Remedy’s Control was recently updated to take advantage of next generation consoles and in a video interview on the IGN channel on YouTube, Communications Director Thomas Puha addressed a number of related issues, starting with the optimization issues for the latest machine lower generation, the Xbox Series S.
Xbox Series S, well, it is no different from previous generations, where the system with the lowest specifications ends up dictating some of the things that you will do, because you will have to run on that system, right? It’s very easy to say that you just decrease the resolution and texture quality and that’s it, it’s not nearly that simple.
It looks good when you say that, but each engine is built differently. Another thing is when players can be like, ‘This game engine does all these things!’, Well, it depends. Are you creating a mechanism that is much more limited by the GPU or the CPU? What are you charging a lot more for? Well, we kind of overwhelm both of you at Control because we have a lot of physics, but we also have a lot of ray tracing effects. That makes a huge, huge difference, especially on the Xbox Series S.
Puha went on to say that it should be easier to take the Xbox Series S into account when making a brand new game with that hardware in mind, compared to optimizing an older game like Control. Remedy CM also admitted that the lowest entry barrier afforded by the cheapest console is in fact appreciated by the studio, although it has reminded everyone that having more platforms makes the whole process more complex for development teams less than huge like from Remedy, as it only requires more resources to optimize all systems.
It is much more difficult to design an old game to ensure that it works on everything, but now that we are building future games and we know that these are the systems on which it should run, we take this into account from day one and we can guarantee that all platforms have the best experience possible.
We recognize that there is a lower entry barrier to an action experience with the Xbox Series S, but the more hardware you have, the more you need to compromise a little when it’s like a smaller studio like us, where we just can’t spend as much time certifying make sure that all of these platforms are very good. Of course, we need to do this, but there is only one difference in doing this because it requires a lot of resources, not just engineering, but QA, the huge QA overhead to test so many different platforms.
In news related to Remedy, the Finnish game developer raised € 41.5 million by issuing new shares. The studio is working on two games that will be published by Epic, in addition to a self-published multiplayer project Vanguard, which aims to solve the recurring problem of content in cooperative titles.