There has been a lot of talk about hardware power, ray-tracing, sound chips and SSD's when it comes to the next generation, and people have high expectations. But according to one of the founders of PlatinumGames, (who is also the Studio Head) Atsushi Inaba, we might be better off not expecting so much.
In an interview with VGC, he says that the next generation will not be as big a step as the generation leaps before it and that the next-generation hardware does not offer the "extreme surprise or the unexpected quality":
"If you think back to the generation between Super Nintendo and PlayStation, and how we went from pixel art to 3D polygons... nobody could have ever imagined that a few years prior. When that stuff started coming out people were just blown away: they weren't ready for it, they weren't anticipating it... it was just so new.
Whereas I feel that the announcements that we've had for recent consoles generations, while all good and interesting, and of course I'm happy for us as developers to have better technology to work on... it's a 'perceivable' future. There's not the extreme surprise or the unexpected quality that I felt from the leap to previous consoles. Now I see the announcements and I think, 'oh, that's cool' and then the next minute I think, 'hmmm... what should I watch on Netflix tonight?'"
This doesn't mean that Inaba doesn't think there are surprises to come. Quite the opposite, and he thinks Nintendo offered a big one with the Switch, and also Nintendo DS. Instead of groundbreaking power, the Switch has exciting features he hadn't seen before, and this is something Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X does not have:
"As an industry, it's all very promising and I don't want to be perceived as too negative. But to give another example of my point, the Nintendo Switch was very ground-breaking in how it was able to just to take a home console and make it portable. It's something that you hadn't seen a lot of people doing before: it took this wall, that perhaps a lot of people didn't know even existed, and broke it down.
Switch opened up all these new possibilities. I think the Game Boy and the DS also did that: there were so many surprises in those. If you compare that to when you're simply seeing graphical improvements or just 'faster, bigger'... obviously it's nice, but it doesn't have that same inventive quality that really surprised me with past consoles."
We'll see how surprised we will be when Sony and Microsoft reveal their upcoming consoles, likely next month (confirmed for Microsoft and heavily rumoured for Sony). Do you think what they have to show will blow you away out of excitement?