Ken Levine: Current Consoles Still Have “a Ton of Juice Left in Them”
With games like Battlefield 3 and Rage “pushing console hardware as much as developers can”, some studios claim that the PS3 and 360 have been maxed out, and that it’s time for a new generation. BioShock creator Ken Levine, however, doesn’t see a need for another console cycle just yet, and thinks there’s still a lot of life left in this generation.
Ken Levine said to the PlayStation Plus UK show Access:
It’s clear there’s still a fair bit of juice left in these machines. From a gameplay standpoint absolutely there’s a ton of juice left in them. I as a gamer am not aching for the new machines yet.
Continuing:
You look at Arkham City, Uncharted and Gears of War and you’re starting to see that these games don’t look old to me. They look very current.
I was playing Batman the other day and he’s flying over this huge city, the snow is landing on the wings of his cape and you can see it hitting and melting. They still retain the power to visually amaze me.
Adding:
I honestly don’t know how they do what do. It’s pretty amazing. They’re still able to drag a lot of juice out of these machines; lots of things left to explore.
He did agree that it is “challenging” to continue to push the current consoles, but said BioShock: Infinite manages to do so by using a “totally new engine built on top of Unreal Engine”.
[Via]
5 Responses to “Ken Levine: Current Consoles Still Have “a Ton of Juice Left in Them””
I’m pretty excited about Bioshock: Infinite, mostly because of the change in location. I wasn’t nearly as excited about Bioshock 1 or 2.
If I remember correctly it was not until near the end of the PS2′s lifespan that Developers finally got methods down pat and started getting better at making great “looking” games with great game play.
Lazy developers will always be the first ones to complain about the “limits” of a given hardware. Too often unfortunately, clueless game journalists will agree with them. We live in an age where every new game is expected to use a brand new engine, or else Metacritic will be very angry.
Just look at Uncharted 3. It deserves much more than 93%, but it was sacked because the jump in graphic quality from U2 was not *quite* as mindblowing as some pixel counters would have hoped.
“Ken Levine: Current Consoles Still Have “a Ton of Juice Left in Them””
Tell that to Sledgehammer!
I personally don’t think that the PS3 has been maxed out yet. I can really say that when I see multiplat devs push the system like how Naughty Dog, Quantic Dream, Santa Monica, Polyphony Digital, Guerrilla and Media Molecule did. The problem is no one wants to single out M$.
Yeah but that’s Microsoft’s problem. I’ve always found that Microsoft associate themself with the biggest traitors the games industry has known and now those traitors are showing their true colours, it’s enough to make me feel bad for MS.
Epic Games had a whole speech on why they regret not bringing Gears to the PS3 and countless XBOX 360 exclusives find their way to the PS3. Perhaps next generation Microsoft need to be more carefull what companies they side with.
As for the PS3 of course there’s still a lot to do with the PS3 and it’s people like Ken Levine who are going to prove that while the guys at companies like Ubisoft churn out their yearly release and wonder why they can’t do much in that time frame. (I wonder if the guys working on Assassin’s creed miss the days before Ubisoft realised how big the cash cow was)