If we're developing a cross-platform game, we aim for the best performance we can squeeze out of our lead platform. If we're targeting PS5 as our lead SKU, that's 16 gigs of RAM, 8 cores at 3.5 GHz, and so on. We aim the majority of our dev time for that first and then we adjust up/down for the other platforms we're building for to stay within reasonable performance specs.

If the game is targeting PC exclusively or as the lead platform, I've seen two different general approaches. The first of these is the "enthusiast" approach where the team is purposely aiming for high visual fidelity and high spec machines as a selling point. Crysis is probably the ur-example of this approach, though it has somewhat fallen out of favor recently. This approach usually aims for near the top of the line when we're finishing up pre-production, which usually means it'll be targeting hardware specs about a year older than the latest by the time we launch. We can't really keep moving those goalposts because top of the line is always a moving target. Instead, we need a target set during production where we're doing the majority of asset creation, so we generally lock in our goal around the time pre-production ends and stick to it.

The second approach is the "broadest possible audience" approach where the target spec is good performance on the common spec at PC cafes in Asia, because that is the largest number of potential players. Blizzard was pretty famous for adopting this approach to their PC game development. By making the game able to run well on potato settings, we remove barriers to entry for as many players as we can. This generally means we can't put in as many pretty effects and visuals, but it also means we have a broader target audience.

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Most game dev teams have a strong idea of who our game's target audience is, and that includes the kind of context they should already have. If we're building a big budget AAA first person shooter, we can expect that our representative player recognizes and likes first person shooters and is likely already familiar with the basics of how to play them. It is unlikely we will need to teach them the very basics like how to move about the map and aim or what strafing is. If we're building a casual mobile game where we expect our representative player is new to games and lacks the context needed to play, we'll need to spend more effort to teach them that context.

The need for tutorialization is especially high in two major cases:

1. When introducing new kinds of gameplay for which there the player doesn't have much or any existing context from other games or real life. Players have no context for the new gameplay, so they need to be taught much more carefully so they can learn. If you've ever seen a player play Dance Dance Revolution for the first time, you'll see what I mean - there's a lot of awkwardness before they start to look more comfortable with playing it. Final Fantasy 13's role change system was similar - it was so significantly different from conventional wisdom that the tutorial elements were spread out over many hours in order to get players familiar with it.
2. When introducing gameplay that specifically conflicts with conventional wisdom. Players already have habits, conventions, and muscle memory associated with that kind of gameplay, so having things work differently will require a lot of unlearning the old habits in order to learn the new ones. If anyone's played the first Mass Effect, you'll probably understand - the aiming and reticle system in Mass Effect 1 is a façade. Putting the crosshairs on a target's head and firing will not guarantee a headshot, even with a sniper rifle. This choice broke a lot of established shooter conventions and caused significant player confusion.

In these situations, it is a good idea to spend significantly more resources on tutorials than games with more traditional gameplay. We, unfortunately, don't always get the resources to do that. In those cases, it ends up hurting the game's reception because players will often miss the features entirely and then complain they aren't there.

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Got a burning question you want answered?

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