What i mean is, this gen the consoles weren't super easy to program for and developers had to learn a lot over the years how to handle the consoles. Better tools were very important so was experience with the consoles. it took years until developers really understood the PS3 and i'm not sure if some still learn a lot about it because they don't really understand the console yet lol.

But next gen looks very "easy" to work for from day one (or let's say after some months with the final dev-kits). Sure, we will also see better tools from time to time (especially the release games won't be really what next gen will show us) and experience will be also important on PS4, Wii U and Xbox One but there isn't a huge hurdle and without this problem, games should show much earlier what the consoles really can and developers could reach much earlier the moment where visible progression won't be that big anymore except for some little tweaks from game to game.

Edit: This would be obviously a good thing because getting the best possible graphics some years earlier because of easy development can't be bad but the "wow" moments could maybe happen fewer times.

PS4 and X1 seem pretty easy to develop for, so I don't see them seeing the kind of improvement we saw with PS3 and 360.

Not sure about Wii U. I'd say it definitely has the potential to greatly improve, given how little it's been pushed so far, but there's always the risk that it may continue to be underutilized and never reach its full potential.

Wii U has the greatest potential for progression because half of its RAM is locked away. If Nintendo eventually unlocks even half of it, that's a massive increase as a percentage of RAM available to developers.

Yes, the PS4 can have more RAM unlocked as well but as a percentage of the total RAM on the system, it's not as big of an increase which won't yield as dramatic results.


I think the real progression though may be how indies progress on consoles through the generation. With the increase in tools and conversion scripts, they will show some seriously marked improvement year over year.

I think that developers will achieve the true potential of the new generation within 12-18 months of release. All of the reasons boil down to the ease of porting or designing games more easily from the word go with the much easier architectures. I have made mention in other threads, i think that this generation will last only 4-5 years. I think that with tablets and smartphones updating every 6 months to 1 year, that they will have become just as or more powerful than the PS4/XBone within 3-4 years. M$'s surface pro tablet is near the same power as the XBone/PS4 and it weighs only 2 pounds and is almost a year old. Within 3 years, they will be able to do this.

I don't think that an HDTV is a good enough display for the difference between this gen and next gen to be particularly noticeable. All of them can display 1080p with a fair margin of power beyond that. On that note alone, you won't see much of a difference between generations.

The PS4 looks to be the easy system to develop for, possibly even easier than PC. It will probably see more AA titles and earlier releases for multiplatform titles than the other systems. The other systems? Who knows.