Small improvements won’t be enough for the upcoming PS4 and Xbox 720, says DICE general managerKarl-Magnus Troedsson. Instead, the Battlefield 3 man wants to see Sony and Microsoft put as much power as possible in the hands of developers.
“The developer heart in me says ‘give me all the power you’ve got,’ when it comes to CPU and GPU and memory and BUS speeds — just bring it,” Troedsson says. “Because that’s what we see as the future of consoles, that they really need to take a big step forward. Not a small step, that’s not enough. They need to take a big step forward.”
As well as asking for “a platform that is easy to develop for with a hardware setup that isn’t too unique”, Troedsson had these words of advice for console hardware manufacturers: “I would inspire [console makers] to realize that they’re delivering the quality HD platforms. Together with modern PCs, they are the HD platforms, and they should be the premium platform. They need to be at the forefront of what technology can do.”
The core gamers on these platforms, this is what they expect,” he told Gamasutra. “You need something that looks and plays well, and sounds really good, and that’s pushing the envelope.”
I completely agree. If MicroSony do "bring the power", the games we see won't only make huge advancements visually, but we'll see improvements in gameplay with improved AI, bigger and more detailed game worlds and smoother frame-rates.
As for the price of these machines, a $600 system would be overkill, but some gamers seem to forget that the reason the PS3 was so outrageously expensive at launch is because of the CELL and Blu-ray drive. Xbox 360 has proved that you don't need to pay a fortune for powerful tech, it was $150 cheaper than the PS3 at launch and the differences between the systems are miniscule. Blu-ray, the definite format for PS4 and probable format for Nextbox is now cheap and it's been heavily rumoured that Sony will ditch the CELL. We can see vastly improved tech in our next-gen platforms for affordable prices.
