A Way Out creator compares consoles to old PCs, says most of the work is getting games to run on them

A Way Out was one of the most pleasant surprises of E3 2017 - a completely co-op game about prison inmates with the cinematic stylings of Uncharted made by the creator of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - what's not to like? And it looks fabulous too. But according to director Josef Fares, the development process has not been what it could be.

"You want the honest truth? This machine is not so strong as you think," Fares told Engadget, pointing to a PS4 running the game. "This is like a five-year-old PC. If consoles were as powerful as PCs are today, you would see all different games. Most of the work developers put out there is to make them work on consoles."

Considering the fact that the PS4 and Xbox One are almost four years old at this point, that's not a huge knock against Sony and Microsoft's systems, but Fares' point stands: technology is advancing rapidly, and while consoles are easier and cheaper than keeping a PC up to date with the latest hardware, they also have a tendency to fall behind.

Still, Fares said that doesn't hold him or his team back. And it's not like Fares is basing his designs around the processing speeds of a GPU. "All decisions that are made on A Way Out are based on the heart," Fares said. "Even if someone tells me, like, 'If you do this you will sell 1 million copies more,' my answer is 'Fuck you.' Look at me, I don't have scripts and nobody tells me what to say. I say what I want to say. Passion is what drives this."

Sam Prell

Sam is a former News Editor here at GamesRadar. His expert words have appeared on many of the web's well-known gaming sites, including Joystiq, Penny Arcade, Destructoid, and G4 Media, among others. Sam has a serious soft spot for MOBAs, MMOs, and emo music. Forever a farm boy, forever a '90s kid.