Devil May Cry Director: the PS3 Hardware Left Devs Feeling "Really Let Down"
Dragon's Dogma and Devil May Cry director Hideaki Itsuno shared that the console's architecture made it harder to create visually impressive games.
The PlayStation 3 was one of Sony's great setbacks as not many people expected a mistake from the company after its success with its two previous consoles. One of the most arguable things developers complain about is the hardware decisions related to its Cell processor which made the development process incredibly difficult.
Recently, Capcom's Hideaki Itsuno, the director of the original Dragon's Dogma and a number of Devil May Cry games, also shared his thoughts on working with the console saying that developers felt "really let down" by the PS3.
In a discussion with Bokeh Game Studios' Keiichiro Toyama (via VGC), Itsuno shared that in the era of PS1 and PS2, developers specialized in working with "many semi-transparent layers" which allowed them to create stunning visual effects and Capcom's plan for the third console was to continue in the same vein. However, the PS3 and onwards didn’t allow for such easy building-block-style development.
"It was strange with the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 that we could work with so many semi-transparent layers. We could just pile them up to make visual effects," Itsuno said. "On the contrary, we couldn’t do this from the PlayStation 3 onwards. Everybody struggled during that generation. We really felt let down."
Itsuno said that there was a big difference between developing Devil May Cry 3 on PS2 and Devil May Cry 4 on PS3. He also stated that Sony's decision regarding its third console had a huge impact on the development scene as it became a struggle to move the projects forward because everything developers had learned while creating games for previous systems was useless.
"That shift came right in between Devil May Cry 3 and Devil May Cry 4 for me. We were told that we couldn’t even replicate what we had done before," he said. "For five years, all we had done was work with semi-transparent layers to make games look cool on the PlayStation 2. Once on PlayStation 3, we couldn’t even think of that technique. I think [developers] all over the world struggled."
You can learn more by watching the full interview with Hideaki Itsuno here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
