In an excerpt from a yet-to-be published interview with Edge-Online, Splash Damage founder and Creative Director Paul Wedgwood has dropped a few interesting remarks on the competing claims of console and PC development.
Wedgwood drummed out the much-repeated line about the PlayStation 3 being tougher to develop for. "Coming from the background of a PC game developer, obviously the Xbox 360 is easier," he said. "If anything, the 360 is even easier than the PC because we don’t have to optimize the hardware parts for Intel, AMD, ATI and Nvidia."
"We just have this one platform and if it runs well, it runs well the next time you boot it, irrespective of which 360 you’re running it on. PS3, it’s more of a challenge."
To compensate for this, Splash Damage has apparently led development of its latest multiplatform projects on PS3, though Wedgwood commented that details of format support were still far from settled.
"Because we haven’t decided exactly which platforms our latest game is going to be on," he explained. "We took a pretty loose attitude towards development at the start of the year, and just said ”let’s have fun trying out development stuff." We knew that the PS3 would be more of a challenge, so that’s the one we got going with."
Wedgwood thinks console gamers are still crying out for the depth that only PC games can provide. "Arguably, and this is not to dismiss what people have achieved in the past, but Halo 3 multiplayer is really Quake 3 from 1999," he declared. "Even Call of Duty 4 is just Counter-Strike on the PC from 2001."
"So there’s an amazing amount of depth that could be present on consoles, but it isn’t there because real-time strategy games have never been successful on consoles, deep first-person shooters have never been on the consoles, and so on."
All of which does not, apparently, mean that Wedgwood thinks console gamers are thick. "I hate the notion that “softcore” people are stupid. What a ridiculous thing to say, that because someone has a console controller in their hand, they’re somehow less intelligent than a PC player. That really frustrates me."
There’s tons more through the link.