It's not too often that you'll hear game developers talk trash about the platforms they're working on. But Josef Fares, whose Hazelight studio is currently developing the co-op prison escape game A Way Out, had some harsh words about the PlayStation 4 console in an interview with Engadget.
"You want the honest truth? This machine is not so strong as you think," Fares said. "This is like a five-year-old PC. If consoles were as powerful as PCs are today, you would see all different games. Most of the work developers put out there is to make them work on consoles."
To be fair to Sony, the PS4 basically is a five-year-old PC: It was announced in early 2013 and released in November of the same year. But the basic design spec, including an eight-core 1.6GHz AMD Jaguar-based CPU, 8GB of RAM, and Radeon GCN-based GPU, would obviously be even older than that. The PS4 Pro brings a little more gun to the fight, but games have to run on the base model of the machine. And if developers are feeling these limitations now, imagine what it will be like two or three years down the road.
Despite Fares' headaches, A Way Out was easily one of the more interesting games we saw during E3: It's narrative-driven, but is exclusively two-player co-op—no single-player option is available—with split-screen play, even if you're connected online.
