Every day that passes brings more grey hairs to the current-generation of consoles, and they certainly aren't getting any younger. You could probably argue that a new PlayStation and Xbox console should have already been released, but you might be surprised what developers think.
Vigil Games Lead Designer Haydn Dalton was asked by Brutal Gamer what he thinks about the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 lifespans after finishing development of Darksiders II, to which he responded:
I think there’s more than enough life in the current-gen consoles. [Developers] are really harnessing the technology and pushing it further each year.
Sure, developers are going to push aged hardware to the limit… because they have to. I'm sure it's comfortable to keep working with the same toolset, but sometimes progression is more important. There's nothing new to raise the ceiling, and the potential for new experiences is stunted by hardware that came out before Bob Barker hosted his last episode of The Price is Right.
When I look at the image above of Darksiders II, I think of the visuals the same way I saw games PlayStation 2 graphics back in 2006. Sure, it looks good, but it could be better. New hardware with more than 512MB of RAM and faster processing power would quickly remind us why we were so excited when we got our first PlayStation, Nintendo 64, or PlayStation 2. There's a whole world out there waiting to be explored.
