Lead Designer, Steve Desilets: Developing at 60 Frames Per Second




It started out with the statement, though a lot stronger than a statement, a full out declaration: “Our game will run at 60hz” (which translates into 60 frames per second).  Great, now how do you achieve this?  

It sounds a lot easier at first than it is.  You can’t know how much of a PITA it can be to obey this self-imposed mandate.  It costs time and patience for the team to achieve, but when all is said and done, it really does make the game and particularly combat feel GREAT.  

The action games that our team loves have all hit 60fps, and really if you want the FLUID feel to combat that is important to the genre, it’s hard to argue that 30fps is going to help in giving it to you.  60 is the magic number.  Lower frame rates make the character feel ‘heavy’, and overall less exciting I think.  Good character design and animations can make up for this ‘drunken’ feel of 30fps, but I prefer the games that delivered on both counts.  If your fiction is conducive to a slow, lumbering character however, then 30fps will be fine.  This is the case for most shooters, for instance (although I think COD4 seems to argue successfully for 60 in that space as well).

I’ve often compared developing a 60hz game to walking over a minefield.  You may be working, say, on a VFX that doesn’t seem too bad performance-wise by itself, but when added to a scene with 100 other VFX going off, the red X’s (our indication of the 60hz break) pop up and you realize you’ve just made the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Now, you could totally let these cases slide if you wanted to, but that’s a slippery slope back down to 30fps.  Overall, our obsession with 60hz has produced a really responsible way to develop since there is 100% accountability for all check-ins.  I think back now to every game I’ve worked on in the past at 30fps  (but come on, most of those games actually spiked down to 16 – 20 fps a LOT), and we were all throwing assets into the game without a care in the world until the game would start chugging miserably, and the panic alarms would sound.  Then the engineers would have to take time do to CSI work to dig through the check-in history to find where it all went horribly wrong.  No, it’s best to measure the effect of every add as its being added, and be completely honest and aware of its effect on the game.  

In the end, 60 frames per second does not a fun game make, but if the game is fun to play anyway, then 60 frames per second only makes it better.  

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