Loppuvuonna 2020 alkavan uuden konsolisukupolven tehoista on puhuttu paljon julkisuudessa. Yhteinen nimittäjä on, että ihmisten odotukset ovat korkealla. Kaikki eturivin kehittäjät eivät kuitenkaan ole varauksettoman innostuneita. Yksi heistä on Platinum Gamesin pomo Atsushi Inaba, jonka mukaan ei ehkä kannata odotaa liikoja.
VGC:lle puhunut Atsushi Inaba sanoi, ettei seuraava konsolisukupolvi tule olemaan iso hyppäys niin kuin wanhoina hyvinä aikoina. Luvassa ei ole suuria yllätyksiä tai odottamatonta laatua ("extreme surprise or the unexpected quality").
"If you think back to the generation between Super Nintendo and PlayStation, and how we went from pixel art to 3D polygons... nobody could have ever imagined that a few years prior. When that stuff started coming out people were just blown away: they weren't ready for it, they weren't anticipating it... it was just so new.
Whereas I feel that the announcements that we've had for recent consoles generations, while all good and interesting, and of course I'm happy for us as developers to have better technology to work on... it's a 'perceivable' future. There's not the extreme surprise or the unexpected quality that I felt from the leap to previous consoles. Now I see the announcements and I think, 'oh, that's cool' and then the next minute I think, 'hmmm... what should I watch on Netflix tonight?'"
Toisaalta Inaba on sitä mieltä, että yllätyksiä on silti luvassa. Hän mainitsee Nintendo Switchin yhdeksi viime vuosien suureksi yllätykseksi. Raa'an tehon sijasta Switch tarjosi jotain aivan uutta pelien pelaamiseen, ja juuri tätä "uutta" ei Playstation 5:llä ja Xbox Series X:llä ole tarjota.
"As an industry, it's all very promising and I don't want to be perceived as too negative. But to give another example of my point, the Nintendo Switch was very ground-breaking in how it was able to just to take a home console and make it portable. It's something that you hadn't seen a lot of people doing before: it took this wall, that perhaps a lot of people didn't know even existed, and broke it down.
Switch opened up all these new possibilities. I think the Game Boy and the DS also did that: there were so many surprises in those. If you compare that to when you're simply seeing graphical improvements or just 'faster, bigger'... obviously it's nice, but it doesn't have that same inventive quality that really surprised me with past consoles."
Aika siis näyttää, miten suuren vaikutuksen Playstation 5 ja Xbox Series X lopulta tekevät. Toisaalta kaikki eivät välttämättä edes halua jotain uutta ja outoa, vaan enemmänkin tuttua ja turvallista, mutta entistäkin sujuvammassa ja kauniimmassa muodossa.