World of Warships Legends - Interview
Wargaming recently released World of Warships Legends onto PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in full, having had the game available via early access for a few months. The PlayStation 4 version of the game was actually built here in Australia and I was able to ask Scott McMillan, the Sydney Team Lead for Wargaming on just how they did it.
Maxi-Geek - With bringing a title like World of Warships Legends to console, what is the first step that you need to do?
Scott McMillan - I think right from the beginning there needs to be a focus on building an experience fine-tuned for console play, not just converting what works well on PC. You can see this in WoWS Legends with the gameplay refinements that have been made, new user interface designed for console, the new control scheme, the work to maximize console graphics quality, and more. It has effectively been built from the ground up with consoles and console gamers in mind.
MG - With the size of the maps, did you encounter any issues on making them fit, within the confines of the console?
SM - The issue was not really getting them to fit, but on having them load quickly and render beautifully without dips in frame rate. There's a fine balance between graphics fidelity and maintaining fluidity, and it's a constant challenge to optimize for both.
MG - Game performance is something that I and many other games take seriously, how did the team go about ensuring a smooth experience when playing the game?
SM - This was quite a large challenge. There were many performance optimizations performed to improve how efficiently the engine can process the game's action. For example, many changes were made to ensure work could be spread across all CPU cores. There were also many graphics optimizations and fine-tuning of graphics effects to look better or to look the same while using less CPU and GPU resources. Some of this involved changes specific to each console. To help manage all of this we used a powerful custom performance testing system. This automated system can measure performance across battles and pinpoint exactly where in the engine things are going wrong if frame rate dips occur. This meant we could run demanding scenarios repeatedly across all consoles and really fine-tune to make sure the frame rate would hold up for players. It also meant we could check that changes and improvements weren't introducing frame rate dips.
MG - With 4K quickly becoming a standard, how much discussion was there around graphical enhancements, or was the focus on the gameplay first?
SM - We always keep gameplay in mind; of course, this is utmost. However, we also want the game to be as visually involving as possible. When building this new console WoWS experience, our aim was to give console gamers both engaging gameplay and beautiful graphics.
MG - Speaking of gameplay, was there room for members of the Sydney studio, to propose changes to the core of the game, to make it fit better with the console experience?
SM - The Sydney team's focus was technical, but there's always been room for us to make feedback as we're playing through the builds, whether it's gameplay, UI, graphical, or otherwise. We're all working as a team to deliver the best experience for gamers in the end.
MG - There was a nice period of early access for the game, how did player feedback help shape the game, for its full release?
SM - Players' feedback has affected how we view and implement combat missions, how we manage their (players') in-game time tweaking the activities, as well as ship balance, commander balance and how we see our roadmap. After all we are making the game for the players!
MG - Achievements and Trophies are a big deal to a lot of gamers, how do you go about deciding what becomes one and how does the name get applied?
SM - This was easy as basically we took metrics pertinent for our game, like battle stats, "heroic" feats, as well as commander roster and ship collections and gave them titles that are either navy-inspired or simply seemed like appropriate puns for the occasion.
MG - Is there a feature on the PlayStation 4 version, that you are the proudest of the team for getting in the game?
SM - There's no feature, it's just really satisfying to see how the work of the entire team on the game has come together to produce the full release that went to gamers on August 12th. It's a really great experience playing from the couch on a big TV, and it's really satisfying to see how our work has contributed to the result.
My thanks to Scott for taking the time to answer my questions. If you want to test out the waters for yourself, the game is free to play and you can get it on PlayStation 4 here, or Xbox One here.
