Less Interactivity than before?

[samueljustice00]

Let me explain the choice for what may be perceived as less object interaction. Early on in development, when we began building the worlds - everything was interactive, this in turn had a huge hit on performance as we were using a lot more props (and new higher detailed models) than TDD. The framerate would drop, memory usage was way more than it should have been.

Throughout development we back and forthed on whether we should cut down on props to enable more interactivity, or keep the props to allow the visual storytelling to shine - to create that believable world. As we began to build the core gameplay, it was very apparent that sometimes props got in the way, as the difference between key items and dressing was fairly mixed up. This was through a multitude of playtesting, and the new direction we took with no inventory meant that glowing blue objects looked really odd when being interacted with.

So in short, at first it was a performance choice - to enable us to create the richest environment that we possibly could. This decision passed on throughout development as the game itself was being built and tuned. There are still tonnes of object interactions and general interactions in the game, just the standard interactions player might've been used to in TDD (such as picking up a small hammer etc) will not be as prominent.