I hope that the PS4 gets as big as the PS2, forcing third party devs to develop exclusively for Sony.
That's not even necessary, XB1 owners can have the games too, it's just that equal allocation of time and resources should be a priority. Some current development results even suggest that PS4 don't even get a valid fraction of development, much less than the XB1 in some instances, which is when we get something like RE-R2 (same resolution worse performance). So yes, something is awry here with some of the current development paradigms.
There are many factors to consider though, a valid solution would be to develop on the best hardware and have that running as best as you can, then scale down on lower end hardware within acceptable performance parameters, but clearly that's not happening in many scenarios. PS4 seems to be eeking out as the best platform just by bruteforce in many side by side cases, we hardly see a tangible difference in asset detail in many scenarios just the standard resolution and framerate advantages on PS4, with the occasional AO/AF/AA uptick every now and then.
Clearly there are always devs which do more than others and have a good development plan for all platforms which they engage, Rocksteady did an excellent job on each piece of hardware, AK looked great on both systems with highly detailed assets with performances and rez differences to highlight hardware differences, perhaps hindered by UE3 and it's high CPU utilization, but through that you could see a dev worth it's salt on the multiplat dev turf. 4A is another.......
I feel somehow that there are too many misc elements and deals which affect current multiplat results or even development; marketing deals are one, it's money on the table or money the dev or publisher won't have to spend directly, so they give a bit more love with the contracted party or make sure that nob gets due attention or is slobbered adequately. It's not as black and white as some people will have you believe, that's why when that Ubisoft guy said their policy "was to avoid debates and stuff", I'm glad that that came out the way it did, because too many are quick to call persons conspiracy theorists...lacing the dev world as all hardworking people, or "they did the best they could" as a response to mediocre or "not good enough results"....Well I'll tell you this, "everybody is hardworking and every development process was veritably fulfilled" is hardly the case in many many many projects across many industries, gaming development is certainly not the outlier.
In any case, there are too many reasons why we get the results we do with released games, especially when they're inconsistent and blatant as opposed to prevailing efforts, we should call for better relations between producer and devs. Quality assurance should also be inclusive of devs using the best of the hardware they have and meeting standards relative to each piece of hardware in development, yes PS4, XB1 Wii, no piece of hardware should be gimped with a generalized approach.
The way I see it, it seems only games developed separately or through good technical studios gets good results on all systems. I'm looking at ROTR and I wish it was Nixxes handling development of that over CD, they have always done better than CD at their own game (technically). So I have no doubt they would make a better port of ROTR on PS4. I also look at SF5 and Tekken 7 and ask if these games were on all platforms would they look as good, T7 especially, the answer may be no and that's a revelation since that fits well with your sentiment on the issue, but I still maintain that all persons can enjoy the games, don't give me a generalized console effort, give me a quality PS4 release, a quality XB1 release a quality Wii release commensurate with what their specs can achieve. Current development paradigms have to be changed and bolstered for the better.
We are long past the days when it was anywhere near feasible for developers, and well, it hasn't been worth the resource investment on doing per console asset levels (in clear terms, putting tons of env. artist tech and QA resources for 1/3 audience vs. using it to create content for the whole audience. Not to mention that it doesn't matter for >95% of the audience). There are of course ways of automating this and using the lodX/HQ/PC models/textures, but even then it generally isn't worth the effort. The rising budgets are already hindering games and teams massively, and for the sake of actually keeping the industry of healthy, it's better if developers would rather try to scale down (which they, in some ways are). It used to make sense when games weren't as complex, hardware/software-side varied a lot between consoles, and the teams much smaller, but again, it's completely unrealistic for today's challenges on the development side (especially when the bulk of it just scrambling to make games technically feasible at all, and make the experience smooth for the majority of users, which as this generation has proven, is a challenge in itself).
Aren't there more middleware programs available now than anytime before, pre fab assets (art, gpu rendering tech) that makes the life of devs much easier than it's ever been. I keep hearing of how hard things are, mostly budgetary/financial, but there have been a lot of improvements to how quickly a game can me made in 2016 too. I'm talking both time-wise and finance-related.
I remember a time when devs had to spend eternal hours making sound assets, art development assumed a mortar and pestle type approach, coding was certainly more janky with crap compilers and syntax hell. With all of these high level OOL's of today, I think we've come a long way with how easier things are...... Imagine a current gen (new age) dev having to write an entire language (GOOL), or developing their own engine from scratch as well, yes, things are much easier now in many instances....
Talking about QA, with big budget games like Unity, Fallout4, is that the right approach? Lots of money, more bugs, worse performance, more useless jank. QA? What does that even mean in 2016......I've seen many lower budgeted games with much more polish and quality than many big budget AAA games.........I'm talking about visuals and performance. Too much money wasted on snoop dogg features, marketing gimmicks, QA that fail and fail. You have to admit a lot of AAA games budgets are wasted.
