 Playstation 4 and Xbox One will hit the stores in two months, which brings the question how the games will look like on the new platforms. Especially with cross-platform titles it looks convenient to take a current-gen game, scale it up and throw it on the market as a next-gen game.
In an interview with  MCV UK Patrick Söderlund, EA Games label boss, talks about next-gen consoles and assures, that Need for Speed Rivals and Battlefield 4 are being developed for the upcoming consoles and downscaled to run on current-gen hardware.
Excerpt:
Do you worry that as most of your games are on both current and next-gen, and because of games like GTA?V, that players might delay buying the new consoles?
If you look at GTA V – which looks crazy, I can’t wait to play it – and when you look at GTA?IV, the difference between the two is significant. I don’t expect the difference between what launches on PS4 today and what launches at the end tail of that to be quite that dramatic, but I still think it will be dramatic. Battlefield 4 and Need for Speed this year were built from the ground-up on next gen, and scaled back for current consoles. Rather than making a current gen game and scaling it up, we went the other way around.
Developers are smart, they figure out ways to get more out of the boxes. That will happen. For next year’s games, I am already seeing games doing things we were not able to do on the ones coming this year. That will be an industry-wide thing.
But when you get your hands on Battlefield 4, 64-players, 60 frames per second, with the fidelity you have on next-gen consoles, versus the 360 or PS3 version, the difference there is significant. We are for the first time offering 64-players, that’s 40 more than before, that makes the game significantly different. On top of that, doubling the frame rate and improving the graphics creates a better feel. That’s just simple stuff, but that makes a big difference. One that’s significant enough to make people say: “I’ve got to have that.”
Need for Speed games have been inconsistent in quality. The games made by UK studio Criterion have been great, but the others have been a mixed bag. Is that why you set up this new Need for Speed developer Ghost Games?
Ghost in Gothanberg was created with not just Need for Speed, but driving games in mind. There’s a lot of car nuts there, a lot of people who have built racing games in the past. And I’m surprised at how quickly they have established themselves. We have taken some senior people, Craig Sullivan from Criterion has moved to Gothenberg, Jamie Keen who was a key design person on Far Cry 3 has moved there. We have assembled an experienced team, with some former DICE employees, as well.
But if I tell a studio that they are going to make a Need for Speed game every year for the foreseeable future, that might seem daunting. People need breathing room. I don’t believe you can make a great game in eight months. You have to give enough time to people to be creative and express themselves. We have always had two teams working on Need for Speed. So it was a natural step to start a new studio.
We looked all over the world. We looked at the UK. But it boiled down to Gothenberg strangely enough, and it seems to be the right choice.
You can find the complete interview here:
 Interview with Patrick Söderlund @ MCV UK
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