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The vice on the PS4 and Xbox One gets a little tighter as Diablo 4 boss agrees 'there's always a time and a place' to drop last-gen
Diablo 4 developers Rod Fergusson and John Mueller acknowledge the possibility of eventually dropping support for last-gen consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) as the game evolves and new features are added. However, they emphasize that such a decision is not imminent and that they are currently focused on maintaining parity between current-gen and last-gen versions of the game.
Diablo series boss Rod Fergusson knows the time is coming to move on from the PS4 and Xbox One, but says that time ain't now.
Speaking to IGN, Fergusson admitted there's a "time and place" to drop last-gen consoles, which are now over a decade old in this case, and release content exclusively for the current gen PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. That said, he reckons there's still life left in the older hardware, at least when it comes to Diablo 4.
"There's always a time and a place for when maybe it's time to no longer support a platform," Fergusson said. "I don't think we're at that time. But we have a long road for Diablo 4, and so we do talk about, 'hey we have this idea for a feature, but maybe it's not a feature our min spec or gen eight players can support, so it's not something we can do today.' But we keep pushing the boundaries on that."
Despite the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S now sitting somewhere in the middle of their respective life cycles - Sony said in February that the PS5 is in "the latter half" of the console cycle - there are still plenty of games, particularly in the live-service space, that still support last-gen hardware. In Diablo 4's case, there are technical features that are exclusive to current-gen, like ray tracing, but content-wise there's complete parity with last-gen consoles, which Diablo art director John Mueller described as a "creative challenge."
"We're pretty good at finding fallbacks," Mueller said. "That's how we think of it. We'll figure out a way to do a fallback, like if there's something really awesome we want to do. I don't think we've been gated by it. We've generally leaned into it, and it's been a creative challenge to figure out, okay, how do we accomplish that on gen eight? So the two things will look slightly different depending on the platform."
Fergusson and Mueller are both speaking on pretty vague terms, but to me the implication is that there could be a point where Diablo 4 outgrows the PS4 and Xbox One and simply drops last-gen support. Square Enix ended Final Fantasy 14's PS3 support in 2017, the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of GTA Online died in 2021, and Destiny stopped supporting PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2016, and I'm sure there's even more precedent that isn't immediately coming to mind.
"It's part of the conversation, always," Fergusson added. "Like, we have this idea for a new feature, can we do it based on what we're supporting today? Yes or no? And generally, as John was saying, we can. We find ways to do it."