What if Sony and Microsoft had waited until Nov '15 to release their 8th gen consoles?

[curl-6]

torok said:

curl-6 said:

Crysis 1 was made with only PCs in mind, hence its enormous scope.

Crysis 2 and 3 were made to run on consoles with 512MB of RAM, hence the simpler, smaller environments.

Almost any game can run on almost any console if you downgrade it enough. With Crysis 2 and 3, they designed with console specs in mind to make the process easier, that's all.

That doesn't make sense if the first game actually ran with the same scope on the consoles. Why would they downgrade the sequels if the consoles handled the first game just fine (except by a lesser degree of destructable enviroments, just like BF games did on PS360)? They did run the first game with 512 MB of RAM, so what's the problem for a sequel with the same scope?

If Crysis 1 was PC-only, that would make sense. But it isn't. It is on PS360. You could argue that if Crysis 2/3 had the same scope than C1, that would mean that consoles couldn't handle a bigger scope than C1. But they actually decreased the scope of a game that already ran on consoles just fine. The explanation is simple. Crysis 1 was a graphics benchmark. Any new Crysis game had to be. So they simplified the enviroments on Crysis 2 to focus resources on a smaller area, lower the budget and get an impressive result. That's noticeable if you look at Crysis 3. It isn't much better looking than the second game, because they had similar enviroments. But Crysis 2 looks WAY better than the first game.

Like I said, to make the process easier.

Crysis 1 had to undergo severe re-engineering to work on PS3/360, and even then it ran badly.

By designing 2 and 3 with a more limited scope, it was less work to get it running on consoles. Less work = less cost.