Intrinsic said:
The "likes of me"? ok. I'm a doctor. Do you have to be one to know that it's probably bad to swallow something that says rat poison written on it ? And who are these dozens of devs that have spoken out you mention? Cause I can also show you a dev that has openly spoken for it. and unlike the rest of these devs that speak out he isn't doing it in hiding. But let's make this simple. Are you saying. that it's a LOT of work and completely unfeasable making something that's already running at 1080p on the PS4 to remain at 1080p on the PS4k? Are you saying that it's a lot of work taking something that's running at 900p on the PS4 up to native 1080p on the PS4k? Even after considering the hardware bump in the PS4k as opposed to the PS4? Do you realize that devs will treat the PS4k as an after thought and just code for the PS4 as per usual? Anyways. sorry if I offended you and if you are indeed a dev, but I also like you to know that I don't have to be a dev to have a pretty decent understanding of how game development works. I may not know enough to do anything more than make an Android app, but o do know enough to know what I don't know and can't do..... if that makes sense. |
Well Greg Zeschuk is one. He said supporting two platforms at once would “be a gigantic pain in the ass that flies in the face of the purpose of consoles.”
I agree with that sentiment. The same goes on the other end. Supporting the base PS4 10 years from now, as you mentioned? That'll also be a gigantic pain in the ass. Anything other than developing for one specific console specification is a giant pain in the ass in comparison. It means more unpaid overtime. It means more time spent away from my family. It makes our jobs more difficult. It's annoying. It sucks. It's completely unnecessary.
I never once said it's a lot of work. I said it's extra work. There's no denying that. In fact I said it will be substantially less work than maintaining a PS4 and X1 build. That doesn't change the fact that it's more work to be done on the same budget with the same hard release dates we have now. It's needless extra work to add on to the pile of work that already has to be done. It will suck for developers like me. It's going to suck even worse for the QA team, and there's no getting around that. It's not the same as changing the video output on your console - this is a seperate build of the game. QA pretty much has to treat it as a completely different platform. All that means is less time playing through the regular PS4 and X1 builds, which likely means that less bugs spotted, and less fixed. What I'm saying here is that this move has knock-on effects all the way down. Sure it's not going to break the industry, but its going to make the job more difficult, and the games won't be as "good" as they could have been without the PS4 neo introduced.
I get the impression that you think this is pretty much a matter of the new PS4 just supporting a new 4K output mode, so the console is going to do 99% of the work for you and all developers have to do is change the engines to support this new mode, hope their game runs in 1080p when they're done the engine work and if it does make sure the PS4K build doesn't break, pour money into testing it, and pretty much call it a day a day from there if nothing breaks. Honestly? That's not too far off what I'm describing above. Not a lot of work, but extra work that really really sucks. But that might not be the case depending on how the engine was designed. If they game developers adapted a PC engine to run on consoles that already supports multiple hardware configurations, adding one more isn't that big of a deal, but they were already bloated and not well optimized. But something that is built from the ground up for console development, like the engine Uncharted 4 is running on? You're going to have to rewrite large chunks of your engine. That could be a huge amount of work. The developers that have put the time and effort to get the most out of the PS4 to date are going to be hurt the most by this.
It just sucks. Games will suffer. Plain and simple.
If Sony figured out a way for the PS4K to do this in the background, to use the extra console power to take an pure sub-1080p rendering and channel the extra power to "boost" the rendering portion of the game to 1080p without developers doing anything (not sure if this is possible, I don't work on engine development)? Then you wouldn't really be hearing any complaints out of me, because then it would just be a PS4 with 4K capable video output. Not a big deal. It would all be the same to developers. As a console owner I really wouldn't care either as I would know that the only real perk of upgrading if I dont own a 4K tv is that the game will be outputted in 1080p. I don't need to worry if games will suffer. I don't have to worry that if Sony is going to drop support of the base PS4 3 years after the PS4 Neo is released. If it's all the same to devs, it's all the same to me.
It's really too bad it isn't.
