Jump to next-gen has ‘quadrupled’ development requirements

Making a next-gen console time takes four times the development resources than a current-gen game, Sony studio Guerrilla has claimed.

The common perception is that the PS4 and Xbox One’s PC-like architecture has simplified games development. Not so, according to Killzone: Shadow Fall’s lead designer Eric Boltjes.

It’s also a lot more demanding, because the production effort needed just to make a next-gen title now is not doubled – it’s quadrupled,” he told VG247. That’s because everything needs to look that much better. It takes a lot more people, and that takes a lot more communication.

So it does it make things a lot more easier from a technical standpoint, but from a professional standpoint it makes things a lot harder. The really scary part is, all the tools and all the stuff we developed previously had to go out of the window. We had to re-do everything.

We had the engine that we were rebuilding to fit next-gen – you know, the new architecture all that sort of stuff – all the assets had to be re-done, weapons had to be re-done and the animation systems had to be rebuilt. It was a lot like leaving your save data for something new and scary.”

As a studio that has worked exclusively on PS3 for many years, it’s of course possible that Guerrilla’s experience is somewhat different to those who have been developing multiformat titles.