8GB of RAM a “joy” to next-gen developers

Sony upped the ante for the next-generation of consoles when it announced last month that it's PlayStation 4 would come equipped with a whopping 8GB of RAM – more than most gaming PCs – and developers are more than a little pleased.

Speaking about it with Eurogamer, is Dishonored's lead level designer, Christophe Carrier: “As a level designer we are struggling against memory every day. We cut things, we remove things, we strip things, we split the levels, we remove NPCs from levels because there's not enough memory.”

“So knowing that memory is something that is going to be improved in the next generation of consoles: to us, it's a joy. It's something that we were waiting for. We were PC gamers at the beginning. We love PC games, and we had to make games on consoles. But the main problem was memory. The processors are good, but the memory, for our games, is the most important. So it's great.”

In comparison with Sony's next-gen offering, the Xbox 360 and PS3 have 512MB a piece and in the former's case, it was going to be 256MB until Epic Games convinced Microsoft to up it to 512MB so that Gears of War could be made for it.

When asked about the future of the studio – Arkane – Carrier spoke a little about keeping grounded after all the praise of the original Dihonoured.

“We will try to stick to our culture, we will try to stick to our values, creating a fairly small team compared to the others in the industry, and keep all our values around fashion, game design, art,” he said.

“That's the future of Arkane. We make games because we like games; we want to make games we want to play. We will always do that. We're not going to change our philosophy or the way we make games. I'm not saying we're going to – we're not going to make the same game over and over, but we're going to stick to our passion. That's something that kept us going so. I think that's our strength.”

KitGuru Says: 8GB is a nice chunk for sure, but I guarantee in two years time when we're all rocking 16GB because it's cheap as anything, we'll see consoles as obsolete once again.

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