

While we're yet to get concrete numbers on the next-gen consoles, it would appear that there are 10 million PS5 systems in distribution and the Xbox Series X is just shy of this figure after the first nine months of being on the market. There's estimated to be 115 million PS4 and over 50 million Xbox One consoles in circulation. We spent a lot of time and effort making next-gen look shiny and all that, but we did have to be careful with console parity so we can maintain cross-play. We couldn't just go off and say, 'oh, we're we're on next-gen, who cares about current gen!' We knew we were developing across five platforms we are at that kind of crossroads in console generation life. We had to be really mindful about what we were developing on. So we have to keep that kind of thing – like enemy counts and whatnot – the same across the board. "It wouldn't work, because we're cross-gen and cross play. We couldn't go, 'oh look, on next-gen you can kill 500 zombies but our current-gen is only 10," says O’Driscoll, speaking to the need to keep the experience consistent across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. "We needed to maintain a certain amount of console parity. "You're gonna notice on next-gen we've got HDR options and things like things like that, and lots of different options for high-end PCs, but it's kind of… okay, this is kind of important." Matt O’Driscoll, who served as executive producer of Turtle Rock's asymmetrical monster hunter, now working as lead producer on Back 4 Blood, tells me that as excited as the team was to get its hands on the new tech it had some bigger considerations to keep at the forefront of its mind.
