It’s hard to believe that we’re in the third year of the life-cycles for the PS4 and Xbox One. With games like Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Gears of War 4 and more coming up, it’s almost like developers haven’t been strained by the graphics potential of the console hardware just yet. To the credit of Microsoft and Sony, both companies have worked on unlocking more resources in their consoles for developers to use. But how does this changing standard affect developers, especially when they have more RAM and CPU power to work with?
According to Coldwood Interactive’s Martin Sahlin, who’s responsible for creating recent (and beautiful) indie platformer Unravel, “It hasn’t had that much of an impact for this game. But I know in the past, for instance, like with the last console generation, if things like, for instance, some units would ship with a hard drive and others would not, that kind of means that you have to make your game assuming that no units have a hard drive, and you have to make your game assuming that.
“Because you can’t create something that wouldn’t run on certain versions. So I guess, you always have to stick with the lowest common denominator, and that can be a bit frustrating, when stuff is a bit unpredictable. But no, not with this game at all.”
Does that mean the PS4 and Xbox One will have even more to show us in the coming years or is their hardware close to being maxed out? Sahlin said, “Well, people always learn new and creative ways to do things, and I think that ties into this idea that limits can sometimes inspire creativity. So I think we’ll keep seeing improvements, we always will. We’ll constantly be pushing boundaries.”
What are your thoughts on developers continuing to increase their efficiency of use of the current gen console hardware? Let us know in the comments.