It seems that Control’s cross-gen development wasn’t easy on its development team, Remedy Entertainment, according to Thomas Puha, the company's communications director. His most recent point of reference is Control, the studio’s 2019 title that received a PS5 and Xbox Series X/S release on February 2, 2021 in the form of Control: Ultimate Edition. The studio is also working on CrossfireX, a first-person shooter set to release later this year on both Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. The ability to play yesterday's games on today's consoles is a big issue in the industry, and a lot of aging games have made their way to modern hardware via backward compatibility and new editions. Control and Remedy Entertainment bridged the generations via the latter.
The industry has been blown away by Control’s ability to tell an engaging narrative through environmental storytelling while incorporating thoughtful, engaging, and exciting third-person shooting mechanics. Control went on to tie Death Stranding for the most nominations in the 2020 D.I.C.E. Awards with eight. It later won four of those awards, making it the highest-awarded game in the show. It’s also received well over 50 other nominations and awards, including a nomination for Game of the Year and a win for Best Art Direction at The Game Awards 2019.
However, a game of such critical acclaim like Control doesn’t come from thin air, and developing such a game for the next generation of consoles isn’t a walk in the park either. On IGN’s Next-Gen Console Watch, Puha outlined the struggles of developing cross-gen games and the impracticality of it. When bringing a last-gen game to the new generation, Puha describes the expectation and importance of having things such as 60 FPS and ray tracing, but “before we even can get to that… our platform engineering team needs to ensure that all the features, that there’s parity…” Furthermore, it’s extremely common for the basic components of a game to break when shifting to development for the next generation. When initially developing on a new engine, “Nothing works at first. The content looks wrong, the textures look wrong, the lighting is busted because we've made all these improvements but then they're incompatible with what we had in 2019.”
It's also important to keep in mind that Remedy (just like any other game development studio) is a growing, breathing company. While working on the switch to the next generation is difficult enough, it also pulls resources from new projects that Remedy is working on. A team can keep hitting a game with more features, “but then you’re already screwing the next project that is expecting to get these developers to work on that game,” says Puha.
As it is, Remedy is already planning several future games that are set in the same universe as Control. These are some of the big reasons that “Whenever you’re in this cross-generational point, to be blunt, it sucks.” Puha’s statements put into perspective why delivering a last-gen game to a next-gen console can so often yield hefty delays and unexpected results. They can further relate to the similar struggle of developing for console and PC simultaneously. Thankfully, when given the right attention and management, the process can be worth the wait.
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