Ben-DutkaOver the past few months, with all the rumors circulating about the next generation of consoles, developers and publishers have weighed in with their thoughts. For the most part, game creators and producers are content with what we have.
But one major publisher has made it plain that we definitely need new machines. Another Ubisoft executive – this time it's executive director of production services, Yves Jacquier – has once again asked for Sony and Microsoft to deliver new game consoles . He says his company wants them "sooner rather than later" and right now, their development feels "extremely limited." He says Ubisoft specifically wants more power for better AI, not necessarily for prettier and/or more realistic graphics:
"Our challenge with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox [360] is that we're extremely limited in what we can do. It's a challenge for the engineers to provide nice graphics and nice AI and nice sound with a very small amount of memory and computation time. We think that the next generation of consoles won't have these limits any more."
Well, that makes some sense, but we wonder why no other publisher has made similar statements. Obviously, AI is a major factor and we have seen increases in enemy intelligence this generation. But Ubisoft obviously isn't content with those advances; they want more, and apparently, they need more powerful machines to grant them access to "next-gen" smarts.