompromises though. Th💛e gameplay experience he wanted the player to have when he designed the encounter remains more-or-less intact. However, had the hardware allowed for it, he would have pushed the visual, auditory, and physicals elements of the boss fights even harder. In other instances, things like visual and sound effects had to be cut from certain fights. Nothing that fundamentally would change the game, but things that would have undoubtedly enhanced the experience:
"The main thing that comes up all the time, [the thing] we can't do because of performance, is really more on the visual side. One of the things I'd love to use more of is decals. When you shoot a wall it leaves a bullet hole decal. In this case it means anything we're going to glue to a surf♔ace. On Ixillis we use a decal where when it shoots a beam it leaves a burn mark on the ground. That's a decal we put specifically to hint to the player where it was that the last beam went so you knew where you were safe. When that wasn't there it was actually kind of hard to tell where it lined up. Decals add to flavor and can serve as subtle gameplay hints, but their expensive. If we're making a fight that's already doing a lot of stuff then decals are scary, especially if we have ones that are overlapping.
In the Haarsgard fight we had to take it out, but we had a whiz-by sound. When the orbs moved past you [could hear] a hum, it felt really cool because you could hear how close it was to you and it helped you to feel skillful, but with all those projectiles out🔯 at once it was just barely the breaking point. The logic that was handling you being close to it and the attenuation of the sound was a performance problem."
How Will Boss Fights Benefit From Next-Gen Technology?
According to Taylor, "the polish level and ꦓhow much awe and how much craziness you can get is going to be the main thing." Next-gen boss encounters won't benefit dramatically in terms of gameplay or mechanics, Taylor says, but instead will simply be bigger and better than ever before:
"As we afforded more fidelity, we're going to have arenas that higher poly count and larger textures so we can get these really beautiful environments, which may mean that we still don't have that much headroom to do the crazy stuff with hundreds of projectiles or whatever. It kind of a wait and see, but that is what I would expect. The next gen 𓆏consoles are really looking l❀ike they're going to give us a lot of space."
You can read more of our interview wit🍷h Taylor Denison .