Kingdoms of Amalur Dev Would Love New Consoles, Still Likes Current Ones

A new generation of consoles, like the oft-rumored Xbox 720 or PlayStation 4, would be great, according to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning lead designer Ian Frazier. He also mentioned that, as a games developer, working with current devices, like the Xbox 360 or PS3, is great as there aren’t a lot of technical challenges.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was just released for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 earlier this week, in North America, and is getting ready for launch in Europe tomorrow, February 10.

Speaking with OXM, Ian Frazier said that he’s on both sides of the next generation console debate, as he’d love for new devices to appear, because he’s a hardcore gamer, but he’s content with current devices, as he likes making games on the PS3 or Xbox 360.

"As a player, I'd love another generation of Xbox, I feel like we've been pushing this technology for a really long time, and I'd love to jump to the next level, the Xbox 720 or whatever it ends up being," he said.

"As a developer? It's really nice having a stabilized platform. Especially with the Xbox, it's so solidified, people know it so well - it's just really, really easy to develop for at this point," he added.

Frazier then went on to say that, given the experience of the Amalur team on the PC, the Xbox 360 was much easier to develop for than the PlayStation 3. Given the fact that both consoles have already been released for quite some time, not a lot of problems were encountered.

"Our team was coming from a PC background, we had Settlers of Cataan on Xbox Live Arcade but that's it, that's the only previous console experience we had. Going to Sony platforms was a little bit tricky, Xbox was significantly easier, but across the board it was really nice going to platforms that were mature and stabilized.”

Plenty of other game developers and publishers, like Ubisoft or EA, are already looking forward to new consoles, although neither Microsoft nor Sony has confirmed anything about replacements for their current devices.