Far Cry 2 Developers Were Worried About PLAYSTATION 3

Ubisoft Montreal, developers for the upcoming Far Cry 2, admitted today that they were a bit worried about the PLAYSTATION 3's architecture.

"We were somewhat worried by some of the reported high complexity of developing for the PS3", reveals Tech Director Dominic Guay, "but the raw processing power is impressive".

After a lot of different looking titles for the PLAYSTATION 3 and Xbox 360 that were supposed to be identical, developers are finally getting it right with Sony's console. "We made sure we had a group of programmers that were not scared by complexity and had a large console programming experience to work on the initial PS3 R&D of Dunia (Far Cry 2's graphics engine). At that point, we didn't know what to expect."

"One thing that we realized pretty quickly as we started R&D on PS3, was that the hardware architecture had a very nice fit with some of our technical design decisions. We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems. So while it did require quite a bit of R&D to understand how to use the system correctly, once we started having results we saw that it was a very capable console and that FC2 could run on it."

Tech Director Guay is also impressed by the potential of Blu-ray and PS3's hard drive for streaming games in real-time. "The hard drive and Blu-ray are making our life easy considering FC2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player. That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated. So, in terms of AI, game structure, physics, dynamic time of day, open world gameplay, dynamic weather system, destructible vegetation, all of those things where we had really pushed the envelope technically, they run well on PS3."

Of course, the game won't match up to PC specs.

[Far Cry 2 Devs "Worried" by PS3...]