Microsoft and Sony have yet to unveil their next-gen consoles in full, but both of them have revealed the partial specs list for the Xbox Scarlett and the PS5 respectively- and everything that we’ve seen, from the SSDs to the much more powerful CPUs, has been quite impressive. All of it is stuff that could – potentially, at least – properly impact game design in the coming years.
We recently conducted an interview with indie team Digital Tales [which included Fabio Respighi (Lead Game Designer), Timothy Van Der Gen (Lead Programmer) and Alessandra Tomasina (Producer & Marketing Manager)], whose unique metroidvania title Bookbound Brigade is due out later this year, and eventually got to talking about next gen hardware and what its greater capabilities will mean for game development.
As per the development, team, SSDs are something that, beyond the cut-dow load and instal times, should also make for bigger levels in games. “Much faster transfer rates will surely bring down level loading times,” they said. “That may allow us to develop bigger levels. Faster transfer rates will also speed up game install times.”
When asked about AMD’s Zen 2 CPU, which will be used by both the PS5 and the Xbox Scarlett, though the team said it’s not the kind of thing that would have much of an impact on a game such as their own Bookbound Brigade, future developments could still lead to exciting things.
“In the future, though, with newer versions of Unity burst compiler advantages will become huge, thanks to the heavier parallelization and higher frequencies & IPC that those chips can deliver,” they said.
Finally, when asked about the Xbox Scarlett’s confirmed GDDR6 memory, the developers responded by saying that they were looking forward to it “allow for faster GPU memory access”, which is something that should help with “enhancing frame rates.”
In related news, we recently heard reports that Sony might be holding a PlayStaton Meeting event in February next year to fully unveil the PS5, so maybe we’ll be finding out a lot more about next gen consoles soon. Digital Tales’ Bookbound Brigade is due out later this year for the PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Our full interview with the development team will be live soon, so stay tuned.
