Xbox Series X's cross-gen approach is robbing players of the next-gen thrill

[ArchangelMadzz]

Mr Puggsly said:

ArchangelMadzz said:

Everyone who's involved in game development is very excited about the SSD's in the XSX and the PS5. It would be difficult to get you on board, that's not what I'm trying to do, the only thing I can say is that storage speed has fundamentally hindered game development for many years.

Again, I know you've said about uncharted but a lot of these games have many ways that they hide loading by slowing you down. Whether it's unlocking doors mechanics, to squeezing through small cave openings very slowly so that the game can load the next section. Spiderman's web slinging speed and many more subtle ways, these would not be needed anymore. 

Cross gen titles would still need these mechanics in because of the HDD's on PS4P and XB1X, and that includes slow, story based games with their level design. A game specifically designed to run on a 2.4GB/s SSD would almost need to be redone to function on a HDD. Cross gen titles will load much quicker but there won't be any of these major changes until games are built from the ground up for superfast SSD's. 

Time will only tell, but even a game like Horizon: Zero Dawn, built specifically for a 5.5GB/s SSD would work fundamentally different to what it turned out to be. 

Whoops correction:I remember reading a piece of PR about how much GPU power Resogun uses and that it can't be doneon PS3. But they did manage to port it, apparently my 2013 memory isn't amazing.

I genuinely don't believe the storage speed has a been a significant hindrance, at least when compared to other specs. But I'm curious to see how developers do use SSD tech.

Again, I feel Uncharted and even God of War are purposely slow paced often for story telling reasons. Its not always for loading.

Spiderman already web slings pretty fast, I'm not sure exactly how fast he needs to go before it just gets ridiculous. Even on 7th gen consoles we had open world games with cars driving faster than Spiderman was swinging. Again, I don't think better specs necessarily changes basic game design.

I wouldn't be surprised of somebody said Resogun was only possible on PS4. I wouldn't have believed it though.

Spiderman's not gonna be going 300MPH, even though he can, the idea is the chains being taken off. You have creative freedom which is what a developer wants. If a developer wants a long drawn out system of lifting eachother over a fence then they can, if they want an annoying lock pick mechanism they can, but the big point is that they don't have to now.

Same with spiderman, if they want him to sling at 60Mph then they can because they want to, not because they have to, if they decide they want 85MPH or 90MPH they can do that. 

It's all about the creative freedom it gives. Developers had to make certain types of games in similar ways because of this, now devs that want to do things differently, can do things differently. 


You mentioned GOW, a game that actually had no visible loading screens, it's no coincidence that it's a slow game. Now they probably wanted it to be slow, it worked well for them. But there was a lot of work involved to get this game to be playable from beginning to end with no loading screens. All the man hours that would've taken... is now gone. (At least mostly)