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Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts has said that there’s some ‘potential’ to the idea of his $49m space sim appearing on next-gen consoles.
I definitely decided very early on that I wasn’t going to focus or be worried about the last-gen consoles,” he told MCV. The current PS4 and Xbox One, they’re essentially like stripped-down, mid-level gaming PCs, so there would be a potential for some form of the work that we’re doing to be on them.
But it’s quite honestly not our focus, because on PC it’s fun – it’s like a great playground – and we’re not limited by working on a particular platform. We can just push it. What kind of graphic techniques can we do in now real-time that in the past could only be pre-rendered? What can we do to create a much more visceral living world?”
Despite the concession that modern consoles could perhaps handle the game, however, Roberts was also keen to stress that past PC-only games have benefitted from not having to pander to fixed architectures.
If you take a look at Crysis, which is the most famous Crytek and CryEngine game, when they did that they really went for it in a way that none of those other games were doing and you couldn’t do on console,” he added.
Even to this day some of the stuff you see in Crysis is technically impressive, and after that with Crysis 2 they came back a little bit to make sure things worked on PS3 and 360, and in some ways it curtailed how much they were pushing it relative to how much they were in Crysis.
For me, for Star Citizen it should be about just going for it and trying to create the richest, most immersive experience possible and not be worried about trying to make it fit 512MB or be on this limited platform that’s seven years old today.”
Rival space sim Elite: Dangerous looks as if it will be heading to PS4 and Xbox One, however, judging by comments from creator David Braben.
Interview conducted by Matthew Jarvis.
