Ubisoft Montreal heeft de PlayStation 4 een “zeer aangename verrassing” genoemd wat betreft het ontwikkelen. Dankzij de radicale verandering van hardwarestrategie door Sony Computer Entertainment is de nieuwe console veel minder complex geworden. Directeur Yannis Mallat laat weten dat de vertrouwde architectuur, die erg veel lijkt op een pc, goed bevalt:
From what we can talk about, which is the PlayStation 4, it’s been a radical change from those guys.De keuze om next-gen games als Watch Dogs en Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag vanaf het begin te ontwikkelen op high-end pc’s lijkt dus zeer goed uit te pakken voor Ubisoft.I’ll tell you an anecdote: When I was the producer on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time we managed to get our hands on a very good programmer who’s still on the Assassin’s Creed core team. One day on his desk he had a black book all written in Japanese, and I was like, ‘what is that?’ It was the documentation support for coding for PS2. ‘That’s why I wanted to have Japanese lessons,’ he said – to understand and make the most out of the machine. That day I understood how complex it was to develop on PlayStation 2. So we were eager to find out what the PlayStation 3 would be in terms of architecture, and it was pretty much the same but more complex.
PlayStation 4 really comes as a pleasant surprise because indeed it’s a very familiar architecture. I think it’s paying off for us deciding to develop on high-end PCs early. It’s a less complex transition.