Even though Mark Cerny estimates that it only takes about 0.3% of the overall effort in a game’s development to implement PlayStation 4 Pro support, Vikings: Wolves of Midgard developer Games Farm finds tuning for multiple consoles to be both annoying and costly.
Speaking with GamingBolt, Games Farm CEO Peter Nagy said the major problem for developers “is that there is going to be lineup of different but still same consoles with mandatory backwards compatibility.” Instead of being able to focus on the development of the game, this “adds more requirements we have to take care of.”
Nagy continued by saying that tuning a game to a single platform is doable, but tuning a game for multiple platforms takes extra work and money: Tuning the game to a single platform is well possible, but tuning the game to multiple – performance wise – different platforms is very annoying and requires additional costs without any real gameplay benefits beyond some visual improvements. I understand that incoming VR and 4K has different needs but the market may become a bit overpopulated with income of Xbox One S and Project Scorpio.
During development of Vikings, Games Farm experienced some performance issues on the regular PS4, which “did not improve a lot with PS4 Pro.” Nagy also said that he considers CPU and memory as primary drawbacks for PS4.
Vikings: Wolves of Midgard is scheduled for release in early 2017 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
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