Sony and Microsoft like to tell us how long we’ll be playing our current consoles. That’s great when you consider that we’re getting our money’s worth out of the boxes. Game developers seem to have the systems figured out, and continue to impress us with what they can do with them. But at least one developer says that they are close to reaching the techincal limits of current game systems.
Codemasters’ Andy Wilson is the director on upcoming shooter Bodycount. CVG asked him if consoles were reaching their limits: “I think [that’s] probably fair, yeah. It’s been an unusually long console cycle and it’s going to run on for some time yet,” he said.
“You find the ceiling by building engines, tools and middleware which mean the next game you do on the current generation you’ve already done all of that stuff, so you can then push it even further.”
In fact, Wilson is having an issue with limits for environmental destruction in Bodycount: “It takes a huge amount of effort to get all of that to even work on current consoles, because it takes sh*t-loads of memory, it sucks up performance out of the consoles like you wouldn’t believe.”
