I guess they may not look as good as a PC of equal or higher spec to mine. But I really do expect to see new types of gameplay and levels. Unfortunately, a large amount of the population are on 32bit with less than 8GB of RAM. That means it's up to developers to decide if they want to take advantage of lots of ram and 64bit in terms of graphics. Hence we have scalable graphics options in PCs.
However, they can't make scalable level design and gameplay choices. The levels and gameplay have to be made to work on systems that meet the minimum requirements, which is always going to be 2GB ram and 32Bit. You can't do anything else, because most of the market wouldn't be able to play the game if you did.
With PS4, developers can design games with the guarantee that everyone has 64Bit OS with the same CPU, GPU, and importantly 8GB of super fast ram. Even if it is shared, thats still a helluva lot. The level design and gameplay choices that can be made when you can guarantee such things should in theory be better than what we have access too on PC.
Whether that is the case remains to be seen. But I certainly hope so.
I don't expect launch titles on either platform to be as good as you think. Halo 3 was better visually than Halo 2, but the Reach engine looks even better. It usually takes about a year worth of hands on development for devs to actually start getting the potential of the console hardware.
As soon as Unreal Engine 4 titles start releasing for PC which should be soon we will start seeing way better visuals for PC.
EA/Dice just needs to get over Frostbite 2 success and continue to develop cutting edge visuals to stay on level. That along with Cryengine 3 and UE4 will keep PC ahead.
Oh yea, not to mention PC is lead platform now due to the X86 architecture of the next gen consoles. Consoles getting the ports mean we get the better experience.
Though it is pretty much a PC, it's not going to take them as long as it did take them to get used to the 360 or PS3. A year is a pretty good estimate as you stated. Took PS3 devs 5x that.
Quite possible Sony deliberately restrict performance at the start. They did something similar with the PS3. With the continual improvement with regards to the O/S footprint being notable.
Case and point. PS4 already holds back graphical capabilities compared to a PC running current hardware.
See Unreal Engine 4 on PlayStation 4 • Articles • Eurogamer.net
Even though it's just shading it still proves that PC will still be more graphically capable than the consoles.
Probably right about graphics. Difference is all PS4 games will pretty much uni formally look excellent. We are privy to only 5 or 10 excellent looking non-ports on PC.
