OXMUK
Volition's Saints Row 4 is out in the UK today, and if you've read our review, you'll know it's an utter hoot. The developer has yet to announce what it's up to next, but senior producer Jim Boone was prepared to discuss some broad possibilities for Xbox One and PS4 when I caught up with him at a hands-on last month.
"That kind of stuff is exciting to me, but we haven't talked about it yet, now that we're at the end of Saints Row 4 - like, we just got approval from Microsoft and Sony America, we're still going through Sony Europe, but we're at the end of this, most of the team is now doing DLC and stuff like that," he said. "So we're finally at the point where we can really start to talk about that kind of stuff in detail. But we haven't - it's just been like all hands on deck for Saints Row 4.
"So definitely, I'm very excited about the possibilities of whatever we do next, but it's too early to know what's next," he continued. "We're interested to dig in - anytime you have a new generation of consoles, come out as developers we are already losing our minds. Like, 'oh my god, the horsepower - this is going to be amazing' - and then very quickly filling it up and complaining: 'why didn't they give us more memory, why didn't they make it faster?'
"But I like what I'm hearing about consoles that aren't just the typical, you know - everyone knows it's going to look better, everyone knows it's going to run faster, but what other more exotic things can you do? One thing I think you touched on there with the persistence, I think would be extremely powerful - but in fairness we haven't really talked about any of that kind of stuff yet. We just need to be able to take a step back and recover from crunching, then hit it, off we go."
Boone didn't want to indulge in "conjecture" about either next generation platform, but was enthused by the advent of large scale cloud gaming on Xbox One.
"There are certain aspects... I'm speaking more as a fan than a developer because I haven't really thought about it," he mused. "But the things I like about it - and this is probably going to be fairly generic, because everyone sort of thinks along these lines - but I love the notion that I can play through a game to a certain point, and then I've got my saved game and my completed point, I've got my state in a certain point and then I can play with someone else and have them view it. Like, go to somebody's house and not worry about having the same saved game.
"I know Steam's being doing that for ages, there's nothing terribly new about that per se, but I like that notion on a console - that you can see it and go to different places and check it out. In terms of what kinds of thing we can do mechanically, I'll confess I haven't really given that any thought yet. I think there are exciting opportunities, and Microsoft has been talking about having these kinds of servers that are available for you to be able to use in these sorts of ways."
Among other things, Microsoft's Xbox One cloud basically constitutes dedicated servers for every multiplayer game at a bargain price (we've heard reports that these servers are, in fact, free, but we've yet to receive official confirmation from Microsoft). For a developer like Volition, which lacks the publisher resources of a company like DICE, this is a tempting prospect.
"And for studios like us, that's awesome because I know the EA's of the world have all their own servers and everything runs on them," said Boone. "And they're able to do some pretty exciting things as a result of that. Whereas for us we haven't really had that opportunity yet, so we're in such an early stage of even thinking about that you know, I don't really know what sort of things we'd like to do with it. I'm excited to start thinking about it!"
One thing that's unlikely to change, should the Saints Row series continue, is the prioritising of fun game mechanics above technical sophistication. "Thinking of Saints Row, I like the fact that we're fairly unique in terms of our tone - sure, guilty as charged, we don't spend as much money as our competitors in terms of developing the game, so it might not be as bleeding perfect in every graphical detail as other ones might be.
"We have fun - we just make a fun game that's totally different from everything else," Boone concluded. "I like that spirit personally, I think the fans like that spirit too, I just hope that can just transcend and have publishers start to encourage others to do that."
http://www.oxm.co.uk/60959/volition-talks-xbox-one-dedicated-servers-and-why-saints-row-4-lacks-bleeding-edge-graphics/
