Runa216 said:
It's almost like none of you are even remotely familair with PC development or something. That's all consoles are at this point, specialized PCs. Altering stuff like framerate and load times and resolution and ray tracing and all that jazz...isn't as hard as some of you are making it out to sound.
PC gamers are regularly some of the most insufferable, 'master race' style douchebags I've ever met in gaming, but they're absolutely right that PC games have by far the most versatile settings and features and regularly the best performance on the market. Everyone knows that a good PC can handle gaming better than any console...so why do so many people seem to think that developing a game like Horizon II The Forbidden West on both PS4 and PS5 is in some way going to lessen the game's performance or presentation on PS5?
Hypothetically, sure. Devoid of any context or nuance to the argument I could see being concerned that cross-generational development could hinder the better console, but in practice it's not as impacting as so many of you seem to think. and if it is, and if it does, and if it is far harder to handle given those circumstances, Well you better get your debate club shoes ready because you got an entire PC master race to try and argue with. Are PCs and consoles the same? Are their development cycles identical? Hell no, but they're close enough that you can't apply logic to one without it at least tangentially applying to the other. This isn't apples to oranges, it's nectarines to oranges. They're more similar than most people realize and the PS and Xbox Line both have gotten a tonne of love in generations 8 and 9 for how easy they are to develop for. You can't have it both ways.
Point is, you can't have an entire community extolling the virtues of PC gaming with its performance and scalability and versatility, then turn around and act like consoles can't have similar performance boosts or well-curated features. It's irrational and it's hypocritical and I can't take anyone seriously who honestly believes that games like God of War or Horizon are going to be bad or not beautiful because they are 'hampered' by the last generation hardware. These limitations are imagined, these performance issues are fiction. The reasoning behind it all makes sense in theory but no in practice or reality.
So I repeat: No one answer is right here. It doesn't matter what we think about what is good or not, how we percieve the pros and cons from a business perspective. We can say we only want games to either be or not be cross-generational, we can have opinions on the matter, but none of us are educated enough on the nuance of the situation to make a judgement on whether one side of the coin or the other is better. all I know is that Sony has been killing it, and when the only real complaint anyone has had about the company's output has been 'why can't I find a console anywhere', I don't really think they're doing poorly.
When your console is the fastest selling consle in the history of the medium and there are memes about how hard it is to get one, there's not a lot of room to improve there.
And my opinion on the matter is that I want people to be able to enjoy as many games as they can, but I also want Sony to do well because it means more people will get access to more great games. If balancing exclusives and cross-generation titles helps to make that a reality for the next 1-3 years, then so be it. I'm not missing out on any gaming experiences because Miles Morales and Forbidden West and Ragnarok are also on PS4, and I think it's also good to have games like Ratchet & Clank, Returnal, and Demon's Souls exclusive for the sake of incentivizing people to get new consoles if they wanna play them.
And you know what? if any of these exclusives get previous-generation ports to appease those who can't get PS5s or Series Xs, I'm okay with that, too. |
I guess what people expected was to see all exclusive to be like the Unreal tech demo and Ratchet and Clank's instant teleportation or whatever you want to call it, as well as the super travel speed demonstrated in Spiderman. Things that change the gameplay and are not possible with a HDD. Stuff you don't see on PC since those still need to cater to lower I/O speeds.
However it takes time to think up interesting ways to use the faster I/O speed, and PCs can technically get around it by using a lot of RAM and preload everything. The older consoles are stuck with HDD, limited RAM and slow CPUs. You can make the graphics fancier, the frame rate and render resolution higher, add more effects, ray tracing, but you can't make use of direct streaming from SSD for new kinds of gameplay.
So if Horizon Forbidden West had a very fast flying mount, it can't be done on PS4. Heck I can't fly very fast in FS2020 over PG Areas as I simply run out of terrain, my cpu isn't fast enough to keep up. The difference with PC is, fix it yourself, get better hardware. On consoles, your game gets taken off psn ;)
But I fully agree that not all games need to be changed asap to make full use of the new features. Let devs play with the new tech for a while to make worthwhile game play enhancements instead of shoehorning fast flying / teleportation into everything.
