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Developing games for the PS4 and Xbox One requires ten times more work than creating titles for the last generation of consoles, a senior Capcom developer has claimed.
Senior manager of technology management Masaru Ijuin said the new generation of consoles required the Resident Evil publisher to develop its new Panta Rhei engine to power its future titles and to cope with "increasingly complex hardware".
He added that Capcom considered upgrading its existing MT Framework, but wanted to further reduce iteration time. He claimed that the new game engine delivered a tenfold increase in the amount of work its developers can do, reducing iteration time from ten minutes to one minute.
The Panta Rhei engine will not be used for any titles on PS3 and XBox 360, while the MT Framework will also continue to be used on mobile projects.
"At Capcom we have been using our original development engine, which is called ‘MT Framework’, to make games and improve the efficiency and quality of development," said Ijuin.
"However, we have run into some problems and limitations while using this framework. Looking ahead to the development of games for next-gen consoles, we felt we needed to completely overhaul the development environment to better cope with the increasingly complex hardware. That’s pretty much why we started developing this new engine.
"Don’t get me wrong. We believe ‘MT Framework’ is a powerful rendering engine. But it’s clear that heightened game quality leads to a rise in the number of man hours. The amount of work involved in making games for next-gen consoles is eight to ten times greater than what is required for the current generation of consoles."
Ijuin also said that the architecture behind the PS4 and Xbox One had drastically redefined the way games are rendered, and conventional theories for developing titles would no longer work.
"If we create games the same way as before, we won’t be able to give our fans what they want, and that’s games unlike any they have ever played," he said.
"We think we should view this new hardware as an opportunity to tackle new challenges."
The first title to use the Panta Rhei game engine will be the upcoming free-to-play fantasy RPG Deep Down.
