Jonathan Blow on the power of PS4 and how sharing will change the way we play

[wraggster]

Developing for PlayStation 4 is leaner than making games for PC and its Share button could change the way we play console games, says Jonathan Blow.We spoke to the Braid (http://www.edge-online.com/review/review-braid/) creator after he took to the stage at PlayStation Meeting to announce that his next project The Witness (http://www.edge-online.com/news/the-witness-will-be-ps4-exclusive-during-launch-window/) will be a launch window exclusive on PS4. Blow seemed impressed by the new console’s power and its developer-friendly architecture.“For The Witness we’re mostly interested in the base machine and how fast it is – the fact it has faster RAM than a PC, which really helps in shuttling graphics resources around, and since it’s not running a heavyweight operating system like Windows that gets in the way of your graphics,” he told us. “Rendering stuff through Windows has an impact on performance. Since a console is just about games, that doesn’t happen, and the equivalent game will run faster. And if you can target to specific hardware you can make it run faster, too.”He added that the addition of the Share button is integral to the new console, stating that that PS4 has been built around the social feature.“In general, as a platform feature, it’s super interesting,” he said. “One thing that most game developers have become really aware of is that over the past couple of years on YouTube the whole livecast and commentary thing is really huge.”“A lot of people are paying a lot of attention to it now and it’s interesting to see what happens if you base an entire console around it. That’s what’s crazy about PS4 – it has a chip that’s always recording to a maybe two-minute buffer. After something cool happens, it’s there in the buffer. That’s the sort of thing that’s really going to change the way something’s used.”You can read more from Blow about why The Witness (http://www.edge-online.com/news/why-the-witness-is-coming-to-ps4-first/) is coming to PS4 first through the link, and the full interview later this afternoon.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/jonathan-blow-on-the-power-of-ps4-and-how-sharing-will-change-the-way-we-play/