The PlayStation 4 NEO and the Xbox One Scorpio are almost here (or at least one of them is), and they promise a very interesting change for the console gaming market. Since they are so different conceptually from everything we have had before, we love to muse on just how they will change things on the developer and consumer side.
So when we got the chance to chat with Mike Hergaarden, co-founder of M2H, and developers on the upcoming Verdun, we decided to pose the same question to them- how do the Xbox One Scorpio and PS4 NEO change things from a development perspective?
“Ultimately nothing will change: because of the new power everyone will expect 4K support and then we’ll still be optimizing games just as hard as today,” Hergaarden said.
That does make sense- but if they had the chance to choose how they would utilize the extra power in the Scorpio, would they go for a higher 4K resolution with lower framerate, or a relatively lower resolution, such as 1080p, but with a higher framerate, something like 60fps? “If we need to choose, 1080p/60fps. Smooth gameplay is more important on the long run,” he said.
Hergaarden also sounded off on Microsoft having the more powerful system on the market over the PS4 now, noting that his own games, written in Unity, are CPU bound, and so unless he can be sure that the Scorpio has a better CPU than the base Xbox One, the extra power doesn’t add much from his perspective.
“On the Unity engine we’re mostly CPU bound,” he said. “So for us the CPU seems to be all that matters for performance, it’s unclear if Scorpio has a better CPU. So we’re not sure just yet…but it might not differ so much.”
And do M2H plan to support the NEO and Scorpio with games unique to those systems? “We have no plans for games specific to these platforms. We’ll keep making the games we envision and then check the suited platforms.”
All of that sounds good- and it sounds like, as far as M2H are concerned, there really isn’t much of a change from the status quo, even with the Scorpio and NEO coming up.