Choo choo! Hype train a-comin’!
The hype train is at full speed now the Xbox One and PS4 are both public knowledge, and Electronic Arts is riding first class. According to EA CTO Rajat Teneja, Sony and Microsoft have systems so magically powerful, they’re five years ahead of the most extravagant PCs.
“These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market,” wrote Teneja on LinedIn. “Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen.
“The compute capabilities of these platforms and the data transfer speeds we can now bank on, essentially removes any notion of rationing of systems resources for our game engines … For a first-person shooter game like Battlefield 4, this means even more detailed gameplay, behavior and awareness for characters and more detailed appearance down to the lighting and clothing on the soldiers.”
The EA executive also makes huge promises about how gaming will soon “become a medium like you’ve never seen,” making wild promises about the way games will behave that reek of pre-gen balderdash. This guy fell out of the buzzword tree and hit every branch on the way down.
“These next-gen platforms create dynamic, living worlds,” he said. “Your game could change overnight depending on actions by other gamers around the globe. Your player stats and information can be updated in real time with real-world player stats and injury reports. These consoles are also inherently more social — something that didn’t matter much when the last consoles came out eight years ago.
“You’re reading this on a social network right now; you’re much more likely to want to connect with your friends and share stats and achievements than ever before.”
Social … you can expect to see that word so, so, so much over the next five years. Better get used to it now.
As far as the hardware goes, though, I’m not buying it. Considering I’m fairly sure my current PC can run Killzone: Shadow Fall, and the Xbox One’s feature set largely consists of things already in my Smart TV, I’m going to have to remain the tiniest bit skeptical that the next generation of consoles are so vastly superior, we cannot conceive of the technology hiding within their humble cases.
I mean, I could be wrong, but … no. No I’m totally not wrong.
