In their latest episode of Next-Gen Console Watch, IGN sat down with Thomas Puha (Communications Director at Remedy) to discuss the challenges of developing for the latest consoles as well as their predecessors. In his interview, Puha doesn't mince his words as he talks about the realities of studios developing for both current and next-generation platforms.
Speaking to IGN, he reveals, "whenever you're in this cross-generational point, to be blunt, it sucks. You have to support the previous gen, make sure that sings, and then whatever you bring to next-gen is still limited by the choices you made years ago for the previous generation. It's not a very realistic thing, that this old game, we're just going to remake everything and then bring it to next-gen. It's just not like that. It's not a reality for us, because you're literally taking away resources that are building the future games and improving the engine for the future." Although he later adds that as things progress, the games on the consoles are naturally going to get stronger and take more advantage of the technology it provides.
He also specifically talks about Control and the challenges the multi-project studio faced bringing the Control Ultimate Edition to life, particularly for the Xbox Series S. When talking about bringing in new features, he admits that "nothing works at first. The content looks wrong, the textures look wrong, the lighting is busted, because we've made all these improvements but then they're incompatible with what we had in 2019. It took months - the game is running, we had it running back in summer of last year, but it didn't have any of the nice things... it just took quite a while to get to the level where we had everything working that we had in the previous-gen version. Now we can actually start doing all that cool next-gen stuff."
Currently, the team are working on four active projects, a multiplayer experience developed by Vanguard, one unannounced project, and the two unannounced Epic Games projects.
8th April 2021
Thomas Puha Talks Next-Gen Consoles With IGN
