Expeditions: Viking has so far been confirmed only for the PC- and for a lot of developers, with a very specific development work flow or vision, it makes sense to stick with the PC, where the hardware is not fixed, and they can target higher end specifications. However, given that consoles have begun to adopt variable hardware as well, with iterative consoles such as the Xbox One Scorpio, is there a potential for some formerly PC only games to make the jump to them?
This is the question we decided to ask Jonas Waever, who is the creative director on Expeditions: Viking– could the game now come to the Xbox One Scorpio, due to the enhanced specs on it?
“The big problem with consoles for a game like Viking is the interface more than the hardware,” Waever said. “The UI is designed from the bottom up for mouse and keyboard, and it’d be a lot of work to redesign and reprogram the whole interface to work with a gamepad. We’ve certainly talked about it though, and again – we can’t rule anything out.”
We also asked Waever about his thoughts about the Xbox Scorpio and the impact it could possibly have with its 12GB of memory, and whether it can increase PC requirements in the future.
“I’m sure it’ll have an effect. RAM is so cheap these days there’s really no reason not to raise the general memory requirements for PC games if you’re not being hamstrung by consoles – you can do a lot with more memory.”
However, even though the Scorpio has a lot of similarities with PC on a hardware level, the problem in porting PC games to console remains.
Thoughts? Let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for our full interview with Waever in the coming days.