Developing a single game on different generations of platforms isn’t easy. Thought has to be put in keeping the project tame enough to run on a PS3 or Xbox 360, as well as making the title actually look new on fresh hardware. Sylvain Trottier, associate producer on Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, recently spoke to Edge Magazine about this balancing act, claiming that the initial goal was to end up with two games that weren’t all that different.
“For us, it was super important that we didn’t want to end up with two different games. If you go with a next-gen and a current-gen team, chances are that over time the two games will split and they will become very different,” Trottier said. “It was part of the creative vision to say that we want the same game on all platforms with no gameplay difference and stuff like that.
“Starting there we said, “OK, where and how can we use the additional power of the CPU, GPU and memory so it looks different?” We came up with something we called ‘the grandma test.’ The idea was, if I put the PS3 version and the PS4 version on two TV sets one next to the other, I want a grandma to be able to tell me, ‘This is the new version.’ We wanted somebody somewhere to say, ‘This is next gen.’”
Games like Call of Duty: Ghosts, Madden 25, and Battlefield 4 have all followed similar blueprints – creating experiences on PS4 and Xbox One that are little more than prettier versions of what we’ve seen in the past. It’s what we should expect early on, but look for more third-party games to make use of the more powerful hardware in the coming years.
