How We Approach Console Development

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Pathological wrote:

The cynic in me says the performance improvements should have been prioritised regardless of the port version, and assigning their value to the port's existence is porky at best.

You say you don't want to jump down a rabbit hole, but you're already looking at it in the rear view mirror. PoE's major draws are difficulty and depth of mechanics. The former is a moving target, the latter is getting watered down more and more as time goes on. You say console and pc will be developed separately, but that simply isn't the case. You aren't going to completely alter mechanics to function entirely differently from one version to the other, and you aren't going to spend time developing new mechanics that don't function well on the console version, which means that the game will have a glass ceiling in this area.

Unless the two games are literally divergent from each other, with different design teams and completely separate skills and back-end mechanics, console is already affecting PC as we speak, because there are choices that you need to make that you cannot make with a console version in the wings. Its existence snuffs out all hope of certain changes being made that many were hopeful would eventually come.

Can only hope to be wrong, but history from other game(s) show us the reality.

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We hired new team members specifically for the the console project. They were directly responsible for the massive improvements to frame rate, client load times, memory use, as well as the introduction of the 64-bit client, DirectX 11 renderer and new audio system. These changes were immediately released to the PC version as soon as they were available. Even if you're not a console gamer, this project improved the game for you.

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We haven't modified the game content on the PC version due to any console decisions.

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Pathological wrote:

The cynic in me says the performance improvements should have been prioritised regardless of the port version, and assigning their value to the port's existence is porky at best.

You say you don't want to jump down a rabbit hole, but you're already looking at it in the rear view mirror. PoE's major draws are difficulty and depth of mechanics. The former is a moving target, the latter is getting watered down more and more as time goes on. You say console and pc will be developed separately, but that simply isn't the case. You aren't going to completely alter mechanics to function entirely differently from one version to the other, and you aren't going to spend time developing new mechanics that don't function well on the console version, which means that the game will have a glass ceiling in this area.

Unless the two games are literally divergent from each other, with different design teams and completely separate skills and back-end mechanics, console is already affecting PC as we speak, because there are choices that you need to make that you cannot make with a console version in the wings. Its existence snuffs out all hope of certain changes being made that many were hopeful would eventually come.

Can only hope to be wrong, but history from other game(s) show us the reality.

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Why?

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Honestly, I'm confused.