Head of Public Relations Department Remedy Thomas Pooh talked about the development of games for consoles of the outgoing and upcoming generations, as well as the differences and compromises that have to be made.
The developer confirmed many of the assumptions about the nextgen, which appeared here and there before the start of device sales. For example that Sony did not change the developer tools – the PS5 has them similar to what is now on the PlayStation 4.
According to Pooh, in the short term, this will give a noticeable advantage to Sony consoles, but the decision Microsoft completely changing the work environment can help to have more advantages over the PS5 over time.
Comparing PS5 and Xbox Series X directly, the studio’s specialist noticed that they are very different – you should not think that these are the same consoles from different brands with slight differences. These are different systems.
At the same time, the developer also confirmed that the Xbox Series S has a big drawback – it limits the capabilities of the next generation consoles. Just lowering the resolution and quality of textures for release on the younger Xbox will not work – there is a lot of work to be done.
Have a lower threshold for nextgen – that’s great, but the more devices there are on the market, the more sacrifices you have to make. Especially small studios like Remedy. We simply cannot spend so much time using all the features of each platform.
Thomas the Pooh
Reflecting on bringing Control to next-gen consoles, Pooh noted that the studio was heavily constrained by solutions that were years old. To implement many of the features on the nextgen would have to spend too much time – from months to a year.
Remedy didn’t have that much time – not only for engineers, but also for testers.
Funnily enough, the Control command did almost nothing to speed up downloads on new consoles. The developers only ported the game, and thanks to the architecture of the new loading systems, they simply became several times faster. And this is taking into account the old restrictions from PS4 and Xbox One.
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