Multiplatform games will continue to aim for relative parity. If publishers aren't interested in it today, why would they be tomorrow? They don't have much to gain there - if anything they've got for differences in the past years it was bad press and fanboy rage.
And honestly, what's there to differentiate?
Adding more RAM is useless IMHO, it'll cause longer load times to fill up more space and noone's going to build more detailed assets for the first few years. Even today, 5 years into the current generation, only a few games do stuff like 1/2 res normal maps for the console versions compared to the PC.
CPU and GPU power? There's a sweet spot with transistor counts when you're planning 6 years down the road with multiple die shrinks and expected yields. Not much room to push more performance out of the similar die sizes. And once again, even if there's some advantage, it's either going to be completely unutilized, or most customers won't notice it anyway.
Wifi, optical/flash storage and other stuff are going to be pretty close as well. BR is a safe bet for PS4 and I don't see Microsoft going any other way either, digital distribution will be a more significant option but you need some kind of physical media and there really aren't better alternatives.
The hardware is going to be pretty close and everyone's going to play safe with it. Industrial espionage is advanced enough to have a good idea about the competition and the risks and costs of a significant advantage are just not worth it.
I'll repeat: investing in some other feature, either online or I/O or such, is offering far better returns for the money then more memory or faster processors.
Quite interesting.... Anyway, what I think Shifty meant is that while subsidizing superb powerful hardware won't be as popular as it was, there's a LOT of room for improvements.
I would be happy to see most games running at 60 fps, and 1080p -or close to it- resolutions with some anti-aliasing. 720p is also fine but it would need more AA.
With fabrication processes about 28nm and below it I don't see why next generation consoles can't be orders of magnitude more capable than current ones.
More RAM doesn't hurt also, for those companies interested in using it. If not for graphics, for better sound quality, more effects happening on the screen, etc. GT5 comes to mind.
Do you think 2GB would be just too much or more than enough?
Companies like Crytek think that current consoles are done, giving a clear signal to its respective designers to get ready for a different technology in a few years. I'm pretty happy with current gen consoles but I think by 2015 they will be well out of phase.
I'd like to see again, someday, a game positively surprising me like Oblivion did back in 2006.
I didn't think a game like that would be possible on consoles, but when I saw the fields, the tall green grass, the wood -filled with plenty of flowers and animals-, the villages and mountains in the distance covered with evergreens, and knowing that if you wanted to, you could get there, it was something really special. Even people who don't play many games except sports and stuff liked it.
I remember a guy telling me that the music and the game were beautiful, and my brother once told me: "Omg, that was pretty authentic" (after confronting a wolf that tried to kill my character in the mountains, he died and fallen down the mountain in a very realistic manner, because the game had great physics). Before that this wasn't possible.
It was like: "Wow, graphics like this can flash-freeze anything".
That wouldn't be possible on the GC, Xbox, PS2 generation. I don't expect that kind of jump this time around but some evolution is always nice.
I think it's about doing more things, not just more power not used smartly for the sake of it.
Oblivion did HDR+AA back in 2006, for instance, but it seems to me it never happened again since then. I love HDR but lately developers use other effects that don't allow GPUs combine HDR with other techniques.
Regarding faster processors, when next generation consoles are out -2014, 2015, hopefully- pretty decent processors will be cheap enough to be feasible.
Assen will have to develop his next gen game on a dual core Atom. And it better not look like crap! LOL!
XDDDD I can imagine making him sick and, as a developer, he would never touch such a product. But who knows, maybe he likes software rendering....
On a different not, a CPU well suited to consoles can be pretty interesting next gen. I remember
Carmack saying that software rendering is important in the future.
Keep searching is the motto, the right processor is somewhere out there.
. I tend to think the only reason anyone would or has charged for devkits is to keep inde devs from wasting their time--a paradigm which the console makers are gradually realizing is insane. I think Sony's only lately realized success with PhyreEngine will convince them to push it's successor out much earlier and more in the foreground. Ideally they could target all their HW platforms, PSP2 and PS phone(?) as well, although that might be unwieldy.