00:01We've been showing you bombastic all-out warfare and tactical team play in every video we've made so far.
00:10This time though, we thought we'd change up the pace.
00:17Today we'll be showing you the world of War Dogs, the trade-offs we made to realise it,
00:21and the priorities we chose to reach the performance goals that we set for ourselves.
00:25Not at the end of development, but from the very beginning, to make War Dogs and Unreal Engine 5 FPS
00:31ready.
00:35When we started making War Dogs, there was this pressure from the investors and publishers
00:40to make the game look really unique and something people haven't seen before.
00:45They want you to appeal to the mass market and audiences that don't really exist.
00:49And we kind of knew deep down that War Dogs didn't need that kind of crutch to just appeal to
00:54FPS players.
00:55Like if I'm really honest about it, I think developers often have this kind of like ego about creating something
01:01totally unique.
01:02And very early on, we were able to acknowledge like this is just our ego wanting to do something different
01:06and the publisher wanting to kind of carve out its own unique space.
01:10But really, does anyone even want that?
01:13It's just not that. That's not what the game is.
01:15And as much as I want to just sell the art and tell you how the world's great,
01:18it's like the reality is it's not an art piece, it's a video game.
01:23That doesn't mean we wanted this like generic Russian setting either.
01:27We've seen that loads before, but we did want somewhere that was like Eastern European in tone.
01:32So it felt familiar to players and grounded, but it had its own flavor, architecture, terrain and culture.
01:40At the same time, the world of War Dogs needed to support our core narrative of three rival PMC factions
01:47fighting for cash, influence and control over a strategically important region.
01:53The more we researched and gathered reference images, the more one country just kept standing out.
02:07You can see the plane off that hill.
02:10The geography, the location, how it was tied into the story and everything else.
02:14I think we decided Georgia was a perfect fit for the game.
02:17You can try and get a feel for a place through satellite imagery,
02:21through Google Maps.
02:23But what we found, especially in Georgia, outside of these main cities,
02:27is that there's almost nothing.
02:29And I think at that point, Joe was like, yeah, let's go Georgia.
02:36We really wanted to make like this serious video about all this incredible research
02:40and all this reference material we went and gathered and that really did happen.
02:44But if I'm honest, the amount of shit that went wrong on this trip was just...
02:52ridiculous.
02:53It's like a pack of wild dogs.
02:55It's like a pack of wild dogs.
02:55I'm very angry.
02:58It's called War Dogs.
03:00It was like, no focus.
03:02Who said no focus?
03:03The guy in the massive truck.
03:05It was a really weird trip.
03:07I was definitely one to remember.
03:09I'm not driving and I'm fucking stressed.
03:11But I did get food poisoning and I fucking hated it.
03:14Joe had a bad time with Georgia.
03:17Yeah, I thought Georgia was colder.
03:23When we were in Georgia, we kind of had this mantra of like,
03:27if this was a survival game, like where would you explore?
03:30Where would you go and like look for something you needed?
03:32And that was kind of how we traveled the country.
03:33It has such a wide variety of like architecture and history.
03:39You know, you start on the right side in Tbilisi, in the city.
03:43And it is very much a mix between modern and very historic.
03:47And then the further you go over, you know, we visited into the middle in Chia Tura,
03:50where we had the mining town and we took a lot of inspiration from there.
03:54And that kind of is really what War Dogs is.
03:55Because it's those kind of like rural areas.
03:57Yeah, Chia Tura was probably the closest thing.
03:59It had like that industrial part, which was very old.
04:02It was like an old train station that was kind of abandoned.
04:05And that linked then into like the edge of the town.
04:07And you could kind of see how it broke up into the little bits.
04:11Outside of Tbilisi, there was a town there and it had all of these train carts
04:17that were like rusted out and abandoned, but people were using them as like sheds.
04:22But that kind of inspired some of the areas that we have now.
04:26And especially the flats that are in the game.
04:30Churches as well.
04:31You could see a church every couple of miles.
04:35All these places we visited that you can see in the game,
04:38like the swimming pool and the factories and the houses,
04:40that's what really makes our fictional region of culture so grounded and believable.
04:45But none of that research, none of the art, none of the visuals matter in an FPS
04:49if it feels like you're playing a PowerPoint presentation.
04:57You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.
