Asset reuse – two forbidden words for fans of franchises like Dark Souls and Yakuza, but also, according to Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3 creative director Alex Hutchinson, possibly the answer to saving video games.
He tells PC Gamer in a new interview, "We do a lot of dopey things in the games industry. We redo too much stuff." But modern Japanese developers, he argues, "got their head around it now."
"The genius of Yakuza was always for me that you're revisiting the same place," says Hutchinson. "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." In comparison, Hutchinson thinks Western developers spend too much time on "pointless work."
He notes that, "In Assassin's Creed, animations move through multiple iterations," so games like "Black Flag reused like 80% of Assassin's Creed 3. So there's always some reuse, at least in the big studios." That said, "Every time you make a shooter, you go and re-record the guns."
"We do a lot of dopey things in the games industry," Hutchinson comments. "We redo too much stuff. Although with modern engines, hopefully we can get around it." The creative director, now a lead at Revenge of the Savage Planet studio Raccoon Logic, suggests, "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." Yeah… maybe.
