Eurogamer's latest Witcher 3 write-up veils an intriguing little snippet about the future of Xbox One, care of CD Projekt's lead engine programmer Balázs Török. According to Török, Microsoft gradually "opened up" ways of getting "more" out of the Xbox 360 across 2007 and 2008, and this may be the case with Xbox One, too.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is due on Xbox One, PS4 and PC at some point next year. The developer has had a relatively easy time of it on all platforms (you might want to click the source link for the stuff about PS4), though it hasn't yet had the chance to optimise each version of the game. "The Xbox One is pretty easy to understand because not just the hardware is similar to the PC, but everything like the [software development kit], the [application programming interface] is really similar to what you would find on a PC," Török noted.
Some teams claim to have all but "maxed out" the Xbox One's capabilities at launch. Török feels this is very unlikely to be the case, drawing on his experiences with Xbox 360. "I saw how Microsoft opened up certain parts that they hid before from developers," he said. "They opened them up, like, 'OK now you can have this back door, and it's risky but you can do this and that...' This is how developers learned a little bit more and more every step. From Microsoft it was a good way to do it - to always let the developers do a little bit more."
Will Xbox One developers benefit similarly? "I don't know because we are not at the stage where they would open up something new. We have what we have right now, and maybe we will have some more low-level access in the future.
"It's not like they would open up new hardware or anything - there's nothing new in there," Török cautioned. "It's new ways to do something. Both companies are already using all the knowledge they have from previous products to make the API tailored to games ... so I expect that they will do something like, 'OK now you can do this; it's extremely risky - only do this if you know what you're doing! But you can do this.'
"It will happen, eventually, but right now we are preparing for it."
You may be reminded of Microsoft's frequent promises that Xbox One will grow more powerful over time, as developers get to grips with the extra-dimensional Lovecraftian entity that is the Xbox Live cloud. This isn't quite the same thing, by the sounds of it - Török appears to refer to new ways of using the hardware's native capabilities.
As revealed in October, Microsoft is working on a number of "primarily" cloud-based Xbox One titles. It seems likely that developers will be able to evolve and upgrade these much more thoroughly than games that rely mainly on the console's local resources.
What do you think?
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