I remember seeing a case of a port of the game Kingdom Hearts 2 on PS4 having different physics and other aspects than the original PS2 release and the PS3 port, presumably due to the original game tying things to the frame rate, and when the frame rate jumped from 30 to 60, issues arise that weren’t accounted for. But then I wonder. How do you NOT tie aspects of a game to a frame rate? Aren’t game logic executed per frame anyways?

It always helps to consider things from the developer perspective at the time. What kind of constraints were they thinking about while building the game?

At the time, Kingdom Hearts 2 was a PS2 exclusive title by a third party developer (Square-Enix) in 2005, nearly a full year before the PS3 launched in 2006, and a good 9 years before the 2.5 Remix released for PS3 in 2014. At the time, the developers were aiming to squeeze out the maximum performance they could on their only target platform, so they likely never considered that the game would be ported to other platforms (let alone on more powerful hardware). Keep in mind - Square-Enix's first game on PS3 didn't launch until 2007 and it was the Japan-localized version of Call of Duty 3 - World at War. They wouldn't publish their first in-house PS3 game (Crystal Defenders) until 2009.

All this to say that they were basically heads-down focused only on developing KH2 for the PS2 at the time. There was almost certainly zero thought about making this work on any other platform, and even less thought toward making the game work on higher performing hardware. Back then, running at 30 fps was extremely acceptable - most people didn't know what frame rates were and games were mostly still running in standard definition. Because they only had the single target platform with the next hardware upgrade being literal years away, there was never any technical need to even consider it. Developers often make a lot of assumptions that are true at the time until they're not, usually on a long enough timeline.

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