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PS4 ‘more complicated’ to develop for than Xbox One says Witcher dev

With the Xbox One and PS4 both now on sale in the UK, the next-gen gaming battle is truly on, with one industry expert suggesting Microsoft might have the edge, in a development sense at least.

According to a CD Projekt Red developer working with both next-gen consoles, the PS4 is ‘more complicated’ to develop for than the rival Xbox One.

“The Xbox One is pretty easy to understand because it’s not just the hardware [that] is similar to the PC,” Balazs Torok, Lead Engine Programmer on the next-gen bound Witcher 3 told Eurogamer. He added: “Everything like the SDK, the API is really similar to what you would find on a PC.”

Looking across to Sony’s newly launched next-gen gamer, the dev stated: “On PS4 this is a little bit more complicated.”

Expanding on the challenges of working for PS4, he added: “On the PS4 it’s very good to have the fast memory. Everyone is really happy about that – but the problem is the game has to function on everything.”

Torok stated: “We are not holding it back, it’s just we are not at the stage right now to go in and optimise 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 optimise, optimise, optimise.”

Although it has been suggested that the PS4 has a power advantage over its leading rival, Torok has claimed that this is not the case.

“I don’t see a major power difference,” he said. “The memory is very different but pure computation power, if you just measure that, there’s no major difference.”

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Xbox One vs PS4

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