| Magnific0 said: ^PS2 was not easy to program at first. One of the first developers to cry out loud about it was Resident Evil creators stating "the machine is so powerful that it will be difficult to budget or plan for the new techniques that would be required to program it" |
Correct. It became easier later on as game engines matured. The same is the case with the PS3, every step foward is a step you don't have to take with future games based on the same (yet improved) engine.
However the PS3 isn't as hard to develop for as compared to the PS2 and the potential gains are much bigger! Essentially with building up an engine from scratch would not be that difficult to yield amazing results (but takes more time to yield any results, such games will take a long time to develop), some existing game engines are well suited to be adapted step by step, with this approach you can release ever increasingly impressive games in between game engine development milestones. Given unlimited resources, building from scratch would be ideal from a technical perspective, everything designing from the core up to run optimal on the new platform, but economically speaking redesigning step by step is often more economically viable. Insomniac has nearly completely redesigned their legacy game engine for Resistance 2, so with competent devs both approaches are viable to achieve groundbreaking results.
