As developers fight for consumer appreciation, they are forced to constantly push the envelope in terms of the amount of power they can extract from the hardware. This is especially true of console development, where the hardware limitations are finite and easily defined.
Gamers have become more and more obsessed with graphics and speed over the past few years, and the pressure is on the developer to make their game a more powerful beast than their competitor – anyone who reads gaming news regularly will be familiar with Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 developers trading blows over graphical capabilities and frame rates.
Sledgehammer, co-developer of Modern Warfare 3, have now said however, in an interview with Industrygamers, that the current generation of consoles don’t have much in the way of “raw horsepower” left, believing they’ve hit a hardware ceiling on what they’re capable of doing with consoles.
“We are definitely in the later phases of the development cycle now,” said studio co-founder Michael Condrey, talking to IndustryGamers. “Teams have had a lot of time on this generation to capitalise on the hardware strengths.”
“For good teams, the raw horsepower has been pushed towards its peak performance, and great teams are looking for hundredths, and more often thousandths of a second of CPU and GPU optimisations to push the consoles harder.”
Condrey says that while there will be no major technological improvements in console games next year, there will be room for refinements.
Battlefield 3 emphasised graphics, while Modern Warfare 3 prioritised higher frame rates.
“New innovative approaches will move the best in class titles forward again next year. By how much, will depend on how well the developers respond to tackling the most challenging optimisations.”
Industrygamers also asked Square Enix’s Julien Merceron and Team Ninja leader Yosuke Hayashi to weigh in.
Hayashi agreed with Sledgehammer’s position, saying, “any further dramatic evolution in current consoles that could be plainly understood by the general gamer would be fairly difficult to achieve.”
Merceron was a little more optimistic, saying that while current consoles’ power is limited, he still sees potential for “major improvements” on the PS3, which he thinks will then put the console “slightly ahead of the Xbox 360 in terms of graphics”.
If what Sledgehammer is saying is true, it may not be a bad thing. Developers can spend less time trying to compete on power, and more time competing on gameplay.
Sledgehammer: “Current consoles have no more horsepower” << Comments and views
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