The PS5 and the Xbox Series X still have a lot left to reveal as far as their specs are concerned, but already, there’s quite a bit that has been revealed, plenty of which has got many in the industry quite excited. Both are confirmed to feature SSDs and different custom variants of AMD’s Zen 2 processor, while the Xbox Series X also boasts GDDR6 memory.
But according to industry vet Alex Hutchinson – co-creator of Typhoon Studios and creative director of the recently released Journey to the Savage Planet – those things won’t have as much of an impact on game design as some might think. According to Hutchinson, the real potential lies in cloud computing, and what that will allow developers to accomplish.
Speaking in an interview with GamingBolt, Hutchinson said that the impact of SSD’s on development heading into next-gen will be “almost nothing”, and that the Xbox Series X’s GDDR6 memory, too, won’t have much of an impact “from a design perspective.” What Hutchinson feels will be much more important is “not the boxes”, but “what they connect to when you’re not looking.”
When asked specifically about both consoles’ Zen 2 processors and how they will help development, Hutchinson said, “It’s more power, but I think the cloud and being able to have large scale simulations and persistence will be the big new things this generation, so not so much the boxes themselves but what they connect to when you’re not looking!”
There’s no question that cloud streaming does, in theory, have a lot of potential to truly have an impact on game design, which is why the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are investing in it so heavily. The question that’s always persisted so far is how soon cloud technology will become viable on a massive scale- whether or not it can happen quick enough to have a proper impact on game design in the near future, and whether it will dwarf what next-gen hardware will enable, remains to be seen. The future is exciting either way though.
Our full interview with Hutchinson will be live soon, so stay tuned to read the entire thing. Journey to the Savage Planet is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.