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Konami considered developing PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Castlevania: Lords of Shadows 2, the game’s producer has revealed, but instead chose to focus on finishing the current-gen version to make it “one of the last great current-gen titles”.
“When we started the game in 2010 we didn’t know about next-gen. Nobody really knew what was going on,” Dave Cox told VideoGamer.com during Gamescom last week, discussing Mercury Steam’s upcoming vampire romp.
“Rather than bang out a sequel cheap as chips and just do more of the same we really wanted to make big changes, and to do that we needed to start with our engine and really think about performance, free camera [and] keep maintaining the level of detail whilst obtaining a pretty good frame rate.”
But though the developer “did think about” developing a next-gen version, it thought it had come too far on its current-gen engine to start from scratch.
“We were criticised for frame rate [in the original Lords of Shadow], we got criticised for being fixed camera, and we really wanted to fix these things,” Cox continued. “So I think when the next-gen consoles got announced we did think about it, but then we said we don’t really have to start again. We’d already gotten so far down the line we just thought, this is the path we’ve set for ourselves, let’s do it.
“We want this to be one of the last great current-gen titles. That’s what we wanted to do. We want to go out with a bang. We want to end the Lords of Shadows series with a bang.”
Tweaks to Lords of Shadow 2’s engine have allowed Mercury Steam to eliminate the frame rate issues encountered by the first game, Cox claims, with the developer “targeting locked 30FPS”.
“One of the issues with the previous game was the frame rate would go up and down, so when you get into combat you get issues with frame rate,” he continued.
“[Frame rate is] absolutely key. Going for 60FPS would have meant dropping a level of quality in terms of the visuals but we didn’t want to do that. We decided that 30 would be better, but it had to be locked at 30FPS… The game is running at a rock-solid 30FPS.”
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 is shaping up to be one of the last triple-A current-gen-only titles, launching on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in February 2014.
