Ubisoft's Yves
Jacquier has spoken outwardly towards the current elongated console cycle; his
studio now feels limited by the PS3 and 360.
As
Executive Producer at Ubisoft, he and his company are ready for the next
console generation now. While it is obvious they aren't so limited they
can't release games, given Assassins Creed Revelations releases in November,
it's definitely true that the hardware from 2005 is starting to show its age to
more than just the super high-end developers.
"Our challenge with the
PlayStation 3 and Xbox is that we're extremely limited in what we can do. It's
a challenge for the engineers to provide nice graphics and nice AI and nice
sound with a very small amount of memory and computation time. We think that
the next generation of consoles won't have these limits any more. Games might
have more realistic graphics and more on-screen, but what's the value of making
something more realistic and better animated if you have poor AI?"
As
someone who follows the more technical aspects of game development and prefers
much higher end gaming experiences on PC, I completely agree. If this
generation has taught us anything it's that amazing graphics can be
accomplished with quite reasonable hardware specifications but as soon as you
start pushing in every other department – AI, physics and the core programming
elements of what makes games, games – you begin to see the limitations. I
built a new PC in April and have run several benchmarks and high-end game tests
on it since, and the sheer capability differences between 2010-2011 hardware and
2005-2006 hardware is staggering. Even way back in 2008, games like
Devil May Cry 4 had PC specific modes that had to be left out of the console
versions due to hardware limits so at this point in time games like The Witcher
2, created for the PC, are making console titles look positively dated.
If not for the massive shift to the console market being the focus of most
games development this generation, we would be seeing a huge number of titles that simply couldn't run on either 360 or PS3. I have
been patiently waiting for the shift to next gen for what feels like far too
long already and I look forward to future PC titles demonstrating just what
everyone will have to look forward to when the PS4 and next Xbox arrive.