The PS4 and the Xbox One may have seemed to be powerful upgrades over the PS3 and the Xbox 360 back when they launched, but that was a matter of circumstance more than anything else- a reminder that the Xbox 360 and PS3 were almost ten years old at that point, and they were beginning to get long in the tooth. The PS4 and Xbox One naturally seemed like major steps up over those consoles.
But what one tends to forget that the two machines were never ‘high end,’ not in the way that the Dreamcast or the N64 or the Xbox 360 or PS3 were at the time of their release- no, the PS4 and Xbox One were equivalent to midrange PCs at the time of their launch, at best, and as time has gone on, they’ve struggled to keep up with the games being developed. So much so that now, less than three years after the launch of these systems, Sony and allegedly Microsoft are already preparing spec bumps for them.
This weakness of hardware means that games can often not run at a proper resolution and/or framerate on the PS4 and Xbox One- as Alex Preece of Bulkhead Interactive told us in an exclusive interview, the upcoming Battalion 1944 most likely won’t be running at 1080p and 60fps on either the Xbox One or the PS4.
“Although our targets are for 1080p and 6ofps we are stressing how highly unlikely that is on console,” Preece said. “This is due to Unreal Engine being a very complex engine and the consoles lacking in power, unfortunately for us we don’t have a 200 man team. That’s what it takes to get a game like this to run at that specification.”
That is a scathing indictment of how weak these consoles are, if there ever was any. If anything, a statement like this highlights the need for an upgraded PS4 and Xbox One more than anything else.
