10mo ago

How does FromSoftware release AAA games so frequently? Elden Ring boss says "we are just blessed with a great staff" that the studio empowers and retains

www.gamesradar.com How does FromSoftware release AAA games so frequently? Elden Ring boss says "we are just blessed with a great staff" that the studio empowers and retains

"We're able to understand quickly what we want to make"

How does FromSoftware release AAA games so frequently? Elden Ring boss says "we are just blessed with a great staff" that the studio empowers and retains

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For starters they keep making mostly the same game over and over. They're essentially doing the Bethesda shtick except their end results are better. Sticking to stuff that can mostly be made in the same engine as the thing you finished 15 minutes ago is going to shave off a lot of time compared to making a new game.
Of course that's not to shit on incremental improvements or engine reuse or anything. That is just sound thinking as long as the games are good.
- They also had great success with Sekiro, which was (and still is) very different from their other titles.
  
  It's still the same engine and general gameplay concept though. The combat was the big difference.
  
  It's the same gameplay concept on a basic level, but that simply comes with the genre. I don't think you could really change much more than they did without changing genres.
  
  It really isn't except it has a decent and intelligible story
  
  I mean, make no mistake, it is fundementally different in lots of ways, but in terms of what the engine needs to do to work, what the character needs to do, how the player interacts with the world, at those basic building block production points Sekiro is almost the same as Dark Souls, I so can agree there.
  
  Sekiro can jump, climb, grapple and swim. Those kinds of more agile behaviors add a lot requirements and considerations to the engine and content makers.
  
  Definitely, but I'm also agreeing that a hugely significant chunk of what they'd already accomplished could save time when moving on to Sekiro. They did of course have to work on the engine and new mechanics as well, but it was far from starting from scratch.
  
  I love the Dark Souls games. I use two moves in those games: swing big sword, dodge.
  In Sekiro, there were many more moves I was forced to use, with precise timing, and split second reads to know which moves I needed to use. My aging brain cannot do that. So I didn't enjoy Sekiro.
  
  You're only forced to use one move: parry. The moves you can't parry, you just dodge. You can finish the game just with that.
  Give it a try again! Sekiro is a rhythm game, and when it clicks, the combat becomes one of the most fun of all FromSoft games.
  
  I used parry on like 2 bosses across 3 Dark Souls games. And each time it was a pain in the arse.
  
  There is an art to parrying. It's a deep rabbithole with parrying frames, different weapons being better or worse, and a lot of practice. Parrying in Sekiro is way different than souls parry
  
  It looks fun as hell if you can get it down, but it was just too difficult for me. I really didn't enjoy dying repeatedly until I figured out the rhythm. The other soulsborne games felt more fair somehow, and often give you a way to make the boss fights significantly easier.
  
  There’s a candy you can use to reduce posture damage so you can start out just holding block instead of trying to parry. That can make learning attacks and timings much easier.
  Almost every mini boss can be backstabbed
  Most can be made much easier with the right prosthetic tool
  Consider giving it another shot someday!
  
  Well, it's still the same as Dark Souls. Engine wise, it's the same. Someone who made models for Souls, can make models for Sekiro. The debugging tooling is the same, etc etc.
  The best example of this is actually Armored Core. They used their engine again, yet the game obviously plays different than anything else they released. And yet, it's the same techstack, the same engine and the same programmers. Nothing changed.
  Compare that to the jump from Oblivion to Skyrim, the engine is no longer recognizable. The models need to be of a very different quality. Etc etc.
  
  To anyone who's played the games it's very evidently exactly the same engine used in Morrowind, running on faster hardware and with less functionality due to it being unable to handle the higher quality graphics. (Morrowind had mostly open cities - except for Vivec - and flying, for instance; later games had to sacrifice those and add more and more loading screens...)
  
  The mechanics are pretty different. Grappling (both terrain and enemies), high vertical jumping, less equipment (but strong diverse builds) and very different combat mechanics with deathblows.
  I don't know if it could be much different without literally changing genres.
- I'd like to add that from a technical point of view, their games don't really push the boundaries and at least on PC, their games often aren't the most polished. Elden Ring had severe shader compilation stutter at launch and a 60 FPS limit - which is a big no-no on PC if you ask me. Nothing game breaking like the state some publishers (EA) release their games in, but not great either.
  
  Not to mention they were actively hostile towards ultrawide gamers. The engine would render it, but then put black bars overtop the sides. Kind of amazing really that level of hatred towards gamers.
  
  I think it's less hatred and more... Not understanding the wider audience, afaik it's just not as common in Japan for uw to be a thing in general. Also it adds even more complexity to performance tuning which... They're not known for. They clearly make games targeted for consoles over PC, the Bethesda comparison is pretty apt in engine reuse and odd decisions to limit fps/uw gaming, Bethesda is at least more open towards modding, but they also don't make multiplayer games mainly, and while the MP aspects of FromSoft games are unusual, it's definitely a large part of the appeal/design process and does inherently limit modding due to cheating.
  
  I guess that makes sense, if it's not that common ... but then ............ why go OUT OF YOUR WAY to make the experience worse? It's like, why didn't they just say "oh hey, they have a wide monitor, nice!" but instead they said "oh hey, they have wide monitor, GO FUCK YOURSELF"
  
  It's not common, period, but because the people most likely to brag about a setup are those with more money than good sense, it gets misrepresented. Same deal with top of the line hardware – look at Steam surveys, most people are still gaming with 5+ year old hardware.
  
  Ultrawides aren't even prohibitively expensive these days though, you can get a off brand uw for around $150-200
  Don't HAVE TO go crazy with it and get a Samsung Odyssey or what have you :p
  
  You're the weirdo for having a weird monitor...
  
  There was a time when 16:9 was also weird because 4:3 was the norm. I wouldn't call it weird, I think over the next decade it's going to become a bigger norm in PC gaming.
  I was a sceptic as well but when I needed a new monitor and saw a decent UW monitor for cheap I decided to give it shot, after all if it sucks I'll just use it in 16:9. Turns out it's one of those "once you try you can't go back" things. I love it for gaming, it feels so much more immersive. So much that 16:9 feels small and constrained. It's just a superior experience in my humble opinion.
  I don't think UW is a, must for games, I'm well aware how small minority UW monitors are. But having UW support increases my enjoyment of the game.
  
  Their games have always been dreadful performance wise. Frame pacing issues and stutter galore.
- The three games I was most interested in last year were Kerbal Space Program 2, Cities Skylines 2, and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. Two of them had newly designed game engines. The third used the engine from the previous game.
  Guess which one I enjoyed playing the most?
  In software development sometimes you do have to rewrite some code to improve things. But if you have something that functions really well, it's better to be just continually making improvements. A lot of what makes a game great is going to be artwork, story, creative level design, creative enemy design, etc. But all of that work can be wasted if the software is buggy, which will happen if most or all of the code is written on a tight deadline.

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