05:00Using Unreal Engine 5 in 2026 as an FPS developer
05:04specifically puts War Dogs under a magnifying glass
05:07in a genre where the expectations of smooth frame rates and no stutters
05:10are a requirement, not just a bonus.
05:12For context, everyone at Bulkhead is a gamer.
05:16We check our applicants' steam hours during our interview process
05:19and openly reject applicants for not being a culture fit.
05:22We understand as much as you do
05:24how important a solid frame rate is to good game feel.
05:27The only reason we move forward our release date
05:29is because we hit our minimum targets.
05:32Other developers may treat 60 FPS as their gold standard,
05:35whilst for us at Bulkhead, it's the foundation for what's acceptable.
05:41100 players in the same locations, not scattered all over the map.
05:45Dynamic base building, vehicles, infantry players
05:48sending important gameplay data to each other within large, destructible maps.
05:53What we've managed to do is pretty impressive
05:55because of the technical challenges involved with the game of this scale.
05:58I think it's frankly a miracle that we've gotten this far, right?
06:03And it's obviously a lot of hard work.
06:05There's no other game you can kind of compare War Dogs to.
06:08Battlefield is probably the closest, but you can do a lot more in War Dogs.
06:12You can drive like 20-odd vehicles into the point and we go,
06:16okay, just let the player do it.
06:17So from like where we were and where we are now, it's definitely like night and day.
06:22War Dogs is a more demanding multiplayer game than most mainstream shooters.
06:27Here's an empty Unreal Engine project running out of the box.
06:30This is what most games give you with some art chucked over the top.
06:33It's not really about the engine, it's about the systems
06:36and how you utilize the systems within the engine.
06:38Most engines use the exact same rendering path.
06:40It's all to do with like the systems you use, balancing of the systems,
06:44constantly checking and being like really critical of it.
06:4860 FPS is minimum for us.
06:50We've been trying to hit 60 FPS on the low spec.
06:52That has been like a clear goal.
06:55Whereas like most companies be like, oh, it's running 30 FPS. That's fine.
06:59It's not really, not in today's age.
07:02We'd rather be upfront before anyone considers spending their money
07:05and ending up disappointed.
07:06You will not be able to run this game at 240 FPS native at 1440p,
07:11whilst on our highest graphics settings.
07:13That fact alone may be a deal breaker for some of the wider Steam audience,
07:17used to less demanding 5v5 shooters.
07:19From the feedback we've gathered across a range of hardware,
07:21most players are pleasantly surprised.
07:23War Dogs delivers good performance to most users.
07:26There's always a limit to that though.
07:28PC upgrade prices are crazier than ever,
07:30and money's tight.
07:32That's why we're introducing Potato Mode.
07:383 years ago, we walked into a normal game store
07:40and picked up the most average gaming PC we could find.
07:44It's right here.
07:45I5-8.
07:471600.
07:481660.
07:49Then, we forced our Tech Art team to play War Dogs on it
07:52until the game ran at 60 FPS at the lowest settings.
07:55Natively, we're close to hitting those targets,
07:57and with the help of some upscaling, we're surpassing them.
08:00On the flip side of Potato setups though, we have Overkill Mode.
08:06Overkill Mode is War Dogs' push to its visual limits,
08:09and we'll be reserving this graphics preset only to high-end PCs on launch.
08:13Meaning, if you don't have a capable PC, we will not even show you this setting.
08:17The reason is purely to protect players who haven't watched our vlogs,
08:21or stumble across War Dogs on launch,
08:23and wonder why they aren't getting the performance they expected,
08:26whilst using the highest graphics settings available.
08:29So, to combat that, we're only making Overkill available to players on 40 series cards and above.
08:37How are we optimising the game?
08:40How are we optimising the game?
08:43Jesus Christ.
08:45We are making a 100-player game that goes against the current grain of Battle Royales,
08:50which as the server progresses, or as the client, as the game progresses,
08:54players drop off, which means that performance naturally increases.
08:57We're introducing a mechanic that is constantly trying to drive people together,
09:01for a full server duration. There's never any rest.
09:05Optimisation is not something you can just do at the end of development.
09:08It needs to be a fundamental part of your ethos as a studio from day one.
09:12We basically started from the very beginning.
09:15My first thing was server performance.
