Moonray, described as a Souls-like game but in a science-fiction setting, has been receiving features that are deemed “difficult” to run even on high-end desktop systems boasting the new Nvidia GeForce RTX lineup of graphics cards.
Speaking with SegmentNext in a recent interview, developer and publisher Element 115 teased that current-generation consoles would not be able to run Moonray as it currently stands on PC.
PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will hence “equalize the differences between” mid-high-end PC and console gaming. That being said, the developer feels that expecting Moonray to run in 60 frames per second will be “more realistic” at 4K resolution on next-generation consoles against the 120 frame-rate benchmark.
Moonray will be first hitting early access on Steam on March 31, 2021. Porting the game over to next-generation consoles will begin roughly six months before the PC version has been finished, which remains unknown. Moonray will though land on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X somewhere in the future.
Have you guys received the dev kits for PS5 and Series X? Has the development of the game on next-gen platforms started or will it come after the PC release?
No not yet, we need to finish PC development first. We’re working in Unreal Engine so the transition to consoles should be relatively straightforward (we hope!). Once PC development is finished, we’ll start console development when we’re roughly 6 months out from the PC launch.
PS5 and Xbox Series X have a power difference of 1.7 tflops. Do you think the power difference is significant enough or it won’t matter in the long run?
I think it will only matter if a developer decides to only launch on one platform. Otherwise you have to develop for a fairly general target and can’t have too many differences between various platforms.
How do you think next-gen hardware will affect the scene of indie gaming? Can we expect to see more graphically appealing game with the modern consoles?
Yes absolutely, graphics will get a big bump in quality, not just from the hardware itself but from all of the software tools that continue to advance to take care of that hardware.
What role do you think Microsoft’s Game Pass is going to play in the next-gen gaming? As an Indie, how do you guys perceive the service?
We’re optimistic about it. We think it could be an interesting source of revenue for indie games and help offset some of the problems with piracy that we see elsewhere.
PS5’s Dualsense has some interesting new features like haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. Do you have any plans to use these features in Moonray?
We don’t have any plans for these, but we will take a look when we get into console development. We do think that giving more feedback to the player via the controller could be interesting for gameplay in action RPGs like what we’re developing.
Theoretically, will Moonray be able to support 120 FPS and 4K on both the consoles or it would be 60 FPS?
We think that 60fps is more realistic for us. We’re doing a lot of things with the GPU that are difficult even on high-end PCs with the latest RTX cards. The current generation of consoles wouldn’t be able to run what we’re doing now on PC, so we see next-gen consoles as equalizing the differences between mid- to high-end PC gaming and console gaming.
