richardhutnik said:
Listening to your develpers, rather than bean counters, is what matters most. I believe the decision to go more memory meant releasing an XBox ssystem without a hard drive to keep down costs. In the end, it was the right one, considering what the PS3 came in at. |
Most probably Sony hoped to be able to launch PS3 one year later. MS move of early launching XB360 to escape from the one-sided deal with NVidia for XFlop GPU initially damaged MS itself a lot, due to the unreliability of the first rushed XB360s, but ended up damaging Sony more. Format war between BD and HD-DVD damaged it further, creating shortages of blue lasers and keeping their price high longer. IMVHO these things put together damaged Sony more than excessive feature richness in general. Kudos to MS, anyway, for overturny a negative situation so deftly. About RAM, avoiding keeping it too small is the most cost effective feature for almost every computing system, yes, 1st party devs can be fine developing exclusives with little RAM available, but 3rd parties can't optimize or even be forced to do major rewritings of their multiplats for every system. At XB1 times the unexpected redution of RAM from the originally planned 128MB to just 64MB, due to the last big RAM crisis, forced PC/XB1 multiplat devs to cripple many games, as they weren't given enough time to rewrite them properly, and even if they had time, costs would have skyrocketed. And so, for example, Thief III levels, that in the older chapters could be huge, had to be split in smaller sections, and Garrett wasn't able to swim anymore. Morrowind had a slightly better destiny, because it used dynamic loading, but it wasn't enough, they were forced to separate indoor and outdoor, the former are separated levels, the latter is a huge single level, but loaded dynamically, and on PC you can increase the visibility distance, but the interactivity one remains shorter, increasing the former you can spot enemies far away, but they stand still and you cannot hit them even using long range attacks until they get closer, at that point they suddenly start moving. Gothic, PC exclusive of roughly the same period, if you have enough RAM can do a lot better even with modest CPU and GPU, while Morrowind, with the same HW, uses it less efficiently, it has limits that cannot be bypassed even if you have enough HW resources.
To cut it short, I really hope next gen console producers not be avaricious with main RAM, if they need to save money they should try to cut anything else, but NOT main RAM!
