Alex Hutchinson, a Ubisoft veteran who directed Far Cry 4, has touched base on the controversial topic of asset reuse in video game development, noting it’s a common practice and argued that developers ‘redo too much stuff’ as it is.
Asset reuse is nothing shocking nowadays. Franchise such as Assassin’s Creed, Yakuza, and Resident Evil make ample use of assets from previous iterations of those franchises. Yakuza, for example, has reused animations, locations, and combat styles across a multitude of titles, while Resident Evil is a bit more subtle in this regard, with the RE Engine titles for example bringing over decorative objectives and key items across its titles (remember the bolt cutters from Resident Evil 7? Well, they showed up in a few other games, too).
Hutchinson, speaking with PCGamer, noted how the Assassin’s Creed franchise went about reusing assets to a major degree. “In Assassin’s Creed, animations move through multiple iterations. Black Flag reused like 80% of Assassin’s Creed 3. So there’s always some reuse, at least in the big studios,” he said.
We’re in a period where the Western devs are struggling and the Asian devs are thriving. And that’s kind of the inverse of 15 years ago, when Western devs were thriving and Japanese devs were struggling and Chinese devs didn’t exist. One reason that the Japanese were struggling is they had a history of bespoke engines per game, which is insane, right? So they would basically make it almost from the metal every time. And it took them that whole period to figure out that it was better to use engines and build tools. I think they’ve got their head around it now.
The genius of Yakuza was always for me that you’re revisiting the same place. So you kind of want to see the asset reuse in a way. It’s taking a limitation, almost like the fog in Silent Hill, and making it core to the experience, so you like it, in a weird way.
Every time you make a shooter, you go and re-record the guns. Not only that, but then when you get back in, the audio people realise that all guns sound exactly the same. There’s only the shotgun, rifle and pistol, but all of them sound basically the same, except for rate-of-fire or if they have a wooden stock. So then, after doing all this pointless work, you spend months making fake guns, to make them sound the way you think they should. We do a lot of dopey things in the games industry. We redo too much stuff. Although with modern engines, hopefully we can get around it.
We don’t reuse enough. Maybe the future is, to use the dirty word, AI vibe-coding for prototypes that you can hand off to engineers to try and save some months.
Hutchinson also served as creative director on Assassin’s Creed III during his time at Ubisoft, and speaking with PCGamer last month, had a few words to share about Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones. In the interview, he noted that it was “bizarre” to see his former company “re-shipping” the same content seen in the title he worked on back in 2012, in reference to its use of naval combat.
[Source – PCGamer]
