Puha went on to say that this is why the PS5 and Xbox series games now don’t look as good as we would like – better than the previous generation, certainly, but perhaps not quite the dramatic update that people might want.
“The games that will be released, the things we are working on, the visual bar, you will be amazed. And you just need to look at previous generations. You look at something like Modern Warfare. I don’t understand how this game looks so good on Xbox One and PS4. And you will have the same in the current generation. We will see many improvements. “
Puha pointed out that many of the problems with developing games for new generations are related to the resources and tools of the developer. He noted that Control originally shipped with a version of its game engine in August 2019, but the engine was completely updated to incorporate state-of-the-art support – effectively breaking everything Remedy already had in place.
“When you get to the point where you need [a game] running on next generation systems, on a new engine it takes several months to make everything work, “he said.” Nothing works in the beginning. The content looks wrong, the textures look wrong, the lighting is damaged, because we made all these improvements, but they are incompatible with what we had in 2019. It took months – the game is running, we had it running in the summer of last year, but there were none of the good things … it just took a while to get to the level where we had everything working that we had in the previous generation version. Now we can really start doing all those cool things for the next generation. “
Developers must effectively choose what they want to work on, he said. But if they want to make full use of every piece of next generation technology for a game that is being brought in from the previous generation, it could take time that they would be spending to make new games.
“We could continue to develop resources for this game for months, if not a year, but then you are already screwing the next project that you expect these developers to work on that game. This is the reality of an organization with multiple projects.”
Control: Ultimate Edition is now available for PS5 and Xbox Series S and X, after an initial confusion about the next generation rescue transfers. The original version was our game of the year 2019 and our original review praised its “captivating and eccentric world”.
Rebekah Valentine is an IGN reporter. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.