MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Xbox 360 and PS3 have little left to offer, from a technical perspective at least.
That’s the conclusion to draw from comment by Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli, who told Videogamer that the studio’s upcoming Crysis 3 uses over 99 per cent of the power available in both machines.
"Crysis 3 is absolutely maxing out the consoles. There is absolutely not even one per cent left,” he said. "No game will ever look technically better than Crysis 3 on these consoles, flat out.
Most games are not even anywhere near Crysis 2 technically. I’m not talking about art style – art is subjective – but the pure fact of what we have been cramming in with Crysis 2 on Xbox and PlayStation, I’ve yet to see a game do that still today.
With Crysis 3 we’re pushing that to another level, but the PC is just two levels beyond. That’s why we said [two years ago] that Crysis 3 is next-gen ready already. We did that without knowing the specs [of next-generation consoles], but it’s not going to be much more than what we have done so far. And it turns out we were pretty much right."
Indeed, this last year has seen an increasing number of titles that clearly push the limits of current console hardware.
Far Cry 3, for instance, looks amazing on both machines. But there’s a price to pay for the visual quality, and that’s significant screen tearing and sub-30 frames per second.
Presumably Ubisoft decided that the raw quality of the visual image took precedent over how smoothly it could be delivered. That’s fine, but the fact that these decisions have to be made at all shows that developers’ ambitions have overtaken what’s offered by our aging consoles.
