Kojima Productions' chief technical officer Akio Sakamoto says the jump from PS4 to PS5 "isn't so great," but has at least made achieving design goals in Death Stranding 2 "more efficient."
Talking to Edge Magazine in its latest issue – on sale now, by the way – Sakamoto takes a question over what the team can achieve on PS5 that wasn't possible when PS4 was the lead format. The jump from PS1 to PS2 this is not, but the new hardware system certainly helps in making development easier.
"The most obvious improvement from a technological point of view is the reduction in loading times, but to be honest, the difference between the two hardware systems isn’t so great," he says. "It's more a case that on PS5 there are more efficient ways of arriving at similar goals.
"Having said that, our artists are less restrained to create the world, without having to come up with level workarounds. But of course this freedom has had knock-on effects, and technical challenges for the programmers. In some ways, it's created an environment where the artists are now out of control."
It's the sort of opinion we've heard increasingly lately. Just last year, former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden said that "you're not going to see another PS1 to PS2 jump in performance," and, in fact, we're likely nearing "a point where the console becomes irrelevant."
"We're at a point now where the innovation curve on the hardware is starting to plateau, or top out," Layden said at the time. "At the same time, the commoditization of the silicon means that when you open up an Xbox or PlayStation, it's really pretty much the same chipset. It's all built by AMD. Each company has its own OS and proprietary secret sauce, but in essence [it's the same]. I think we're pretty much close to [the] final spec for what a console could be."
Until then, though, there are still some wins to claim on the developmental side, which makes implementing new ideas in games like Death Stranding 2 all the easier, thankfully. We know Hideo Kojima's next game features a day and night cycle for one, and at one point was looking a bit too "Metal Gear-ish", according to some devs. With the release date coming on June 26, though, you'll see all of that for yourself soon enough.
