Remedy Developer: Moving to next-gen was 'pretty painful,' Sony was 'a bit more ready'

By: Dylan Lepore | @dylanslegos

Thomas Puha, a Remedy Entertainment developer, talked to IGN about how bringing Control to next-gen was "pretty painful" and how Sony was "a bit more ready."

IGN's Next-Gen Console Watch, published Friday on YouTube, guest-starred Puha, speaking on behalf of Remedy Entertainment, giving insight into how third-party developers are juggling last and new generation consoles and also the Xbox Series S.

"Sony stuck [with] what worked; their development software and tools were pretty stable and good pretty early on," Puha said. "Microsoft opted to change quite a lot of things, which in the long run are probably good, but of course, it was just a bigger hurdle for us devs early on because we had to rewrite a bunch of different things to take advantage of specific features."

Puha mentioned that even with next-generation consoles in their infancy, due to Xbox Series S's lower quality, it somewhat compromises the quality of games developed by third-party developers because of their lack of resources.

Puha said, "Series S, well it's you know, it's no different from like the previous generations where like the system with the lowest specs does end up dictating a few of the things that you're gonna do because you're gonna have to run on that system."

"The more hardware you have, the more you have to ultimately compromise a little bit when you are a smaller studio like us, when you just can't spend as much time making sure all these platforms are super good," Puha said.

When Sony introduced PlayStation 5's Activity Cards, according to Puha, Sony set up a requirement for developers to create at least one card for games coming to the new system.

Puha thought it was ridiculous. So, even though Remedy Entertainment didn't have the PS5 Activity Cards in mind when initially creating Control for last-gen, they went all out on the PS5's Activity Cards to keep gamer's attention in-game even though the Xbox Series X/S don't have such features.

"When Sony presented the Activity Cards and help and all of these things - I didn't quite expect that from Sony, that's pretty forward-thinking and the way they sold it back then really was like 'hey people should hopefully be completing more single-player games;' like people just kind of give up at some point," Puha said.

Another feature Puha mentions are the load times in Control on next-gen consoles stating, "there's things like in Control on next-gen, you know we were commended by 'hey the load times are so much shorter.' We did nothing; we really didn't do anything. That's all pure hardware."

Puha ended with, "It's only going to get better. I mean, really, just you have some really nice-looking Series X and PS5 games, but like we're really scratching the surface, I have to say."

Control: Ultimate Edition is out now for PS5 and Xbox Series S and X, and has a current Metacritic score of 85 out of 100.