Can you give me some examples of something that legitimately could not be done on the previous generation of consoles?
World and level design can fundamentally and radically change with new hardware. This is something specifically that Mark Cerny mentioned during the Road to PS5 lecture he gave earlier in the year. He said that even since the PS2 days, level and world design hasn't changed that much, and that developers still architect these worlds around the limitations of slow I/O.
Destiny 2 is a perfect modern example of this. Here's the map for the Earth / European Dead Zone -
Two things to notice -
- There are about 6 discrete play spaces, and they are fairly small.
- They are connected to one another by these long, winding, narrow "hallways".
Those empty narrow corridors exist to allow loading for the new play space that the player is entering. The play spaces on top of that are fairly small as well. You have a ton of dead space on this map, particularly in the middle. Nothing about this world design is because this is how Bungie wanted it to be, but rather how they had to design it based on the limitations of the hardware.
When I played through this planet when Destiny 2 released I didn't understand this convoluted design. I always wondered why Bungie didn't create a larger, more vast world without all of these weird hallways connecting these small play areas. Now I know why.
The PS5 and Series X completely remove this barrier. They allow for streaming of assets at a rate that's over 30x higher than the PS4 and Xbox One. With that kind of throughput, you don't have to rely on this design methodology anymore. You can create a massive open spaces with unique areas that literally would not be possible on older hardware.
Artificial Intelligence is another example. Enemy AI hasn't changed much in the past 10 years, and this is due to to the weak Jaguar CPU cores on the older consoles. So if you're an AI engineer writing code and developing new AI paradigms for an upcoming game, you have to write software that can be executed on those outdated cores. Conversely, if you're designing an AI system for just the new Zen 2 CPUs in the new consoles, you can create enemy AI that is far more complex, dynamic, and unpredictable.
The list goes on. These cross-gen games we're seeing now cut down on the loading times and bump up the resolution and framerate on the new consoles, but designing new games from the ground up for the newer hardware enables a vast array of new possibilities.
