RGG Studio technical director Yutaka Ito recently reminisced about the development of 2008’s Ryu Ga Gotoku: Kenzan!, the Like a Dragon series’ first PS3 title. Although the PS3 offered developers a big leap in hardware capabilities, they had limited resources about the console, and getting the increasingly elaborate 3D environments of the time to run smoothly was no easy task.
In a thread on his personal X account, Ito comments, Actually, I was in charge of Ryu Ga Gotoku: Kenzan!’s first 3D map. Before development started, I was thinking, Well it’s the PS3, we’ll manage somehow. But the map of Gion our designers so ambitiously created went beyond my expectations in both scale and quality. That’s when I realized I was in trouble.”
From there, Ito’s programming team held numerous meetings to figure out how to fit Kenzan’s 3D environments within the memory limits and lighten processing load. He mentions that there was far less information available for game developers at the time, so they turned to overseas websites and research papers for solutions. However, finding the right ones for their game involved a great deal of trial and error.
“Also, the game was designed so that you could play straight off the disc, without installing data to the hard drive. But loading from Blu-ray is slower than from the hard drive, so if you kept sprinting around, sometimes the map data couldn’t load fast enough, and you’d see patches of sky through the gaps.”
“This isn’t limited to just Kenzan! – the Like a Dragon series in general tends to have very dense backgrounds, so even a small movement requires loading a lot of data. That’s why we actually set the characters’ sprint speed to “the maximum speed at which the environment data can still load in time,” Ito explains.
Additionally, another factor Ito and his fellow programmers had to consider when developing for the PS3 was which data went where on the Blu-ray. “Since the outer edge of the disc reads faster, we placed files that need to load quickly there. Also, to avoid triggering seek time, we had to make sure that data which needed to be read consecutively was arranged in order. Ito says these kinds of adjustments continued right up until release.
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