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Ubisoft Reflections rounded off day two of last week's Develop conference with an intriguing talk, tantalisingly entitled "Tips and Tricks for Porting to Next-Gen". For Digital Foundry, it was a must-see presentation primarily because the vast majority - and perhaps even all - of the multi-platform games we'll be playing on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 by the end of the year have been derived from PC code, necessitating some level of porting across to the new hardware. It's an intriguing state of affairs, especially if you're a PC gamer with a reasonably powerful computer. Once upon a time your hardware was a porting target, sometimes with only minimal effort put into the conversion. Now, PC is lead platform. E3 2013 starkly demonstrated that the availability of final production console hardware for developers is exceptionally limited, with many games destined for console hardware running on "target" PC systems. It makes sense that PC takes centre-stage during the development effort, simply because games take upwards of two years to develop and actual console hardware wasn't available until very recently.
Ubisoft's highly promising next-gen racer, The Crew, received its E3 debut last month, with the company's first gameplay demo running on PC hardware. It's a new project created from ex-Test Drive Unlimited staff who've formed a new studio - Ivory Tower - and are producing the core PC version of the game (and, we suspect, the Xbox One version). However, what's curious here is that it's the UK-based Ubisoft Reflections tech team that is entirely responsible for the PS4 edition, while other staff in the Newcastle studio produce additional content for the game - specifically sound, script, the skill challenges and, remarkably, the entire state of Texas.
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