The next-gen consoles are great but the Xbox One is easier to develop for

Nov 30, 2013 02:01 GMT  ·  By

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt developer CD Projekt Red believes that both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One next-gen consoles are evenly matched in terms of power, although the Xbox One is a bit simpler to understand thanks to its PC-like technologies and features.

CD Projekt Red has a reputation of pushing platforms to their limits, after already delivering the stunning The Witcher 2 onto PC and then on Xbox 360.

Currently, the Polish studio is working hard on The Witcher 3, which will debut for the PC, as well as for the PS4 and Xbox One next-gen consoles.

The studio's Lead Engine Programmer Balazs Torok has talked about the new platforms with Eurogamer and confirmed that, while the PS4 has the faster GDDR5 memory, both consoles are evenly matched.

"On the PS4 it's very good to have the fast memory," he said, "everyone is really happy about that - but the problem is the game has to function on everything. It's just we are not at the stage right now to go in and optimize on each platform specifically. We want to make the game and the whole engine run on everything, with all the features and bells and whistles, and then just optimize."

"I don't see a major power difference. The memory is very different but I already said that before. Pure computation power, if you just measure that, there's no major difference."

What’s more, Torok also revealed that, thanks to Microsoft's different technologies that were carried over from the PC, it's quite easy to bring a game onto the Xbox One.

"The Xbox One is pretty easy to understand because not just the hardware is similar to the PC, but everything like the SDK, the API is really similar to what you would find on a PC. On PS4 this is a little bit more complicated, but I personally worked on PS3 before."

Both the PS4 and the Xbox One use a PC-like system architecture which has already been praised by plenty of developers.