Developing games for next-gen consoles is challenging, especially if you’re simultaneously developing them for current-gen, as Control developer Remedy was. But the PS5 and the Xbox Series consoles were not equally challenging to develop for, according to Remedy’s Thomas Puha.
On Next-Gen Console Watch, Puha said that Sony was “a bit more ready” with its PS5 early tools for developers, and said that it was easier initially to get games like Control working on the PS5 than it was for the Xbox Series X and S.
He did go on to say that both machines were still great to make games for, and while they’re both still working out system-level issues, this is normal for new hardware and things will ultimately get better with time.
“Sony stuck what worked, their development software and tools were pretty stable and good pretty early on,” Puha said. “Microsoft opted to change quite a lot of things, which in the long run are probably good, but of course it was just a bigger hurdle for us devs early on because we had to rewrite a bunch of different things to take advantage of specific features.”
Puha also had something to say about the Xbox Series S: namely, that developing for it is admittedly holding developers back at least a little.
“It’s no different from the previous generations where the system with the lowest specs does end up dictating a few of the things you’re going to do because you’re going to have to run on that system,” he said.
“The more hardware you have, the more you have to ultimately compromise a little bit when you are a smaller studio like us, when you just can’t spend as much time making sure all these platforms are super good.”
He added that quality assurance especially is a huge problem contributing to this, as it is more and more expensive to test games the more platforms you have to test them on.
“I don’t envy folks making Halo Infinite,” he said.
Control: Ultimate Edition is out now for PS5 and Xbox Series S and X, and seems to be running fine on both. The original version was our favorite game of 2019 with our original review at launch celebrating its weird world, its thrilling ranged combat, and its incredible cast, script, and secrets.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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