Alex Hutchinson, the director of Far Cry 4, has dropped a very candid take on asset reuse. Initially frowned upon, it’s become mainstream enough to go unnoticed, thanks to some clever ways to justify its use.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Hutchinson commented on how reusing assets from previous games might have drawn less ire if studios had only stepped out in front of potential issues, with the Far Cry Primal controversy being a great example. “I kept saying to them, ‘Just announce it, because someone will figure it out. Just say it’s the same place 40,000 years ago. And then it’s cool.’ They didn’t say anything, and then everyone was like, ‘Cheap developers!’, as always.”
However, the practice might just be a viable part of solutions aimed at reducing development times, and can be justified fairly well if a game manages to find creative ways to frame the existence of elements that players find familiar. He pointed to the Yakuza franchise as an example.
“The genius of Yakuza was always for me that you’re revisiting the same place…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.”
Hutchinson also pointed to studios like FromSoftware and Ubisoft, highlighting how asset reuse has always been a part of game development. On the subject of AI’s use in development, he argued that it could be a great tool to generate prototypes and concepts for what a game could be that would then be handed off to developers and engineers as a starting point to work with.
“If we imagine what we would actually have to do to make an Assassin’s Creed, we have to somehow write the prompts to generate two and a half hours of story cinematics, with 22 kilometres of open world.’ Even if it did stuff, it would take years of prompts. Anything of any real complexity, imagining how to describe in words what you wanted would be so hard. At a certain point, you’d be like, ‘We should just get some people to do this.'”
For our part, we don’t mind seeing familiar bits of the game we’ve loved in the sequels as long as the Developers manage to blend enough fresh elements with familiar ones.
