In an interview with Kotaku a couple of weeks ago, The Order: 1886’s game director Dana Jan defended his commitment to the shooter’s 30 frames per second cap, despite the expectation of all games for the new current-gen consoles to run at 60 frames per second, 108op.
When the subject was broached to him, Jan responded that 60 frames per second is indeed enjoyable to play with, but his defense as to why The Order: 1886 will run at 30 frames per second is because – apparently – having a game running at a higher frame rate changes the game’s aesthetic.
Puzzled by that statement? Me too.
Jan is also steering The Order: 1886 to go for the “filmic look”, and we know that movies and TV run at 24 frames per second. Jan admits that playing at 24 frames per second doesn’t feel good to play, so instead the cap was rounded off at 30.
“60 fps is really responsive and really cool. I enjoy playing games in 60 fps,” Jan told Kotaku. “But one thing that really changes is the aesthetic of the game in 60 fps. We’re going for this filmic look, so one thing that we knew immediately was films run at 24 fps. We’re gonna run at 30 because 24 fps does not feel good to play. So there’s one concession in terms of making it aesthetically pleasing, because it just has to feel good to play.
If you push that to 60, and you have it look the way we do, it actually would end up looking like something on the Discovery Channel, like an HDTV kind of segment or a sci-fi original movie maybe,” Jan continued. “Which doesn’t quite have the kind of look and texture that we want from a movie. The escapism you get from a cinematic film image is just totally different than what you get from television framing, so that was something we took into consideration.“
In keeping with Jan’s vision for The Order: 1886 to be a cinematic experience, he moves on to defending how the game will be lit, and how he is unaware of any other game that will look like The Order: 1886 in real-time with no pre-rendered cutscenes and still run at 60 frames per second. He thinks that lighting is what people underestimate the most, particularly when there’s multiple directional light sources: candles, fires, various items and apparel, etc. In short, it appears that Jan want’s the focus more on the visual experience of the game than worry about a preferred framerate.
“Then, on top of it, I don’t know of any other games that are gonna look like our game in real-time with no pre-rendered movies, with all the stuff that’s going on lighting-wise, and run at 60,” Jan went on. “I think that’s probably the thing that most people underestimate is [that] to make a game look like this—the way that they’re lit, the number of directional lights that we have… We don’t have a game where you’re just outside in sunlight, so there’s one light. We have candles flickering, fires, then characters have lights on them. So [to make] all those lights [work] with this fidelity means, I think, until the end of this system most people won’t have any clue how to make that run 60 and look like this.
“That was something where we kind of said, ‘what was important to us?’ We’re visual creatures. when we see things, that’s kind of our first senses. I think immediately we look at this game, one of the things that’s exciting to me, it feels next-gen,” Jan added. “It’s one of the first things that I go, ok, I think this is helping define what next-gen really means. Getting a new system and actually booting up and saying something that is like, ‘I’m blown away by what I’m seeing.’ There’s almost nothing that you can take away from that.“
The Order: 1886 is slated to release on PlayStation 4 in early 2015.
[ Kotaku ]