Quantic Dream’s David Cage has said that PS3 exclusive Beyond, the follow-up to Heavy Rain, will stay exclusive – he has “no plan” to update it for the PS4, expected to release just months after the game.
Indeed, speaking with GameKult (and translated by GAF, here) Cage added that the studio discovered early on that what they “developed on PlayStation 4 would be useful for PlayStation 3”, suggesting quite the reverse.
“We started to develop on PlayStation 4 a number of ‘next-gen’ features,” he said, “and we were saying ‘we can’t do that on PS3’ but after thinking, it was doable for PlayStation 3, maybe not as well [as on PS4], as pretty or as finished as the PlayStation 4, but feasible.”
“Beyond’s engine was able to take advantage of this twofold development by getting a number of [next-gen] features,” Cage added.
“What we see of the PlayStation 4 is that it is so powerful, which allows us to do so many things, there will necessarily be an inflation of budgets,” he said with regards to costs of developing a next-gen game, something that’s sure to increase next-gen.
“We have to be able to anticipate, and this is not a bad thing, since we create experiences that have real value and affect a wider audience.”
“We will have to reach profitability with these higher budgets, but if we’re going to do amazing things with this next generation of consoles, I doubt we can do it with a PlayStation 3 [game] budget.”
The article also teases a multiplayer mode. Beyond is out this Autumn, only on PlayStation 3. For now.
XisTG
Well, I will buy this on PS3 for sure; even if they do eventually update it for the PS4, I won’t be buying the game twice :)
gaffers101
This and The Last of Us are the only 2 PS3 games on my radar before the PS4 launch. Until then I’ll be catching up on my PS+ back catalogue.
shields_t
Is that just like he had no plan to implement move for heavy rain before it came out?
KeRaSh
Multiplayer mode? I guess even David Cage can’t resist the MP hype…
yiddo
Am I being stupid here but why would game budgets increase?
Surely the amount of staff etc would stay the same, and now they have better tech available to them meaning they can use more of their talent and not be as limited. It may be a stupid question but I don’t understand why they CONSTANTLY go up.
KeRaSh
Same here. Someone (Ubisoft?) mentioned that next gen costs could go up by 10% but it wouldn’t be as significant as some devs want us to believe.
Sure at the start of a new generation it will be more difficult to develop because the tech and architecture is pretty new but after the initial push it should settle around the costs of the current generation.
bunimomike
Initially you have potential retraining costs or maybe taking on new folk who are accustomed to particular aspects of the new hardware that you didn’t need to cater for with the old kit.
Outside of that you’re also looking at the potential ramp-up in asset quality. Textures might be four times larger, for example. This means working on far bigger images in the likes of Photoshop which takes more time as you’re having to be more meticulous than ever before as well as the computer running more slowly because of the increased dimensions to said image. Now, multiply that by all of the graphics and sound a game might contain and, yeah, it really will bump things up a notch. However, if it goes up by 10% that’d be great as that’s a relatively low figure and efficient, ongoing development will surely bring that down in the long-run.
TSBonyman
I know they were talking about going multiplayer next-gen, what with the increased budget requirements and all, but mp in Beyond? I wasn’t expecting that but i’m still looking forward to the game.
Eldave0
At least he doesn’t intend to change it from a PS3 to PS4 game. That was my main concern.
The game itself looks great and I can see myself picking up Beyond and LoU around Xmas time after they have both seen a price drop or two.
quinkill
They don’t need to port to next gen. We’ll all be streaming the game via Gaikai anyways
Broonba
Really looking forward to this and LoU. Not sure about the MP though.