In our recent interview with Frogwares, besides inquiring about the success of their open world investigation game The Sinking City, we also asked about the newly revealed next-gen console specifications.

　　Sergey Oganesyan told us that the development of an open world title will be much simpler thanks to the SSDs included in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. When we asked if the specs will be enough to warrant 60 frames per second as the standard for next-gen, though, he was a bit skeptical.

　　We are happy we are moving to a much faster SSD storage. For open world games, that’s a life (and time) saver.

　　I think more and more devs will offer you a choice between resolution and framerate. I personally hope 60 FPS will become the standard, but optimization is not that easy, especially for smaller studios.

　　Overall, he expects we'll have to wait a bit in order to see truly mindblowing next-gen games, due to the fact that cross-generation titles will dominate at first. After all, Microsoft itself said Xbox Series X exclusive titles will only start to appear one or two years after its launch.

　　Looking at what happened when the current-gen was first introduced, we probably shouldn’t expect an absolutely mind-blowing jump in terms of game quality being the standard, because cross-gen titles will be a thing for some time. I just don’t think developers can momentarily drop their support of an enormous fanbase that has grown during the current-gen life cycle unless they have the financial incentive of the console makers to make up for the potential missed out sales.

　　But we should all definitely look forward to things like better textures, better framerate, better lighting, better loading time, bigger maps, more detailed environment, etc. Which is a lot and the improvements will be more than noticeable.

　　We already have absolutely gorgeous games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn, and I can’t even begin to imagine how good these games would look on the next-gen hardware.

　　Both next-gen platforms from Microsoft and Sony are still scheduled to hit retail stores in the Holiday season, though delays aren't entirely out of the question just yet.