An impressive selection of game developers has spoken to IGN about the next-generations of consoles, with a specific focus on how this new era of gaming hardware will improve the visuals that studios are able to produce.
Of particular interest to fans of the zombie-adjacent game The Last Of Us will be the quotes from Bruce Stanley that are used in the article. Stanley previously worked as a creative director at Naughty Dog and was heavily involved in the making of The Last Of Us.
Reacting to the announcement that the Xbox Series X will have 12 teraflops of GPU power, Stanley delved into the specific things that will be easier to produce with next-gen hardware. There are some specific areas of graphics that will improve.
“Smoke, water, wind – things like that are great for GPU processing,” Stanley says, explaining some of the things that will look a lot better and be a lot easier to produce on next-gen hardware like the new Xbox and the PS5. He then went on to talk about, of all things, hair.
“It’s always been really difficult to make really good hair," he revealed. "And then hair responding to different environments – hair and water, hair and wind, hair and hair gel, are all reactions that can be processed.” So if you were hoping to see some high-end hair in the next generation, you're in luck.
And that's not all, because Stanley also spoke about shadows, which could also be improved by next-gen tech capabilities. “In The Last Of Us, we had an ambient shadow system which we had to downrez significantly, and it sure would be great if we could do that at a higher resolution and get more fidelity in it.
Referring to those much-hyped 12 teraflops and the impact they could have on things like that ambient shadow system that had to be downgraded, he added, “Something like this makes that more possible.”