The Xbox One Scorpio is supposed to be the most powerful console ever built- and indeed, Microsoft lets no opportunity pass to remind us just how powerful this new system us truly going to be, with adjectives such as ‘beast’ frequently having been used to refer to it by Microsoft executives themselves.
And yet, there is a conceptual problem here- given that each Scorpio game needs to maintain intercompatibility with the existing Xbox One, does all that extra power truly amount to much? This is a question we have often pondered- and so, we posed it to Guillermo Andrades, Creative Director at CremaGames, currently working on Immortal Redneck. Does he think the extra power in Scorpio will functionally amount to much?
“It all depends on the developers,” he said. “Right now what we’re seeing with PS4 Pro is that most games are the same and the changes between the versions are really small (resolution, framerate or more effects). If the power difference is really that huge developers are going to need a lot of time and tweaking to take advantage of it.”
What goes unsaid here is that developers may choose not to utilize that extra power effectively, or at all, to save time and resources- after all, that is exactly what happened with the original Xbox (versus the PlayStation 2), as an example. Microsoft needs to reconcile some of the contradictions inherent within the Scorpio concept.