Given the fact that the PlayStation 3 is almost 5 years old and the Xbox 360 six, its only obvious that Sony and Microsoft will be announcing their next generation consoles in a year or two. Eventhough the hardware is not yet ready, companies like Epic and Crytek already have their gaming engines ready which should hopefully power the next generation games.
In an interesting interview by Next Gen Biz, Epic co-founder and VP Mark Rein has commented on how Unreal Engine and next generation consoles could possibly work out.
“We’ve already built next-generational features into UE3. If you saw Samaritan at GDC this year, that was super-high-end stuff. We didn’t hide the fact that that is our proposal for what next gen should be. And those DX11 features have been in the UDK since just after GDC, so customers have been working with that for several months. We don’t know what the next-gen consoles will be, when they’ll come and how much power they’ll have, or how much of a generational leap there’ll be, so it’s really hard to say. But if the next generation of consoles is the DX11 generation, then UE3 can already do that.”
“Does it become Unreal Engine 4? Possibly. We just don’t know yet. I think we’ll have a pretty good idea of that in about a year’s time.”
You can read the entire interview here and you should because its absolutely fantastic.