PS4 and Xbox One are going to be pretty much the same

 

Need For Speed: Rivals' creative director Craig Sullivan believes that Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will deliver "pretty much the same" visual experience, telling VideoGamer.com that it's difficult to determine whether one is more powerful than the other until "you're seeing the same game running on both systems".

"To be honest, I think they're going to be pretty much the same," said Sullivan, when asked whether the differences between Xbox One and PS4's specs will lead to one offering more advanced visuals than the other. "Nobody's played the same game on finished hardware yet, so you can't make a comparison.

"We will see," he continued. "I think it's all down to how the development teams use those systems. It's not necessarily about horsepower, it's about the game experience you want to create and how you best those systems. We will push them as far as we possibly can, but until you're seeing the same game running on both systems, who's to say? "Sullivan is currently leading development at Ghost Games on Need For Speed: Rivals, the first next-gen Need For Speed and the first game in the series to be built using Frostbite 3.

"We're going into a new generation of hardware... We'd be crazy not to harness the power of that stuff," he continues. "The game looks amazing. I think it's by far the best looking Need For Speed game ever. The cars look amazing."

Frostbite 3 allows Ghost's creative team to "get to really high quality stuff... way, way quicker," Sullivan adds. "Plus, Ghost is in Sweden. There's a lot of people working there from DICE, we're in the same country as DICE where Frostbite is made, so it's the natural thing to do, to use Frostbite 3."Need For Speed: Rivals launches on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on November 19, and is expected to be available at the launch of Xbox One and PS4. I went hands-on with the game at E3, and came away stupidly excited.

Microsoft's been the industry's punching bag over the last week, but beneath the used game debate, exhorbitant price tag and archaic attitude towards self-publishing, boutique studio Capybara (of Sword & Sworcery and Clash of Heroes fame) is working on one of more intriguing indie games on the horizon. Below was one of E3's most brilliant surprises, and to find out more I caught up with Capybara president Nathan Vella to outline this mysterious upcoming project.

Simply put, Below is an action roguelike. It's portrayed from a top-down perspective and features real-time combat, permadeath, and randomly generated locales. In keeping true to the best of the genre's entries like The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, Below will be hard. Very hard. But it'll also be fair.

 

"Below is our love-letter to rogue likes of yore, and to games that were about very difficult almost harsh combat that's very fair," explained Vella as we chatted about his game sitting in a carpeted hallway at E3's Los Angeles convention center. "Once you become familiar with the combat and the way that it works, anytime you die it will be be your fault, not the game's fault."

Harkening back to the old days, Below will offer new players no guidance whatsoever. "It's very much about exploration [and] aesthetics," Vella tells me. "There's no text in the game. There's no tutorials. There's no anything. There's no hand-holding. It's about learning in a lot of ways. It's about even exploring the combat system. I mean you're in the game exploring, but part of exploring is trying to figure out how to use your sword and your shield and your bow."

Microsoft apparently liked the idea so much that it supported Capybara through the development of its yet-to-be-released hardware. "That was quite early on. We'd been working on Xbox One for awhile and we've had access to some of the people putting some of the features in the system," Vella notes. "Having that kind of access is kind of awesome when you're making something that has certain components like multiplayer and some other fancy stuffs that we'll say is persistencey, but won't go into any detail on what that is. Having access to the people working on those features is a big win for developers."