Sony's U-turn - Should first party games be cross-gen?

[Runa216]

SvennoJ said:

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.

But that's just it, with any new technology it takes time to learn how to best maximize their performance. Games at the beginning of any and all generations are vastly different to the games at the end of the same generation. Metal Gear solid 3 looks vastly superior to Metal Gear solid 2. That's just sort of how things work. and with each console generation's leap in technology getting smaller and smaller (in terms of what we see and feel, not in raw power), I just don't see how games are going to make a HUGE leap at the beginning of this generation so why not make games cross-generational. 

If it's gonna take a few years to truly integrate the new console's features into games, why not take the games that CAN be played on the old hardware and adapt them to do so? 

Not all games are going to need instant teleportation or any of the unique features of the PS5. Not all games will need to take advantage of the SSD and blast processing and all that jazz. MOST games - even first party games - are just going to be prettier, better performing versions of old games. In any new console generation only a small percentage of games make full use of the console's unique features. 

Except Nintendo games. those tend to do a damn good job with their unique features. but Sony isn't Nintendo. I would like it if they could take some cues from Nintendo, but they seem to be doing well enough.