The Playstation 3 was infamous for being a powerful but difficult console to develop games on. However, God of War: Ascension developer Sony Santa Monica said in an interview released Thursday that won't be the case for the PS4 which will lead to even better games.
"Generally you have to write a lot of low-level code in order to work with architecture from PS2 and PS3 and then you go to this standard that everybody is programming with on PS4,” Ascension lead designer Mark Simon told Edge Magazine. “So what that means is it frees a lot of people to stop thinking about low-level code. Obviously it was a strength of the PS3 because the sub-processor was a badass, but it took a lot of work to use the full architecture of the PS3. But now by using something that’s more common across all of programming land, that frees up time, and programmers with freed up time can make better tools and that’s going to make for better games.”
This commonality will also help multi-platform games which was a weakness for the PS3 when it first launched. It was until game developers learned some very hard lessons with porting games from the Xbox 360 to the PS3 that they learned it was easier to start development on Sony's console first.
Poor ports between consoles and the PC will hopefully be less of an issue as the PS4 shares similar architecture to the PC and the same is expected of the Xbox 720.
Simon said that the raw power of the PS4 also has him excited for how next-gen games will look. “I’m excited that things like depth of field will look great next-generation. It’s going to mean real cinematography, and real in-game is going to look like a pre-rendered movie. That is awesome, because then our cinematic games becomes really cinematic all the way through and there’s no quality change between pre-rendered and in-game.”
The PS4 is expected to launch in October or November of this year.
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter for the latest news or you can subscribe to our RSS feed or email alerts.
Via: Edge
Comments