What Devs Want from the Next Gen

[Labadal]

Dungeon Siege III lead designer Nathaniel Chapman, Obsidian Entertainment.

 

One thing that is tricky with the next gen, and is beginning to be tricky with this gen, is that [the platform holders] seem to be splitting and going in their own directions with features. You have Move, you have Kinect, the Wii, and Wii U now.

 

What we want when we make a game is for it to be as good an experience as possible for people and we want as many people as possible to be able to play it, so there are those competing pressures.

 

If you make a Kinect game it has to be Xbox exclusive. If you're using Kinect to its fullest there's no way you can make it a PS3 game. Same with the Wii U. You can't take a Wii U game that has a second screen and make it on... well I don't know what all the features of the next PlayStation and Xbox controllers are going to be, but I'm going to assume they don't have a screen on them.

 

Microsoft is rumoured to be preparing a 2012 next Xbox announcement.

It's going to be very tricky to make really great experiences for that which can be cross platform. It'll be an interesting challenge how devs adopt those features and, indeed, whether or not they do.

 

The thing that most holds me back right now is memory. The number one difficulty in making a console game is that the consoles, to varying degrees, have very restrictive memory, especially when you compare it to making PC games. I'll be happy if they double the memory - that would make my life a lot easier. It would make developing games a lot easier and would fix a lot of the problems that people have making games right now.

 

Here is the rest of the article with other developer opinions.

Edited August 4, 2011 by Labadal