Alex Hutchinson, creative director of Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 4, discussed a controversial topic in an interview with PC Gamer: the reuse of game assets.
He believes the industry wastes huge amounts of time and resources redoing the same content for no clear reason. Hutchinson cites his experience on Black Flag, where 80% of animations were reused from Assassin's Creed III. A similar situation arose with Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal, as players noticed similarities in the maps and accused developers of laziness.
«I kept saying to them, Just announce it, because someone will figure it out. Just say it's the same place 40,000 years ag. They didn’t say anything, and then everyone was like, "Cheap developers!"», — he recalls.
Hutchinson also praises Japanese studio RGG, creators of the Yakuza series, as «brilliant»: fans expect to revisit familiar locations, and the studio has turned this limitation into a signature feature of the franchise.
«In Assassin's Creed, animations go through multiple iterations. Black Flag reused about 80% of Assassin's Creed III. That’s normal for big studios», — Hutchinson says.
He notes that today asset reuse is becoming widely accepted:
«We don't reuse enough. Maybe the future is, to use the dirty word, AI for prototypes to save months of work».
Despite this, Hutchinson remains skeptical about artificial intelligence and does not expect it to fully transform game development.
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