Devil May Cry director says making games for the PS3 was terrible for developers

There are some video game systems that come along and seem to define years, decades, entire childhoods, let alone generations of systems. Then, there’s the PlayStation 3. 

The PS3 was the hugely anticipated follow-up to the PS2 that simply didn’t live up to the gigantic expectations laid upon it in large part, and in many places, it was seen as the one generation where Sony definitively “lost” the console wars with Microsoft. The Xbox 360 was cheaper, had some incredibly console-exclusive games, and at least in the United States, it felt like it dominated the market against its PS3 competition.

It turns out it wasn’t just players that didn’t feel like the PS3 lived up to the PlayStation name. Hideaki Itsuno, the creator of some classic titles like Dragon’s Dogma and Devil May Cry, recently said in an interview that he was “let down” by the PS3 and its hardware.

Itsuno’s issues, as transcribed by VGC, stemmed from a notorious complaint about the PS3 that many developers had and that many people pointed to as one of the main reasons that the Xbox 360 always seemed to have more cool games and exclusives than the PS3: it absolutely sucked to develop games for the third-generation Sony system.

According to Itsuno, there was little continuity between developing games for the PS2 and the PS3 due to how the different consoles were constructed. While both the PlayStation and the PS2 allowed developers to build things using “semi-transparent layers,” the PS3 and onwards didn’t allow for such easy building-block style development.

“Everybody struggled during that generation,” Itsuno said of the PS3 era. The transition from the older PlayStation systems came in between Devil May Cry 3 and Devil May Cry 4, and it’s perhaps clear to see what Itsuno is talking about when comparing the two games. While Devil May Cry 3 is considered by many to be one of the best games in the series, if not the best outright, the fourth game was… good. Pretty good. And “pretty good” isn’t what you’re aiming for when you’re launching a critically-acclaimed series on a new console generation.

While Itsuno doesn’t delve into too many other details outside of the semi-transparent layer structures and how those went away, he remains adamant that the PS3 simply wasn’t a good console system for developers regardless of where those developers were from or what type of game they were working on. The PS3 also maintains a notoriously tricky console in terms of backwards compatibility, as many of the console’s games still aren’t able to run on the later generations of PlayStation consoles natively.

But if you were a PS3 owner, at least you never got the red ring of death! Right?