| clapfaddle said: First indicator that the PS3 has suffered a slight, panicking Sony fans start talking about what promise the PS4 holds. If the industry is struggling to make economically sound the current standard of HD gaming then how do you hope there will ever be a successful standard such as this in the next five years? It's already taking explosively massive budgets and half a decade of R&D to make games like MGS4, RE5 & FF13... Yet you expect an even more extravagant and resource hungry standard to supplant the current trends of which even true PS3 grade graphics are a scarcity alloted largely to first and second party developers with sony's pocket book at their disposal. Even then, to assume everyone would adopt this standard how many games a year do you honestly think the industry could manage? Yet all you can see is promise of even prettier graphics, even greater eye candy, a wonderous trip into the uncanny valley. It's this kind of focus, this kind of blind ambition that has cost Sony the gaming market. Right now the only thing we can be sure of is that talk of the PS4 is a P.R. tool to ensure consumers that the PS3 isn't the last of its kind and that its safe to purchase one. What other reason would there be for talking about it so early? |
Well, we shouldn't see as dramatic of an increase in development cost in the next generation as we have seen in previous generations for a few reasons. In the big-buget HD games most of the modeling and texturing techniques that are being used in pre-rendered movies are already being used (at a lower level of quality), and the cost to make a single graphical asset is similar across formats; this means we have hit (or are close to hitting) a plateau in the quantity of work that is required to make a graphically intensive game.
Besides that, I think one of the consequences of this generation (in particular the Wii's dominance in this generation) will be that most projects will not try to take full advantage of the graphical capabilities of a system to produce the most realistic graphics. Although they will boost the model and texture detail from what they have produce for the Wii (with much better lighting and effects), I wouldn't expect to see EA (or other publishers) take games like Boom Blox or MySims and drastically improve the graphics using techniques already applied on the HD consoles.
