Chris Roberts says current-gen consoles just don’t have the sand to deliver a proper Star Citizen experience.
Chris Roberts has been an enthusiastic and unapologetic cheerleader of PC gaming since his recent return to the business with Star Citizen, but there’s more than just nostalgia for the glory days of Wing Commander and Privateer at work. There’s a practical aspect to it as well, specifically that current-gen consoles aren’t powerful enough to do what Roberts is doing. Powered by the CryEngine 3, he claimed Star Citizen will offer realistic physics and graphics with “ten times the details of current AAA games.”
“You can’t do that much with 512MB [of RAM on a console], so that constrains a lot of your game design. If I’m building a PC game, I’m going ‘Yeah, you need 4GB on your machine’,” he told Ars Technica. “Of course you’re not going to get all 4GB because Windows is a hungry beast, but you’re getting a lot more than 512MB so it kinds of open up what you can do, what you can fit in memory at the same time, and it changes your level of ambition.”
“You can do most of it on a next generation console, but I can promise you a top-end PC now is already more powerful than what a next generation console is going to be,” he added. And, he pointed out, when Star Citizen comes out in two years the high-end gaming rig of today will be a middle-of-the-road setup.
“I have an iPhone and I can watch The Dark Knight Rises on it, but I don’t want to watch The Dark Knight Rises on my iPhone – I want to see it in IMAX on a big screen, and I’m willing to spend $18 to see it on the big screen in IMAX versus downloading it for a couple of dollars on my iPhone,” he said. “I definitely think there’s a PC gaming audience like that.”
Source: Ars Technica