09:17That's going to be our key bottleneck.
09:18We need to nail that.
09:19100-player game.
09:20Have to get it nailed.
09:21We worked on that first, like, extensively.
09:24The key thing is that people don't do, and it's really simple,
09:28is just measure your game.
09:29Get the metrics, see where it's slow,
09:31look for those bottlenecks, and then just focus on them.
09:34We have three pillars to our optimisation,
09:37and they are client performance, visuals, and networking.
09:41We realised playtesters cared more about consistent, smooth frame rate,
09:46over blisteringly high FPS with stutters.
09:48So consistency is what we prioritise.
09:51But client performance isn't one single clever trick.
09:54It's a stack of decisions made over years about what matters to players on screen,
09:59and optimising around that.
10:01Optimisation is, a lot of the time, a huge smoke and mirrors game.
10:06Basically, you as a player have got this letterbox into the world.
10:08Whatever we can do to make that letterbox the best visuals, the most performant,
10:15like, that's what we're trying to do, and that's what optimisation in a nutshell comes down to.
10:19Lowering movement update rates, lowering animation update rates,
10:22like, reducing fidelity of visuals.
10:24They're all the tricks that we're doing.
10:26They're all ones that you don't just get out the box with Unreal Engine,
10:30and you can't just tick a box and be like, hey, give me 60 FPS.
10:36Performance is a death by a thousand cuts.
10:38If you cut corners on every system you develop, by the time you reach release,
10:43those thousand cuts literally do kill you.
10:45Too often developers look for big things they can fix and optimise it, save the day.
10:50But that's just not how performance works.
10:52That amateur approach has continuously disappointed gamers.
10:56So by focusing on performance from day one,
10:58and being incredibly strict and bullish on our team about performance,
11:03we've been able to deliver only what we would consider good enough.
11:08We kind of always put performance first,
11:10and then we try to get as much visual fidelity out of it as we can.
11:14It's not sexy to have performance as an art pillar, but it's true.
11:19Accessibility is key with these kinds of games.
11:21We have, like, this huge map.
11:23You fly through it.
11:24You're loading stuff in.
11:26Players are dropping stuff.
11:27Players are driving vehicles.
11:29All of that behaviour has a cost.
11:31We mix new and old rendering techniques on purpose.
11:34For example, we use trim sheets a lot,
11:36but then we also use Nanite,
11:38which is like a brand new virtualised geometry, high-end behaviour.
11:42We kind of have to balance that, right?
11:44You can't just go, okay, all Nanite have, like, super dense geometry.
11:48We have to compromise on fidelity sometimes.
11:51We can make it look really good.
11:54You can turn on all the bells and whistles,
11:56and then everyone's capped at 30 FPS.
11:58It's not good enough.
12:00There's always room for more improvements.
12:02So no, I'm not satisfied, because we've still got time,
12:04and we can still get better perf.
12:07There are constraints,
12:08but it doesn't mean I'm just going to give up and be like,
12:10well, it's all it can be.
12:11It's just you have to keep pushing.
12:13Same with perf, same with hard, same with anything.
12:18Straight up, it just doesn't matter how many frames you get
12:21if your shots on target don't connect.
12:23That's an entire video in itself.
12:24We'll release that at a later date.
12:26For now, just know we treat it at the same level as performance
12:28when it comes to game feel and responsiveness.
12:32When everything in War Dogs comes together in a playtest,
12:35the immersion of the environments,
12:36the spectacle of the visuals,
12:38along with the performance and network reliability holding up,
12:40War Dogs is genuinely one of the most fun projects we've worked on,
12:43and everyone comes away from a playtest with their own War Dogs moments.
12:47It's so validating to know it's not just us saying it now either.
12:51Playtesters are having just as much fun as we are,
12:53posting their own War Dogs moments in our pre-alpha testing channels.
12:58Can you carry me a bag to the base?
12:59Yeah, sure. Let's go.
13:04Right, that's it.
13:06Make sure you sign up to playtest and wishlist the game.
13:09If you don't wishlist, you have zero chance of being invited to play.
13:19Cliff that shit, dude! Cliff that shit!
13:23Yeah, bye-bye.
13:25Bye!
13:27Hey, stop crying out there, you bitch!
13:30Wait...
13:30Just...
Kommentare