Infinitap Games

"Next gen" is here! While many people have decried it as a small incremental update from the previous gen, I talk about why it takes a while to unlock the potential of the new hardware.



Does anyone else have the new consoles? What are your favorite experiences? I've played:
PS4
Contrast
Resogun
(I'm going to check out Killzone, but haven't had time)

Xbox One
*edit* Crimson Dragon *edit* How could I forget?
Ryse
Dead Rising 3
Forza
Call of Duty: Ghosts

Interestingly, this is my first Call of Duty game, and I'm not really a fan of the single player experience at least. I haven't tried multiplayer yet.

I haven't kept up with consoles for a while, I'm a cheapskate who just upgrades my PC every 2-3 years and waits for PC ports of games I want to play. So I'm a little out of the loop, but I know you mentioned load times and I was thinking; have any developers started planning to use SSDs in a console? I google'd it and neither the PS4 or Xbox One seem to. An SSD is probably the single most noticeable upgrade I've done to my PC, it seems like it would be a no brainer for consoles to eventually switch over to.

Also kind of an aside question, what consoles have you done development for, and which was your favorite and/or easiest?

RightClickSaveAs wrote:have any developers started planning to use SSDs in a console? I google'd it and neither the PS4 or Xbox One seem to.

You can't swap out the hard drive on an Xbox One so you can't have one in there but you can actually put your own SSD in the PS4, that said it's been tested and the differences aren't huge enough to justify the cost of buying an SSD that's of equal or higher size than the one supplied in the PS4 currently.

If you're interested in the differences you can view a video on it here!

I suspect that at some point in this generation, they will offer consoles with SSDs although probably not for the reasons you stated. Instead, they will probably offer it for cost reasons. The problem with hard disks is that because they are all mechanical, even though drive sizes get bigger, getting a smaller drive isn't cheaper. They had this issue on the original Xbox where although there was only 8 GB formatted, they were putting 20 GB drives or something like that at the end of the lifecycle.

I suspect that's the main reason they made an Xbox 360 without hard drives. Microsoft got boned on the Xbox because they couldn't make a profit late in the lifecycle because they couldn't reduce their manufacturing costs because of the HD and the fact that they used off the shelf components. (Microsoft actually sued Nvidia if I recall correctly over this, which is probably why they switched to AMD on the 360 I imagine)

SSD prices are decreasing like crazy, so I imagine a Xbox One or PS4 will be released once they can get one for less than $40 that can fit a fair amount of games. Since everything runs off the hard disk, and they are on blu-rays (meaning each game may be 25-50 GB of data), it might be a while.

There is little advantage to the console these days other than games are guaranteed to work forever, which is appealing to me because I play a bunch of old games (I discussed this in another thread).

I suspect the new consoles are going to show their age a lot sooner compared to PC because they aren't using exotic top of the line hardware. I would wager that this generation is the last of the generation of expensive upgrades every 5 years. I imagine now that they are essentially PCs, they'll move to the iPad/Ouya model putting out more hardware revs just because they switched to off the shelf hardware, which I suspect will be better for developers and consumers.

The developer advantage is that better hardware will be available to them, so they have to worry less about optimizations.

The consumer advantage is that the will be guaranteed backwards compatibility and consoles won't be so darn expensive.

At that point there will be minimal difference between a PC and consoles, but consoles will have the advantage of being able to get closer to the hardware, and can optimize for specific hardware configurations rather than trying to get it run on infinity billion different hardware configurations. PCs will be like android and consoles will be like iOS, and I think while Apple has more rules, developing for the iOS hardware is better.

Or the steam machine will crush them all! Or the Ouya. Who knows!

I must admit I'm not too interested in the console stuff. The only "proper" console I own is a Playstation 1 (MediEvil and Croc, woo!!!) and a couple of more modern handhelds. Still, considering how much games are developed for consoles nowadays (with the PC getting a port rather than primary development), I guess it is relevant. What do you folks think of the comments by nVidia that even upon release the new consoles' hardware is behind the times, though? In a way, aren't consoles holding us back, especially on technical issues like fps, resolution and the like? Not to mention I feel that the more modern first person shooters are very much due to on-the-couch gameplay, whereas stuff like STALKER plays very differently?

While I agree that the top of the line PC is more powerful than the next gen consoles (although a top of the line PC would be significantly more expensive), I don't think console development is really holding PC back - at least given the current market conditions where I think more money is spent on console games.

Retro/Grade didn't even use all the power of the PS3 (although we did use quite a lot), and I had to make the game scale way down for the PC release, and didn't bother making it scale up.

If anything, I think the new generation of consoles will help developers increase the minimum spec for PCs and provide a better higher end experience. Looking at the current Steam hardware survey, over 50% of the current Steam users have 1 gig or less of GPU ram. That means developers either have to create a very scalable graphics engine or cater to the lowest common denominator, and 1 gig of GPU ram doesn't get you THAT much given that I suspect most of the 8 gig on PS4/Xbone games are taken up by textures. The lowest common denominator currently is last gen, but developers stop releasing games on last gen consoles, I think the PC min spec will be increased greatly and developers will make games with better graphics.

Yeah, I suppose the wider array of systems can make it more difficult to develop for computers. Though on the other hand, some developers just say "screw it" and create something outlandishly high-performance like the Crysis games back then, perhaps driving/forcing people (and the hardware industry and, secondarily, the other software developers) along. Regardless of "next gen", it'll definitely be good for PC development when "last gen" is no longer prioritized, though, I agree with that.

I think the thing about Crysis is that it only did good business because they were the only ones targeting the bleeding edge. People bought the game solely to benchmark their high end computers, so Crytek was guaranteed sales. If your market is limited to just high end computers, then people have lots of choices to make use of their fancy hardware, then bleeding edge game will have a much smaller attachment rate.

I'm excited about the Steam Machine and what that might for PC development. Steam has really revolutionized the platform and maybe the Steam Machine will be the next big step to improving the platform.