Metro 2033 creator 4A Games now working on open-world game

4A Games chief technical officer Oles Shishkovstov recently revealed that, with the release of Metro Redux still in the rear-view mirror, the developer has moved on from the Metro series onto “a more sand-box style experience.”

“For the game we are working on now, our designers have shifted to a more sand-box-style experience — less linear but still hugely story-driven,” Shishkovstov said in an interview with Eurogamer, during which he also discusses the nuances of new-gen development with regards to differences between PS4 and Xbox One.

“PS4 is just a bit more powerful. I’ve seen a lot of cases while profiling Xbox One when the GPU could perform fast enough but only when the CPU is basically idle. Unfortunately I’ve even seen the other way round, when the CPU does perform as expected but only under idle GPU, even if it is supposed to get prioritized memory access.

“That is why Microsoft’s decision to boost the clocks just before the launch was a sensible thing to do with the design set in stone,” he added. However, although gaps between hardware do influence the output of a game, Shishkovstov does not believe the experience itself is affected as radically.

“Counting pixel output probably isn’t the best way to measure the difference between [PS4 and Xbox One] though. There are plenty of other [and more important factors] that affect image quality besides resolution.

“We may push 40 percent more pixels per frame on PS4, but it’s not 40 percent better as a result … your own eyes can tell you that.”

[Eurogamer]