This whole cutting business will infringe upon developer vision. You can only cut so much until you have a emptier version of a game that loses what it set out to do. It's like if they tried to make UC4 TLL on PS3 or FFXV.
These games are not just simply "prettier' or smoother versions of last gen games. These games wouldn't have nowhere near the amount of shyt going on in real time last gen. There's a marked difference in animations and detail of multiple enemies that to say this can be scaled back is disingenous. There's literally no games on PS3 that look as good.
If you look at say Uncharted 2's set pieces in comparison to UC4, it was very static. Back then it looked great but now it looks very simple and closed in.
Compared to the shyt going on in UC4 on PS4 it's a mind blowing difference.
Compared to the similar train set piece in UC2 it's just jaw dropping. This whole portion of the game wouldn't be possible at all on PS3 unless they rehauled it to something very basic. Even just Drake's animations is much worse.
Every single game that people used the "scalable" argument with to downplay the negative effects of it were games that suffered so much.
MGSV for example ended up being a very BLAND and empty game for most of the world and forced helicopter rides for every damn mission.
Scale is just a phrase people use with games that don't mean nothing. Fortnite running on mobile is nothing. That game was designed to run on a toaster.
The CPU in the X1X or PS4 compared to the PS5/XsX will be worlds apart. The X1X still had trouble running some games past 30fps and yet you think this new gen will just be minor? This "scaling" word is so empty and just a loose term thrown around so much. With this logic PS2 can run PS4 games just run it at 20~30fps at 144p. People are going to eat their shorts when they see next gen games running. Even with the crappy jaguar cpu in the current gen we got crazy looking titles now imagine this new gen coming with the big leap in CPU/GPU.
The similar nature of the architectures between current and next-gen consoles means that the instruction sets can be shared. Differences wouldnt be as stark. A good amount of the ‘wow’ factor in UC4 compared to UC2 comes from the increase in raw power, but don’t discount the superior camera work, framing and rendering techniques. Also, the massive increase in RAM helps to store a lot of the game action such as the improved animation. We arent getting that type of memory jump again this upcoming gen. So the differences wont be as stark.
The overall difference in system performance between Xbox One and Xbox Series X isnt as big as you think. A lot of that extra power will be used up to render higher framerates (60fps), and higher res (4K).
Anyways, I concede to your point. When games are being developed next-gen only (specifically with SSDs -the biggest jump next-gen- in mind) games experiences wont be able to be ported down to non SSD systems.
But in the context of this thread, that probably won’t be for a couple of years anyways since game devs just got development kits that better represent the final next-gen hardware, it will take a while for their dev environment to mature. So MS is safe with porting to Xbox One for a couple of years.
Lastly, big budget games are so expensive to make these days, it wouldn’t make sense to sell them to a new console which has a small user base. I will be shocked if Sony has a big budget exclusive PS5 game at launch or in the launch window.
have your games only available to a fraction of that during the first couple years